NeoLemmix Update: V10.12.XX [GSTool V10.12.13 released]

[namida]

Latest versions:

Player: V10.12.15-D
Editor: V10.12.12-C
Flexi: V10.12.14
GSTool: V10.12.13


NeoLemmix Player

A lot of the changes here are behind-the-scenes optimizations, but there's still some stuff that's relevant to the end-user.

Please note that VGASPEC support has now been entirely dropped. Tileset mixing should be used instead. Music pack support remains for now, but it won't remain for much longer.

XX.12.XX Core Changes
- Flipping or rotating one-way arrows now affects their functional direction rather than just graphical. This also means one-way-up arrows can be created, which are only destroyable by bombers.
- VGASPEC support has now been discontinued altogether rather than just deprecated. If you haven't already, switch to tileset mixing.
- Replay format has been revised (old version replays will work on this version; this version's replays will not work on older versions)
- The L2, L3 and LPV graphic sets are now built into NeoLemmix (thanks to Prince Jamie and IchoTolot for the L2 sets, and IchoTolot and GigaLem for the L3 sets)
- Something which will not be revealed yet * Update: This new feature is the addition of a Fencer skill.

XX.XX.12 Feature Changes
- Cloner shadows have now been implemented, in cases where the Cloner is selected and a lemming with a shadow-supporting skill is moused over
- Skill panel is generated at runtime from source images instead of being mostly pre-rendered
- If custom sprites are specified but don't exist, NeoLemmix will fall back to default sprites instead of crashing
- Graphic sets or entire packs can specify lemming spritesets to use other than "default" or "xmas"
- Entire custom sets of lemming sprites can be added rather than just modifying default and/or xmas
- Custom lemming sprites may have arbitrary framecounts instead of having to stick to the original amount
- Custom lemming sprites may alter the foot positions
- Bomber and stoner sprites no longer have oddities in some cases (eg. athletes, zombies, moused-over, etc, especially in the Xmas set)
- Fixed the "white line on right side of minimap" bug
- Added an option (turned on by default) to replace the minimap with extra buttons for features such as fast forward and directional select; there is a clickable button in-game to toggle it
- Fixed some bugs with assigning skills to highlit lemming when highlight hotkey is a keyboard key and not a mouse button

-B Hotfix
- Fixes a crash on levels that have background images placed as regular objects.

-C Hotfix
- Fixes the bug where the pack-wide sprite specification doesn't work in many cases.
- Fixes the bug where if the minimap is turned on while paused, the border appears but the minimap itself is blank until a frame advance or unpause.
- Fixes the bug where the displayed Cloner count may be incorrect after a restart or frameskip (only affects display, not function).

XX.XX.13 Feature Changes
- The bugs relating to the weird way NL handles windowed mode are gone, which should greatly improve compatibility with Linux+WINE and "Window Capture" modes in recording software and negate the need for the "-alt" versions.
- Fixed bug: Trigger areas of objects with the "Only On Terrain" flag didn't show up in clear physics mode.
- Fixed bug: "Most Lemmings Saved" record was only saved on successful attempts.
- Fixed bug: "Fastest Time" record was based on the last lemming the player saved, not the last required lemming the player saved.
- You can now assign a "Select Fencer" hotkey without having to manually modify the hotkeys INI file.
- If music is turned off via the Toggle Music hotkey then turned back on, it resumes from where it left off rather than restarting. (This can easily be reverted if people don't like this change.)
- Preview / postview texts can now have up to 21 lines instead of only 18.
- Talismans screen now displays 6 talismans per page instead of 5.
- Level select menu can now display 18 levels at a time instead of only 15.
- Preview screen now uses as much space as possible for the level preview image.
- Postview screen now shows previous lemmings saved records and best time.
- When starting NL on a Linux+WINE setup with Fullscreen mode enabled, NL asks if you'd like to switch to windowed mode; this is due to fullscreen mode not working on certain Linux desktop managers (Unity is known to have issues with fullscreen; LXDE appears to work fine; have not tested any others).

XX.XX.14 Feature Changes
- There's now a proper screen for the mass replay checker, instead of the gameplay screen flickering during testing. (And it's now working again; it was broken in V10.12.13)
- Mass image dumping no longer causes the screen to go blank while processing.
- Added an option to restore the old behaviour of using the entire screen area on menu screens when in fullscreen mode instead of having black borders like in-game.
- Added an option to use a smooth resampler when zoomed. There are seperate options for menus and in-game, menus default to on while in-game defaults to off.

XX.XX.15 Feature Changes
- Changing between fullscreen and windowed no longer requires a restart of NeoLemmix.
- Menus are always stretched to take up as much space as available while remaining proportional; the option has been removed.
- Zoom and fullscreen settings are now independant of each other.
- When in windowed mode, the window can be resized arbitrarily (subject to a minimum of 320x200 x zoom level).
- When in-game, the gameplay display uses as much screen space as available rather than having black borders for everything outside a 320x160 region.
- Mouse wheel scrolling can now be used as a hotkey.
- It is possible to zoom in and out during gameplay as long as there is enough space in the window (or on screen in the case of fullscreen) to fit at least a 320x160 region of the level plus the skill panel.

-B Hotfix
- Fixed a bug where the game may crash when entering Clear Physics Mode.

-C Hotfix
- Fixed the bug where music fallback was not working correctly.

-D Hotfix
- Fixes a bug which may cause crashes or incorrect results when running the mass replay tester on packs that use a large variety of graphic sets and/or graphic sets with a lot of pieces.

Downloads: Latest Stable Release | Permalink to V10.12.15-D | All Available Versions
Thanks to changes in the XX.XX.13 features update, an alt version should no longer be necessary.


NeoLemmix Editor

The NeoLemmix Editor update is mostly just to include the newly-added styles.

V10.12.12 Update
> Many improvements to the piece selection menu, most notably that it can now be vertically resized
> Fixed the bug where object rotation is lost during copy/paste

V10.12.12-B Hotfix
> Fixed the bug where an error message prevented changing the background
> Fixed the bug where if a flipped or inverted object was copy-pasted, the new object would display in both forms

V10.12.12-C Hotfix
> Fixed the memory leak when scrolling through the piece selection menu.

Downloads: Latest Stable Release (Full) | Permalink to V10.12.12-C (Full) | Permalink to V10.12.12-C (Upgrade) | All Available Versions


Flexi Toolkit

Flexi's update is mostly for compatibility with V10.12.XX of NeoLemmix, but one major change: the Talisman Editor is now built into Flexi directly, rather than being a seperate app. This also means that if you move a level around, you don't have to manually update the rank and level that the talisman refers to (you do still need to update the description, though).

> Creates NXPs compatible with NeoLemmix V10.12.XX
> Talisman editor has been integrated into Flexi Toolkit, negating the need for a seperate app
> Removed direct support for many rarely-used custom images
> Added support for arbitrary custom data files, which can be used for the purpose of said custom images
> Removed the no-longer-useful "Export / Import SYSTEM.DAT" buttons
> As far as possible, custom graphics will be auto-converted to V10.12.XX layout
> Can set a forced lemming spriteset other than "default" or "xmas"

V10.12.13 Update
> Image import dialog can now be resized
> Image import dialog is offered when importing BMP or PNG files as custom data files

V10.12.14 Update
> Should fix the issue some users had with Flexi not showing up on the alt-tab menu
> Fencer-related options in Talisman Editor are now visible

Downloads: Latest Stable Release | Permalink to V10.12.14 | All Available Versions

Also, I finally updated the tutorial! Not only is it up-to-date for this new version, but I also finally added information on the Replay Manager.


Graphic Set Tool

The only change here is that it now supports setting a lemming spriteset other than default or xmas. Just for the record - there's no need to worry about "what if someone uses it without building an NXP that includes my custom lemming sprites" - if the custom sprites a set specifies aren't available, NeoLemmix will just revert to default sprites.

Just to be clear - the piece names still have no effect on current versions of NeoLemmix. It's still recommended to set them as it will matter when we do properly move to new-formats, but for the moment they do not affect anything except the display list in GSTool itself.

V10.12.13
Added a "Lemmini Resolution" checkbox when importing pieces.

Downloads: Latest Stable Release | Permalink to V10.12.13 | All Available Versions

[namida]

Content Upgrade Guide

First things first - if you have levels that use VGASPECs, I told you a while ago to switch them to tileset mixing. V10.011.XXX deprecated VGASPEC support, but still had some degree of backwards compatibility. That's not the case anymore - your VGASPEC levels will not work at all on this version unless you change them to use tileset mixing.

There's a fair few changes to how custom images are structured. Flexi Toolkit will actually take care of most of this for you when you open a pack; and if you're just using a custom set you got off the NeoLemmix website, you can simply redownload it from there (they have all been updated to the new layout). If they're completely new ones, some images will require some degree of manual editing. Flexi will alert you to this; I recommend checking out the default images to get a feel of what your custom ones should look like, as that's easier than trying to explain it.

If you're using the color-shifting Floater / Glider sprites, you'll need to redownload the updated versions of these too.

If you are using any of the Lemmings 2: The Tribes; Lemmings 3: The Chronicles / All New World Of Lemmings; or Lemmings Plus V graphic sets, you no longer need to build these into your NXP. All other custom graphic sets still need to be included. It's fine if your levels refer to them by the older names ("medival" (notice the missing "e"), "gigalem_l3egypt" and "gigalem_l3shadow" rather than the new ones "medieval", "l3_egypt" and "l3_shadow"); NeoLemmix has some compatibility code to use the right ones, and the editor's style.ini specifies these as AltNames.

The VGASPEC thing aside, existing levels and replays should work perfectly fine as is (there are no physics changes that would break them), but it's still a good idea to run a test just in case. But if your levels were solvable on V10.011.XXX, it is extremely unlikely that they won't be on this version. So far, there isn't even a single report of a broken replay.

Custom graphic sets will not need any modification for this update.

See the pinned post on the Level Packs board for how to add compatibility icons for this version to your posts.

[namida]

There's been some reports in the IRC channel of some levels refusing to load in the player, usually with an "ObtainObject loop" or "ObtainTerrain loop" error message. If you get this on any levels that worked on V10.011.XXX and have confirmed that all required graphic sets are present, can you please send me the broken LVL files via private message so I can investigate? Please be sure to also include any styles that aren't either (a) among the default ones or (b) on the auto-downloadable list; including customized versions of those styles.

There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes changes which some of required new backwards-compatibility code (as mentioned, versions since V1.47n actually run off the new-formats code internally, but have compatibility code to load older formats; rather than natively using the old formats), so it is not impossible that some of this may have caused issues. However, I haven't encountered problems on my own content, nor did anyone report issues on the experimentals, so without some examples of levels that cause these issues I have nothing to go on in terms of working out why this is occurring.

[IchoTolot]

Well, V 1.41 of MegSEBytes has 2 of these levels:

- The 2nd level of the last rank. It uses my City tileset conversion + OWW from gronklings Beast 2 tileset. Mixing in the OWWs caused the error there. Removing those and unsing just the City tileset works fine.

- Flopsy's scrapbrain level. Here the error comes from renaming the tileset after the level was created with the old name. There is no easy way to fix level affected by this anymore, like simply switching the tileset to the new one in the editor. There should be such an option for easy switching of the primary tileset again (like in older versions of the editor)!

EDIT: All my single level stuff made with Beast2 and City seems to work just fine. Indeed everything I checked so far from my stuff (including Reunion and PimoLems via mass replay check) works as expected.

[namida]

Took a look. I don't know why what you're suggesting ended up fixing them (unless they fixed these other things at the same time), but in fact they both have the same cause: Image background objects have been placed in the level as regular objects, instead of only selected as backgrounds.

In previous versions, these were still loaded as objects, and thus the object reference to them wouldn't fail to find a valid object. In the new version, they're loaded into a completely seperate "backgrounds" list, with the result that references to them as objects result in the object failing to be found. (EDIT: Okay, I was confusing the exact details a bit, the backwards-compatible version handles them a bit differently than this, but the general idea was still the same - it was relating to background image objects being placed in levels.)

I'll make a hotfix that prevents crashes on levels that have this issue.

[namida]

Released a -B hotfix that fixes this crash. Tested it on both of these levels and they do not crash.

[IchoTolot]

Ok, that explains a lot. Now it does make sense why the crash happens!

Flopsy/Wafflem must have forgotten to remove the big bg object instead of just selecting the one you want to use via the "level properties window".

[namida]

Uploaded a Flexi Toolkit update V10.12.13.

This update offers the Image Import popup (the one presented when importing a directly-supported custom image) when importing a BMP or PNG file as a custom data file. If used, the image will be converted to a 32-bit PNG and you'll be offered the opportunity to set transparency via a transparent color. In the case of a BMP file, the extension will be changed to PNG after importing and converting - which is probably what you wanted, since after all, NeoLemmix doesn't look for files with a BMP extension either.

Additionally, the Image Import popup is now resizable, which might help when handling larger images (such as the title screen logo).


Since this is only a features update, not a core or bugfix update, it is not critical, and you can remain on Flexi V10.12.12 if you have no interest in these new features.

[namida]

Just realised I forgot to mention a couple of things in the changelog, which I've now added:

1. Flipping or rotating a one-way-arrow object now affects the directions physics-wise, rather than just affecting the graphic. (EG: A horizontally-flipped one-way-left arrow object will function as a one-way-right arrow object.) Creating a one-way-up arrow this way is possible; it will only be destroyable by bombers.
2. When the Cloner is selected and a lemming that is performing a shadow-able skill is moused over, a shadow for the cloned lemming will be displayed.


The first point does not currently apply to one-way fields, but we are strongly considering it.

[namida]

Another player hotfix.

Fixes the following bugs, which range in severity from "most people won't notice" to "very fucking annoying if it happens", but none of which affect anything functionally.

- The pack-wide lemming sprite specification doesn't work in many cases.
- If the minimap is turned on while paused, the border appears but the minimap itself is blank until a frame advance or unpause.
- The displayed Cloner count may be incorrect after a restart or frameskip (only affects display, not function).

[namida]

As you might've noticed elsewhere, I've mentioned that V10.12.13 (this will solely be a features update, and as such will not be critical - only update if you want the new features) will be fixing the weird windowing system at last. This should mean better compatibility with recording software or Linux-WINE setups inherently, and no need for an "alt" version.

But aside from that, I've also fixed that odd thing (carried over from DOS lemmings) where the internal resolution of all screens other than in-game is 640x350. Instead, it's 640x400 now, which means a bit more space. Preview / postview texts can now be up to 21 lines instead of only up to 18; the level select screen can now display 18 levels at a time instead of only 15; the talisman screen can now display 6 talismans per page instead of 5.

But the most exciting change is on the preview screen. My initial change was to dedicate more area to the level preview image. But then I thought - all it's doing this way is putting the 1/4-size image into the middle of a larger area. So I went and improved it further - the level preview image has 640x128 of space to use, and it now uses as much of that as possible while still (a) remaining proportional, and (b) not cropping out any part of the preview image (which in and of itself sometimes happened on the existing version with very large levels, for example Lemmings Plus Omega Puzzling 30 "Drop Them Lems").

[namida]

Here's a preview screen comparison on a level that's both more familiar to most people (especially since the one in the above shot isn't released yet except in private test versions), and shows it off much better.

[namida]

While it's not as interesting as the improvements to the preview screen, I made some nice adjustments to the postview screen too.

The time is only displayed / remembered on successful attempts, and is counted from when the last required lemming exits. So if you save 30 but the level only requires 20, the time recorded here will be based on when the 20th lemming exited.

The lemming count is always remembered. So if a level requires saving 15, and you save 12, it won't count that as a pass of course, but it will remember that 12 lemmings is your record.

(If you're wondering what level this is on, it's "The Arcade" from the LPO2 demo.)

If you can't wait for a stable release to try out these features, why not give the experimental version a try - be sure to report any bugs you encounter!

[Proxima]

Keeping track of personal bests is an excellent feature

I take it "+13f" is the number of frames beyond an integer number of seconds? I don't like showing that, because it's extra clutter, I don't think most players will care, and players who don't follow development discussions won't know what it means. I would suggest either removing it (entirely, or as an option), or replacing it with centiseconds, which are more universally understood.

[ccexplore]

The centiseconds idea is a good alternative. I was going to suggest showing " ([number of frames] frames)" in place of the "+Nf", but that would be more verbose than centiseconds.