Quote from: WillLem on Today at 01:42:00 PM

or 10 levels (1 tribe) for 12 people

Eleven. Classic has been done years ago and should be findable with a forum search.

Began work on the first beach level today. Screenshotted from Amiga Forever, set is as a background image with reduced brightness for ease of use as a template, and began placing the tiles manually. Here's how it's coming along so far. This is about 15 minutes' work:


(With background template image)


(Without background template image)

I anticipate that it would take me several hours to figure out how to work with the original tiles / .dat level files, particularly since they aren't already in some accessible format and I'm getting sass from Windows when I try to even get started, so I'll continue with the manual work for now. It will be slower overall, but at least it will definitely get done.

OK, I think I know what the problem is.

In SLX, a level exists as 3 different things:

1) The file itself
2) A TNeoLevelEntry, which stores the basic level information (title, levelID, etc)
3) A TLevel, which stores the more complex information (skillset, talismans, plus whether or not the level was successfully passed, etc)

I need to find a way to create a TNeoLevelEntry from the file. I can do that for the purposes of playing back the replay, but not loading the actual information. It's baffling, but nothing I haven't encountered from this codebase many times before. I'll get around to it.

Made a surprising amount of progress with this today. We now have a Playback Mode button in the Level Select Menu:



As well as looking pretty, this button opens up a dialog from which a folder of replays can be selected. Once chosen, SLX will then iterate over each replay in the folder, matching it up with a level from within the currently-active pack (note: at this point, it only looks in the currently-active pack for matches - this could be expanded to it searching the entire levels directory, but this may make loading slower). The "currently-active pack", in this case, is the parent pack of whichever level is currently selected in the Level Select treeview.

Each replay is then played back automatically, one after the other (the preview and postview screens are briefly seen in between each level). If a level has multiple replays associated with it, each one will be played back as and when the replay appears in the Playback list.

Playback Mode can be cancelled by simply cancelling the replay as normal (I might give this a dedicated hotkey if people think it's worth it - it's possible that users might cancel the replay by accident, and also users might want to do something within the current level, but then go ahead with playback again for the next level, which is currently possible if we don't cancel Playback Mode along with a normal replay cancel).

Some issues:

1) The preview screen always shows the first level in the list's info, even though the correct level is loaded when playback itself starts
2) The music is always that of the first level in the list - this is likely part of the same problem, but I'm not sure exactly what's going wrong
3) If a replay doesn't have a definite "end" point (so, if the original player pressed [Esc] rather than nuking at the end of Tailor-made For Blockers, for example), the level will continue to play indefinitely - not sure exactly what to do about this at the moment, but ideas will come
4) Not an issue as such, but randomizing the playback currently isn't possible by any other means than manually mixing up the replay files so they're not in logical order. Let's get the other issues sorted first and get the feature nice and tight, then we can look at expanding functionality to randomization of playback, etc.

If you're interested, check out commit 80da87c02 to see implementation so far. If you can see possible improvements or ways to fix the above bugs, input would be most welcome.

Otherwise, just watch this space!

a 1 in the level file would mean the first 16x8 tile

What level file are you referring to here? Do you mean the ones that need to be decompressed using LEMZIP? And, if so, where are they?

@geoo

Thanks for the info, I’ll take a look at the assets later.

Conversion via script is a good idea. It would only have to be done once, assuming it works and all goes according to plan, so doesn’t need to be too pretty. Thereafter, the levels would exist in NL format and can be edited as necessary.

I wonder whether the levels could be saved as bitmaps somehow. These could then be used as backgrounds in the Editor, so at least if something went wrong in the script conversion it would be somewhat easier to make corrections as necessary.

OK, this is still happening in v2.7.3 (screenshot attached).  I have been able to replicate this numerous times now.  It seems to occur when I browse through the different level pack/groups, expanding and then contracting different levels in the tree structure on the left.

OK, I've added this to the list of known bugs and will try to find a fix at some point.

It will work fine to start with, then will temporarily freeze/lock up, and the level select window will get the "...(Not Responding)" message in the title bar.

I've noticed this as well, it's been happening for quite a while. I've also added this to the list of known bugs; the level select menu in general could do with some debugging and bottleneck fixing. I'll take a look at it and see what can be done.