The Lemmings Stampede conversion to New Formats NL is finally here! Lemmings Stampede is a level pack by bulletride which originally started off as an Old Formats pack for NL. I figured the best way for me to make the foray into level pack making is to start with taking an Old Formats NL level pack and converting it to New Formats NL. So, I took the liberty of trying my hand at converting Lemmings Stampede to New Formats NL, as I saw around the Forums that this can easily be done without any major reworking being required.
So why my interest in converting the level pack to New Formats NL? It pretty much came about because in the past month or so, I recently remembered and played through some old packs on Lemmini/Superlemmini, most notably RotL and ssam1221 Dos/Lemmix packs. Lemmings Stampede also happens to be a pack that I remembered being really good. Even though I got stuck hard quite often with Lemmings Stampede and it's not an easy pack at all, it's still one of my favorite level packs of all time. Bulletride really has a knack for making very deceivingly tough levels, which are definitely my type of levels I love playing and solving. There are a lot of favorite levels of mine in this pack!
Another is that I came long after bulletride is no longer active here on the Forums. Since I really like this pack a lot, his pack, work, and legacy definitely deserves to be preserved. I think there was talk of converting the pack to New Formats, but surprisingly it hasn't been done yet, until now. Also, going through RotL, I apparently have played some other levels of bulletride's outside of Lemmings Stampede. I definitely remember how difficult but really good his levels are. His levels kind of remind me of both Clam Spammer's and Nepster's level styles in a way of being difficult ones.
The conversion went completely well without a hitch! It was a simple process of using namida's nxp extractor and using an older version of a v12 NL player to cleanse the .lvl files so that they are in up-to-date nxlv file format. Originally, I tried using Nepster's conversion tool for level packs, but it always kept throwing an error at Tame 9 due to not finding the OWAs for the marble tileset. After some sleuthing around, I found a post where namida talks about putting the .lvl files into a subfolder in the levels folder of a v12 NL player and simply cleansing the levels, so I did that and it worked without any problems.
The only thing that didn't carry over were the backgrounds, so I had to open each level in the editor and put in the backgrounds wherever one was present in the Old Formats version. Also, I matched the music track to each level that plays on the Old Formats version as well.
As for compiling the level pack itself, I simply imitated the file structure of a level pack. Once I saw that everything loaded correctly in the NL player, I realized how very easy it is to put together a level pack for New Formats NL! It's not that hard at all, and definitely far easier than putting one together for Old Formats NL
The level pack can be downloaded in the attachments. Extract to your NL directory. Everything should fall into place.
Music pack download:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t49zau78a15bit1/Lemmings%20Stampede%20music.rar?dl=1. Extract to your NL directory. Everything should fall into place.
The pack only uses the OL and ONML tilesets, as well as the Christmas tilesets, hence why the conversion was quite easy. Any styles that are missing, you can either download them from the NL website or use the in-game style manager, but I think all the levels should load fine for anyone.
Lemmings Stampede was a level pack that I played through whenever I got stuck hard on Lemmings United (I generally played through other level packs in the meantime whenever that happened), and I got to say this is one of my favorite level packs of all time. It starts off easy but then gets very difficult really fast. I would even say that Lemmings Stampede is pretty much on par with Nepsterlem's difficulty! The Moon and Comet ranks of the latter are pretty much of similar difficulty to the Tame and Crazy ranks of Stampede, while the Wild rank of the former is pretty much Planet/Sun difficulty of the latter, etc.
The Tame and Crazy ranks weren't too much of a problem, but once you get to the Wild rating then the difficulty picks up considerably. Immediately right out of the gate Wild 1 stumped me very hard. From that point on, it was very slow going through the remaining 30 levels of the pack. Eventually, I hit another major roadblock with Wicked 5 and didn't come back to the pack for about a month or so, when I got stuck hard on United. I still struggled with the level, but eventually I was able to solve it. The solution I came up with is extremely messy and almost fails had skill assignment at the bottom not worked out. The rest of the Wicked rank wasn't too bad, but they were still very challenging! Finally, the entire Havoc rank was just a very long struggle to the end, as I pretty much struggled with every level in that rank, save for Havoc 4, which I felt was easier than Part 1, which is the Wild rank finisher. Needless to say, I eventually solved the entire pack after much struggling and without any help and was very satisfied having gotten through it all.
As for my Old Formats replays, when I ran the mass replay check, I had it refresh the replays, and out of the 50 replays, I only needed to fix 3 of my replays: Tame 7, Crazy 4, and Wild 4. All my Old Formats replays for these 3 levels broke because I used the ceiling in my solution, whereas it's deadly in New Formats. Also, the only level that was impossible in New Formats NL is Wild 4 due to the solution requiring interacting with the deadly ceiling, and so I added a small piece of terrain in the places where that occurs to prevent dying to the ceiling so that the level becomes possible.
Have fun with this mind-boggling pack!
Thanks to
- bulletride for the level pack
- namida/Nepster for the nxp extractor and for NL
- Lemmings Forums community for all their support and for just being very awesome people