Lemmings Forums

You know how I want to make a game?  I've read on the old forums some people edited levels with a hex editor as opposed to LemEdit or Lemmix; would that be good practice?

I wouldn't reccomend it for anything beyond stat changes... you're more than welcome to try though.

Can you post a link to this discussion? I can't imagine any reason for using a hex-editor to make levels when there's a decent alternative...

The only hex editing I have ever done is making Cheapo levels with >99 skillsets, >99 release rate, or >200 lemmings.

I have never used a hex editor to make actual, normal Lemmings levels.

I have. My DOS levelpack on Lemming Crazy was made entirely in a hex editor, using LemEdit only to compress it into a DAT later on. (Basically, at the time, I had the Windows version of lemmings with me on a laptop, but no level editor, but I did have a hex editor handy).

While not overly complicated, it's far from an ideal way to make levels.

I made a series of levels using ResEdit, but because of the limitations of this method I could only change the stats and skill availability of the standard levels. (I still made quite a few interesting ones that way, I have to say.) But why limit yourself this way when you don't have to?

It's completely possible to edit the terrain, or even create levels from scratch, with a hex editor. Don't expect an easy task, though.

Is there a download for the hex editor by any chance?

Like I said, it would be for practice on making a game if I did.

Okay, I still don't have this question answered...  would it be good practice for making my own game to edit Lemmings levels with a hex editor?  Hope it's clear that this would be so I can get an idea of what it'll be like to make terrain and stuff without having a GUI handy.

would it be good practice for making my own game to edit Lemmings levels with a hex editor?

Nope.  Hex editing may be of some utility for hacking, but it has close to no place when you're making your own game:

1) If you actually get to the point where you can handle programming the game's graphics and so forth, it wouldn't be that much harder to write your own level editor for your own game.  Note for example that the people who wrote Lemmings also wrote their own editor to create the levels.

2) Even if you for some reason don't want to bother writing your own level editor, there's no reason the file format of the levels for your own game has to be binary.  You could just as easily program a text file format for levels, then you could edit the level with a normal text editor rather than a hex editor.

Ironically, about when I posted that, I thought of writing a map editor.