Lemmings Forums

Other Lemmings Projects => Other Projects => Topic started by: LJLPM on September 02, 2014, 09:10:26 PM

Title: jLevelBrowser
Post by: LJLPM on September 02, 2014, 09:10:26 PM
jLevelBrowser has been released :D

More than one year ago, I decided to code a Lemmings-like game.
It's my currently-running Android game project: http://www.lemmingsforums.com/index.php?topic=963.0;all

And before actually digging into this game development, I created a level-editor that suited my needs:
It's jLevelBuilder: http://www.lemmingsforums.com/index.php?topic=794.msg17498#msg17498, which you can also use to design levels for Lemmings.
(as a matter of fact, for storing levels, my Lemmings-like game uses a Lemmini-compliant file format)

Now that the Android game dev is pretty much finished, I can focus on making the game's graphics and levels.
And, in order to easily list and sort my future levels, I wanted a convenient tool which could quickly browse my level directory: it's jLevelBrowser.

For every level found in the browsed directory, this little Java app (20ko) displays thumbnails of your levels, as well as levels' main info.

jLevelBrowser is compliant with ".lvl" and ".ini" levels!
But, for each tileset, this app does require a configuration file: it's just the Lemmini's "brick.ini", "dirt.ini", "snow.ini", etc... config files that you have in your Lemmini's tileset directories.
Why is this file required? Because in this config file, the app will find the number of frames of each animated Object, and therefore it will be able to determine the size of the 1st frame to be displayed!

So, how does this level browser work? It's dead easy actually.
- click on the .jar file
- choose your Lemmini's Style/Tileset root directory (the directory that contains all your Lemmini tilesets: bubble, rock, pillar, snow, etc ...)
- then, choose your Level directory (the directory that contains the .lvl/.ini levels to list)
- and voilĂ !
Each time you select a Level directory, if there are new levels to scan, then the display is refreshed.

Please note: to perform fast browsing, thumbnails are approximations of the actual levels: upside-down pieces are inverted, but Eraser pieces are just not drawn, and NoOverwrite and OnlyOnTerrain properties are not handled, too. However the results are accurate enough to help you locate, remind, and get infos about specific levels among your stock of levels :)

You can save ALL! the thumbnails as .png images, using the "File > Write output images" option.
The output images will be written in the directory jLevelBrowser is in (so don't put this program directly on your home/desktop directory :sick:, but create a specific dir for it instead).

One more thing: data text is red for .lvl files, while data text is white for .ini files (so it's easy to see the format of a given level).

That's it.

I find this software to be convenient ; maybe you will find it too.

You can freely download jLevelBrowser by clicking on the following link:
http://www.lesjeuxlesplusmieux.com/webtools/downloadfile_jLevelBrowser.php

ps:
using custom tilesets is obviously possible: 1) just create a dir named after your custom tileset, and 2) put in this dir your complete custom tileset + a config file (tilesetname.ini) for your animated Objects (in this config file, the only required info is "frames_" actually).