Lemmings Forums
NeoLemmix => NeoLemmix Styles => Topic started by: Strato Incendus on March 10, 2020, 02:55:10 PM
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With the release of his pack Lemminas, WillLem inspired me to do something that I had been contemplating for a while, especially given the frequency with which my levels refer to geographical locations:
Lemmings 2: The Tribes may be (in-)famous for overwhelming the player with new skill types, but it also famously changed the visual appearance of the standard lemming sprites ever so slightly from one tribe to the next one, giving each of them a unique identity - albeit some tribes are easier to identify (e.g. Highland) than others (e.g. Sports or Medieval).
Thanks to the recolouring feature namida implemented, it's easier than ever to create new lemming populations! :D Naturally, I tend to think of these options in terms of real-world countries. But you could also create completely different types of lemmings. For example, I've brought up the idea of a "Lemmings Universe" pack before. Wouldn't it be nice to have "alien" lemmings occasionally for a Space level?
This thread is just for brainstorming for now, kind of like the "joke ideas for skills" thread. In contrast to those, though, these new lemming sprites are much more easily implemented - basically, anyone of us could do this. So if there is a particular type of sprite that several people would like to use, why not quickly introduce those? ;)
First of all: When it comes to recolouring, there are basically three things we can change: Hair, clothes, and skin tone. Secondary options would be the Builder / Platformer sack and the appearance of Zombies in that particular tribe.
When it comes to lemmings with a different shape than the default ones, to my knowledge, we can choose between:
- X-Mas
- GigaLem's Millas (with the feather in their hair)
- WillLem's Lemminas
I hope recolouring is enabled for all of those? ;)
I formerly included Arty's Silhouette sprites in here, but I guess those are also a recolouring by now - just that skin, hair, and clothes are all set to the same colour, "black".
Here are some suggestions of mine:
Irish Lemmings
Skin: white; Clothes: green; Hair: red / orange
This is actually something I tried to create as early as Old-Formats Lemmings World Tour for my level "The Irish Rover" - by using the X-Mas sprite and making all the Lemmings athletes (Swimmers, to be exact). I could do this because it didn't affect the solution to that level in any way, and the level obviously was a ship anyway, thus, it seemed fitting. Due to the standard reversal of the colour of hair and clothes, this resulted in red-haired Lemmings (like the L2 Highland ones), but with green robes.
However, now it would be easy to create such sprites based on regular lemmings, as well: Green clothes, orange / red hair. Those would simultaneously also serve as the "Acid Lemmings" from Lemmings Revolution, since we already have the Water Lemmings as part of Arty's Underwater tileset.
English Lemmings
Skin: skin colour, Clothes: white, Hair: red, Builder Sack: red
These could go well with sports levels; should pretty much look like the English national football team. ;) Hence, we need a different skin colour than the default white, otherwise you couldn't tell the difference between the lemmings' heads and their clothes.
Nordic Lemmings
Skin: white; Clothes: blue (default), Hair: yellow
The L2 Polar tileset comes with its own sprites; however, they hardly look like anyone living even close to the Arctic Circle. Having all-blonde Lemmings for "Scandinavian" levels of course would be just as clichéd as the Highland sprites being all redheads, but well, as long as we don't plan to enable sprite mixing in one and the same level, any "tribe" we create will include such generalisations. :D
(Sub-Saharan) African Lemmings
Skin: dark brown, Clothes: yellow, Hair: green (default); Builder Sack: red (default)
I already made those! They are now the default sprite for my strato_generalmd tileset (select it as "Theme" in the level editor if you want to use them). This tileset is "shipped" as part of Lemmings World Tour and/or Lemmings Open Air (the latter currently still in development).
I went with yellow clothes because, in conjunction with the red builder sack and the standard green hair, those are the pan-African colours (you will notice a lot of African flags actually feature some combination of those three colours).
Soviet Lemmings
Skin: white, Clothes: red, Hair: green (default), Builder Sack: dark yellow
I kind of liked the look of the "red pants" in Lemmings Paintball. But now that the Cold War is quite some time in the past, who says lemmings wearing red still automatically have to be the bad guys? :D
Chinese / Asian Lemmings
Skin: no, not plain "yellow" :P , but maybe a slightly different shade than the default white; Clothes: red, Hair: black
I've prepared this level called "The Great Wall of China" for my pack Lemmings, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll. Currently, the lemmings are still tourists - would be nice to have the option of turning them into natives as well. :D
Donald Trumps
Skin: orange, Hair: yellow, Clothes: black, Builder Sack: red (default)
Make Lemerica great again! ;)
Lemming Vampires (Lempires)
Skin: white; Clothes: black, Hair: black
We have quite a few castle tilesets now. How about some lemmings that look the spooky part? The L2 Shadow ones are really more supposed to be like Ninjas, and not nearly pale enough to be confused for vampires, even given the proper context of such a castle level.
Alien Lemmings
Skin: green, Clothes: white, Hair: silver / grey
"Alilemms" was just a word in Lemmings 3D. Now we could make it reality! As said before, seems quite fitting for some space levels, especially given that the L2 Space ones don't look all too different from regular sprites.
Trash Collectors
Skin: white, Clothes: orange, Hair: orange
Would be nice though to give them a little hat instead of just orange hair. ;)
Naked Lemmings
Skin: white, Clothes: white, Hair: green
Don't forget to slap an age restriction on your pack if you include these! :P
And then two more that I think would look nice, without any specific context implied:
Skin: white, Clothes: purple, Hair: yellow
Skin: white, Clothes: red, Hair: yellow
EDIT (29th April 2021): All of my own sprite sets (I can't guarantee for those made by others) have been updated to include recolouring data for neutral lemmings and lemming selected, as required for future use.
You can find all of them in the attached collection. Future sprite sets which already fulfil these new requirements might be released separately in later posts (i.e. I will not constantly update this archive here in the starting post, it's just easier for one quick update now).
EDIT (1st May 2021): Fixed the Zombie recolouring for the YoRHa sprites, they looked too similar to the regular lemmings.
EDIT (14th July 2023): Fixed the Lix sprites, so that they go along with WillLem's updated version of the Lemminas sprites.
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- GigaLem's Millas (with the feather in their hair)
as a correction, those feathers are actually ears, Basset ears to be exact case in point, image below
(https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/freedomplanet/images/9/9a/MillaFP1Portrait.png/revision/latest?cb=20191005163009)
The Skies the limit when it comes to recolors though some ideas I probably would've left them unsaid.
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Default and Xmas have full recoloring support. I know the Milla sprites have at least partial recoloring support, because I helped GigaLem set it up to have just one set of sprites and recolor them for the Festive styles - but I only added the bare minimum needed to make those styles work, so unless GigaLem has added the rest, they don't have full recoloring support. I have no idea how much, if any, recoloring support the Lemmina sprites have.
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Great idea Strato - I'd love to see these in action if you get a full game together with them!
I have no idea how much, if any, recoloring support the Lemmina sprites have.
I can confirm that the Lemminas have full recolouring support: in fact, in-game their clothes are recoloured for Athlete/Lem Selection/Neutral purposes, and the entire sprite is recoloured (skin, clothes and hair) for the one-off zombie Lemminas appearance in Nightmare On Lem Street III.
The theme.nxtm file contains all colour schemes; please note that both the high-res and low res version have two-tone colouring for hair, clothes and skin and although the sprite recolouring does support shades, I found that it was necessary to specify each tone for more targeted recolouring purposes (this has already been done in theme.nxtm, all you'll need to do is specify your new colour for each of the given values).
For easy reference, here are the hex codes for a default Lemmina if you want to have a play with them:
Hair (dark electric blue): 0026FF
Hair (light sky blue): 0094FF
Bobble (banana yellow): FBFF19
Clothes (dark rose): FF476F
Clothes (light pink): FF9EC4
Skin (tan-shade skintone): F4B590
Skin (light skintone): FFD5B3
Just find each code in the theme.nxtm file and change it as you wish! Let me know if you need any help with it.
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Thanks for your cooperation, GigaLem and WillLem (in the sense that you seem to be fine, at least in principle, with people recolouring your sprites :thumbsup: ) And special thanks to WillLem for even providing the exact hex codes!
Based on that, I would add the following ideas:
Lara Croft (Lemminas-based)
Skin: skin-tone, Clothes: green / teal, Hair: brown, Builder Sack: brown (like the bagpack)
Nepster has made two famous levels called "Tomb Raider". I think those levels should be playable with fitting sprites! :D
Pippi Longstocking (Lemminas-based)
Skin: white (default), Clothes: bright green (like athletes), Hair: red
These would be a special type of Swedish sprite. :D Although they could also simply be regarded as female versions of the Irish / Acid lemmings. Likewise, if you set the clothes back to default blue, they'd be female Highland lemmings.
Indian Lemmings (default-based)
Skin: like my African lemmings, Clothes: orange, Hair: green (default)
I have a couple of levels in Lemmings World Tour that are either located in India ("Taj-a, Taj-a, Taj-a, Taj me", "Kashmir") or make reference to it ("Yoga"), as well as one set in neighbouring Bangladesh (Bang-a-Boomerang). There's also a famous song, Krypteria's "Liberatio", that is kind of tied to the Tsunami that hit Sri Lanka and other nearby nations in December 2004 (similarly to Enya's "Only Time" and 9/11). Tamils (=people from Sri Lanka) often look quite similar to Indians and therefore frequently get confused for them. Either way, the yellow clothes my African lemmings are wearing seem unfitting. Orange is present in both the Indian and the Sri Lankan flag.
Of course, one could set the hair to black, as well - but if the other colours already serve to give a sense of the geographic origin of those lemmings, I'm happy for every type of sprite that gets to keep its iconic green lemmings hair! :thumbsup:
Not to be confused with:
Native American / Amerindian Lemmings (Millas-based)
Skin: again, not "orange" (in contrast to the Trump sprites! :evil: ), but a slightly darker tone than default, slightly red-ish, Clothes: brown (default), Hair: black
I tried to create an Amerindian tileset in Old Formats, I just never completed it. For example, the exit was a recolouring of the tent from the L2 Outdoor tileset. Having fitting sprites available would be a nice incentive to pick up on that again! ;)
Additionally, acknowledging that those supposed "feathers" are actually ears :P :
Elvish Lemmings (Millas-based OR Lemminas-based)
Skin: white (default), Clothes: dark green, Hair: yellow, Builder Sack: blue
Elves usually have pointed ears AND long hair, therefore, I can imagine such recolourings for both of the aforementioned custom-shaped lemming sprites you made. One could even make "Christmas Elves", Santa's little helpers, by applying the same colour scheme to the X-Mas sprites. :D
Speaking of X-Mas sprites:
Arab Lemmings (X-Mas based)
Skin: L2 Beach / L2 Shadow, Clothes and Hat: white, Hair: black
Those are supposed to look like sheikhs, or like Beduin nomads in the desert. It's also easy enough to create female versions of these, using the same sprites...
Skin: L2 Beach / L2 Shadow, Clothes and Hat: black, Hair: black
And just like that, you have lemmings wearing a Nikab! :P
Monk Lemmings (X-Mas based)
Skin: white (default), Clothes and Hat: brown, Hair: green (default)
Again, a nice design for Castle levels - lemmings in a monastery, wearing appropriate clothes! :) Now that we do have Lemminas, that only makes it seem more like the default lemmings are male (which would be fitting, because when it comes to soldiers, just like with lemmings, guess who's more "expendable" for evolution... :8:()[: ). With Monk lemmings, you can be absolutely sure they are celibate! :P
Great idea Strato - I'd love to see these in action if you get a full game together with them!
I'm planning to make excessive use of them in my upcoming pack Lemmings, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll! ;) Because that pack is going to have geography-based levels again. Once I've made all of these recolourings, I might also add them to the appropriate levels from Lemmings World Tour in hindsight (which is only going to work in the New-Formats version, of course).
For example, I have already added my yellow-pants African Lemmings to the Lemmings World Tour level "Diggas in Paris" (go figure :P ) from the Diva rank - I think also to Toto's "Africa", which is on the Legend rank, and to "Waka Waka" on the Professional rank. I think I forgot to add them to "I like to move it, move it!" though, which is located in Madagascar... one thing I have to remember for the next update!
Lemmings Hall of Fame, meanwhile, will have to stick to the sprites from the respective L2: The Tribes tilesets, in order to maintain the feeling of that L2 authenticity. Likewise, Lemmings Open Air basically only features default lemming sprites, because it's supposed to look very much like classic lemmings.
some ideas I probably would've left them unsaid.
If you're referring to the Naked Lemmings here, that concept could of course also be applied to any other sprite... ^^ As long as they have a different skin tone or hair colour than default, because the clothes would obviously become irrelevant, or rather identical with whatever the colour for the skin tone is.
For example, take the L2 Beach sprites and make the clothes identical to the colour of the head --> voilà: now you have lemmings from the Naturism beach! 8-)
Do the same thing for the Lemminas --> welcome to Lemmings Baywatch! :evil:
Or we simply call them "Brazilian Lemmings", coming straight from a carnival parade.
And then, finally, when my aforementioned yellow-pants Lemmings show up... but without those pants... all the regular default lemmings are probably going to hide in shame... :devil:
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Lara Croft Lemminas is a great idea, I'll definitely give that one a go! :thumbsup:
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A quick look at the Lara Croft Lemminas ;P
(https://i.imgur.com/KZD41AO.png?1)
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These look precisely like I imagined them! :thumbsup: Great job, WillLem! One less I have to take care of!
Can you share those as style folders?
I'm uploading my Asian and African sprites with this post. Since we're now going for many different sprites, it no longer makes sense to have the African sprites come with just my strato_generalmd tileset.
The colours for the Asian tilesets are in line with what I suggested above, but the specific shades are taken from the example picture created by Armani in the Lemminas thread (https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4679.msg80237#msg80237). So credit goes to him for that! ;)
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...and here's Soviet, Indian, and Trump! :evil:
While designing the Soviet lemmings, I noticed that default lemmings actually aren't completely white, they have a slight skin-tone shade to them. These Russian lemmings, in contrast, really have #ffffff, i.e. complete white, as their colour! :D
For the Indian lemmings, somehow the reflection on the Builder's sack is red. I don't see anywhere in the recolouring options in the "theme" file where you can change this? ???
And for the Trump lemmings, don't worry, I didn't actually create that level just to show them off... this is an old level from Paralems called "The Wall (Part II)", converted to New Formats, and it might actually make its way into Pit Lems remastered, just to have all three "The Wall" levels in one place... ;)
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These look precisely like I imagined them! :thumbsup: Great job, WillLem! One less I have to take care of!
Can you share those as style folders?
Thanks! I'll need to sort out the low-res versions and the recolouring for athlete/selection/etc first, then sure, I'll share them here.
Haha the Donald Trump Lemmings are brilliant. :crylaugh:
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8-)
The Trump lemmings look very spot-on and are especially ironic, since I imagine the lemmings will end up getting past a wall in the level, literally behaving like the illegal immigrants Trump loves to hate on.
I was expecting a more pure reddish clothing for the Asian one from your initial verbal description; the current shade seems more pink. But the clothing color is kind of arbitrary anyway.
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Forgot to mention: notice from the screenshots the lemmings icon/graphic left of the "number of lemmings remaining in the level" count is still the standard lemming graphics with blue clothes, white skin and green hair. Wondering if the recoloring should be affecting that icon/graphic as well?
Though I guess it would create an issue when one of the recoloring uses black, since the background for that icon/graphic will always be black.
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Trash Collectors
Skin: white, Clothes: orange, Hair: orange
Would be nice though to give them a little hat instead of just orange hair. ;)
Hmm, is that a German thing, the orange clothes? Here in the US I don't think there're any standard uniforms for trash collectors. Although the orange jumpsuit is quite commonly recognized as prisoner clothes.
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As promised, here are the Lara Croft sprites in both resolutions and with the recolouring sorted out for use in-game.
Enjoy! :lemcat:
(https://i.imgur.com/KZD41AO.png?1)
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Thanks a lot, WillLem! :thumbsup: I was wondering how I could specify the different shadings for high-res for my sprites as well, but I think this is probably a unique property of your Lemmina sprites? Or is there a way to do this for the default sprites as well, by simply specifying two consecutive lines per hair-, clothes-, and skin colour? ;)
Because at least Armani's suggestion for the Asian sprites actually seems to have been set up that way (with two different shades of red for the clothes and two different shades for the skin).
Hmm, is that a German thing, the orange clothes? Here in the US I don't think there're any standard uniforms for trash collectors. Although the orange jumpsuit is quite commonly recognized as prisoner clothes.
Yes, trash collectors actually have to wear warning wests in Germany for their own safety. Simply have a look at the images you get when you look for the German term, Müllabfuhr (https://www.google.com/search?q=m%C3%BCllabfuhr&client=firefox-b-d&sxsrf=ALeKk03T9bXEo3gALIKSUu0nMScguMLo3A:1584375491252&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjf7OLSsp_oAhUVhlwKHVfyDrwQ_AUoAnoECA0QBA).
In contrast, prisoners can wear their own clothes in Germany, meaning it's exactly reversed. :P
But feel free to use these sprites as "Prisoner Lemmings" instead, once they have been created and uploaded here, if you happen to live in the US :evil: ...
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Thanks a lot, WillLem! :thumbsup: I was wondering how I could specify the different shadings for high-res for my sprites as well, but I think this is probably a unique property of your Lemmina sprites? Or is there a way to do this for the default sprites as well, by simply specifying two consecutive lines per hair-, clothes-, and skin colour? ;)
Because at least Armani's suggestion for the Asian sprites actually seems to have been set up that way (with two different shades of red for the clothes and two different shades for the skin).
Yes, that's basically it: note that the scheme.nxmi file only needs to be placed into the low-res versions' folder, and the hi-res version will follow suit. No pun intended. ;P
The way I did it was by specifying the two shades as separate values in scheme.nxmi, thus:
$SPRITESET_RECOLORING
LEMMING CLOTHES xHEXVALUE1 (lighter shade)
LEMMING CLOTHES xHEXVALUE2 (darker shade)
etc, doing the same for skin and hair
Then, in the $STATE_RECOLORING section, each value has it own dedicated set of instructions:
$ATHLETE
FROM xHEXVALUE1
TO xHEXVALUE3
$END
$ATHLETE
FROM xHEXVALUE2
TO xHEXVALUE4
$END
Where HEXVALUE 1 and 2 are the original chosen clothes colour, and 3 and 4 are the desired target colours for, in this example, the Athlete's clothes.
Hope this helps!
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Thanks a lot, WillLem! I've noticed though that the Lara Croft style actually contains separate pngs of each sprite in its modified form (i.e. with teal shirts, like the Lara Croft lemmings are supposed to look anyway - not like purple-blue Lemminas that are merely being recoloured). Did you recolour these by hand? If so, what does the scheme.nxmi file actually do, aside from changing colours for athletes, zombies, and selected lemmings?
And isn't an overload of additional sprites (in terms of actual png images for each type of sprite) precisely what we wanted to avoid by having the recolouring feature? ;)
Or can a scheme.nxmi file also apply to a set of sprites that is not contained within the style folder as "lemmings" and "lemmings_hr"? With theme.nxmi files, you can simply refer to the sprites at the top (LEMMINGS default, for example), without having to include the single png files again.
If not, I get how this method allows you to customise more about your sprites, i.e. two different shades for each part. But I think it might lead to a lot of redundancy in terms of pngs if we do this for every sprite we recolour, because then each of those sets would have to come with its own set of pngs again?
In the meantime, happy St. Patrick's Day! Here are the Irish lemming sprites! :D
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I just want to make it clear that any creations in this topic are ONLY going to be accepted into the NL styles download if they're being used by actual styles / packs, or involve an actual proper custom spriteset rather than just recoloring info for an existing one (and "it is just a recolor, but I made it as PNGs instead of using theme.nxtm" does not work as a loophole to sidestep this). They will not be added purely "because they exist" - enjoy experimenting for sure, and any actually-being-used content that comes out of it can definitely be included. But there's simply too much room for creating stuff here, for every variation to be included just for the sake of doing so.
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No worries, namida; I'm pretty sure nobody in here expects any of these sprites to become standard inclusions. ;) Anyone who uses them for their specific levels should obviously distribute the required sprites together with their pack. Although I believe that, in case a player forgets to install them, there will be a fallback to just default sprites instead?
Because I remember you set up this fallback in case a sprite for a particular skill (most recently, the Shimmier) is missing. If somebody downloads e.g. Lemminas and the required graphic sets, but without downloading the Lemminas sprites, then simply all the sprites would be missing, and consequently, the NeoLemmix player would fall back to default blue-green Lemming sprites, wouldn't it? ;)
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If somebody downloads e.g. Lemminas and the required graphic sets, but without downloading the Lemminas sprites, then simply all the sprites would be missing, and consequently, the NeoLemmix player would fall back to default blue-green Lemming sprites, wouldn't it?
Theoretically yes, although in practice Lemminas only has one style, and the Lemmina sprites are part of that style, so this wouldn't actually happen. A more likely situation would be if a new skill was added in the future, and the Lemmina sprites didn't have a graphic for the new action. (I consider this "if" because I suspect it's very unlikely that WillLem would be slack on updating his sprites. It's probably more likely this would happen with the official Xmas sprites than the Lemmina ones.)
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Did you recolour these by hand? If so, what does the scheme.nxmi file actually do, aside from changing colours for athletes, zombies, and selected lemmings?
Yes; I generally prefer to do things like this manually so I know exactly what result I'm getting during the creation process.
And isn't an overload of additional sprites (in terms of actual png images for each type of sprite) precisely what we wanted to avoid by having the recolouring feature? ;)
I guess so; but, beyond the Lemminas (and now the Lara Crofties!) I have no plans to create any further spritesets or recolourings: I'll leave that to you to have a play with!
Or can a scheme.nxmi file also apply to a set of sprites that is not contained within the style folder as "lemmings" and "lemmings_hr"? With theme.nxmi files, you can simply refer to the sprites at the top (LEMMINGS default, for example), without having to include the single png files again.
From what I can tell, the theme.nxmi is all that's needed for purely recolouring purposes: scheme.nxmi only needs to be played about with if you're creating new sprites.
In the meantime, happy St. Patrick's Day! Here are the Irish lemming sprites! :D
Looking good! Hopefully I can get these to work...
Side note: I can't get the Donald Trump and other sprites to work btw, in either resolution. I choose them as the theme but I'm only getting default colourings...
I just want to make it clear that any creations in this topic are ONLY going to be accepted into the NL styles download if they're being used by actual styles / packs
I'll be making willlem_laracroft into a full-fledged style pack in due course... no plans to make any others though, I think I have enough for now!
A more likely situation would be if a new skill was added in the future, and the Lemmina sprites didn't have a graphic for the new action. (I consider this "if" because I suspect it's very unlikely that WillLem would be slack on updating his sprites. It's probably more likely this would happen with the official Xmas sprites than the Lemmina ones.)
Thanks for the kind comment there, Namida! I will indeed keep my spritesets up to date, and I'll be more than happy to look after the Xmas ones as well. :lemcat:
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Ah, okay. Well, thanks for making the effort to specify two colours each for the Lara Croft sprites - as well as for the manual recolouring - but so far, it doesn't seem necessary to do so: ;) All of my "just-recoloured" sprites also turn to two different shades of their respective colour when I switch to High-Res mode.
Side note: I can't get the Donald Trump and other sprites to work btw, in either resolution. I choose them as the theme but I'm only getting default colourings...
Thanks for reporting the error; how exactly did you go about this? Did you import the entire folder into "styles", and then the theme inside that folder?
They all work perfectly fine for me, and since all of these theme files just refer to and then recolour the default Lemming sprites, for which everyone needs the pngs, I don't see which files I could possibly have on my PC that you don't have. ???
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All of my "just-recoloured" sprites also turn to two different shades of their respective colour when I switch to High-Res mode.
That'll be thanks to the $SHADES capability that Namida implemented for dual-colourings. It works a treat with certain colours, but I have found that I don't get quite the results I want with certain others. That's just me though: I go into perfectionist mode ad absurdum when it comes to colours/visuals; I would expect that the $SHADES function is more than enough for most sprite/theme design requirements.
Thanks for reporting the error; how exactly did you go about this? Did you import the entire folder into "styles", and then the theme inside that folder?
I just extracted strato_lem_trump to the styles folder, with all of its contents... and I do indeed have the default lems sprites where they should be.
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Thanks for the explanation. Did any of the other people who downloaded the Trump sprites (as well as the others) experience these problems? So far it says each sprite type has been downloaded 4 times, so I assume by four different people.
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Quick question as well, regarding sprite recolourings:
Let's say you wanted to create a level pack from the orig and oh_no! tilesets, but with recoloured sprites...
Would you have to create a new style pack with just a theme.nxmi file specifying the recolourings, or could you include theme.nxmi in the root folder of the levelpack itself (thus avoiding having to create a separate style for a recolouring theme)?
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I remember the Old-Formats pack toolkit had an option to select sprites on a per-pack basis vs. on a per-style-used-in-level basis. I always went with the latter one, but technically, it would have been possible to have your entire pack just feature default sprites or just x-mas sprites. The latter option was probably chosen by people who made distinctive custom Holiday packs back in the day?
But of course, in Old Formats, you could basically just choose between default and x-mas anyway; the only exception I know is GigaLem's Millas, and I think he just outright replaced the default sprites with his custom ones in the context of Old-Formats Millas.
In short: I don't know if per-pack choice of a fixed sprite type is even possible anymore in New Formats, because it seems like more flexibility was what people wanted more ;) . What would of course work is simply setting the theme of each of those levels to "Lemminas", or whatever sprite type you want to use, no matter which graphic sets the individual levels are using. But of course, that would change the colour of Builder staircases, umbrellas, pickup skills etc. as well, rather than having those continue to go along with whatever theme would fit the graphic set of a level. And of course, it would be quite tedious to do manually for every single level.
But I guess namida can clarify this.
In the meantime, here's another popular character turned Lemming! With umbrellas, bridges, and Builder sacks made of web!
Note that there is no recolouring of Athletes compared to normal lemmings with these sprites! :) So this is another case of "aesthetics over strict mechanical fairness". But it simply would not look right if the lemmings sticking to a wall (=Climbers), of all skills possible, were the ones looking precisely NOT like Spider-Man! :evil:
Originally, I wanted to use the black symbiont outfit for the athletes. But that's hard to do with such low resolution, plus these sprites would only work with coloured backgrounds then.
And inverting the normal sprites to blue heads and red shirts would also be quite strange, because I'm not aware of any Spider-Man outfit (and there were many!) that looked even remotely close to such a colour scheme.
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And here are two more: English and Arab! (Also, I'm using high-res mode this time...)
The Arab lemmings are my first attempt at recolouring the X-Mas sprites. I tried to create some Star Wars Jawas with it (with brown robes and black faces), only to find out you can't actually recolour the seam of the robes (it always remains white).
Notice how the regular Arab lemmings are in white (sheikhs), the neutral Arab lemmings are in black (women in Nikabs). :P Athletes still wear green, because... well, that's just the colour of Islam.
Yet, for some strange reason, the Digger still gets recoloured to standard x-mas red (see below, the picture with the pyramid)? :D
I can't see where to specify that, unfortunately... after all, it's not a permanent skill...
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I'll just bump the question so it doesn't get lost, I think we need to know this for sure really:
Let's say you wanted to create a level pack from the orig and oh_no! tilesets, but with recoloured sprites...
Would you have to create a new style pack with just a theme.nxmi file specifying the recolourings, or could you include theme.nxmi in the root folder of the levelpack itself (thus avoiding having to create a separate style for a recolouring theme)?
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I remember the Old-Formats pack toolkit had an option to select sprites on a per-pack basis vs. on a per-style-used-in-level basis. I always went with the latter one, but technically, it would have been possible to have your entire pack just feature default sprites or just x-mas sprites.
If I remember correctly, old-formats allowed a style to decide between normal or xmas sprites, and pack creators could customize each set however they liked. Theoretically, the support was there for more than two spritesets, but the lemming graphics had to specifically be built into each pack (they wouldn't be part of the style itself; the style would only specify which one to use).
Let's say you wanted to create a level pack from the orig and oh_no! tilesets, but with recoloured sprites...
Would you have to create a new style pack with just a theme.nxmi file specifying the recolourings, or could you include theme.nxmi in the root folder of the levelpack itself (thus avoiding having to create a separate style for a recolouring theme)?
Allowing the lemmings to be selected by the pack, apart from the question of "when does the style's setting override vs when does the pack's setting do so?", has all the same issues as selecting the lemming sprites seperately from the overall level's theme: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4698.0
However, this "same issues" applies in a positive sense too - if one was implemented, it would be trivial to also implement the other.
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Allowing the lemmings to be selected by the pack, apart from the question of "when does the style's setting override vs when does the pack's setting do so?", has all the same issues as selecting the lemming sprites seperately from the overall level's theme
I think I understand...
Does it work like this?:
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1. LEVEL has Theme A, for which the Default lemmings sprites are recoloured to have red shirts.
2. Theme A is linked to Style A, and so the recolouring needs to be specified in Style A's folder in a file called theme.nxmi, which provides all of the instructions for Theme A.
3. PACK has multiple Themes, potentially, across several LEVELS. So, if a theme.nxmi file were to be placed in the PACK's folder, any given LEVEL would think: "hang on, am I using Theme A (for example), or the PACK's theme?"
4. Meanwhile, the Editor doesn't have a function to select a Theme based on a PACK that hasn't yet been created. So the Editor's position is: "Choose an existing theme, and that will be the one I'll hard-code to the LEVEL."
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Between the above four truths, is this where the potential issue could arise?
If I understand correctly, I see why a levelpack couldn't have its own theme.nxmi file. But: would there be another way to implement sprite recolourings without having to create a separate style folder with a single theme.nxmi file in and nothing else?
Perhaps, there could be an option in the Editor to select "Levelpack Theme" under "Theme". This would then instruct the level to look in the levelpack's folder for theme.nxmi rather than a particular style. In all other cases, the theme is whatever else was selected.
But... and I feel like I'm chasing my tail here... if the levelpack hadn't yet been created, you'd be asking the Editor to specify a level theme that doesn't exist.
:lem-mindblown:
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Thanks for the explanation. Did any of the other people who downloaded the Trump sprites (as well as the others) experience these problems? So far it says each sprite type has been downloaded 4 times, so I assume by four different people.
I figured out the issue! The .zip file is a .theme within a folder within a folder, meaning that the editor was looking for the .theme file but only finding a folder (which the .theme file was in).
I've now moved the .theme files out of the folders-within-folders, and they all work a treat in both resolutions.
Also, since you were asking about this on a now-closed topic, the "Reacher" state of a Shimmier can jump through and and land upon a 2px platform, provided their head is above the platform. Here's a quick video (https://youtu.be/geX9d_QYeVM) to demonstrate this:
(https://i.imgur.com/asKnmXr.png?1) (https://youtu.be/geX9d_QYeVM)
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Great, thanks for both "types of information"! :thumbsup:
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So, I tried to make some Dutch lemmings with orange clothes and orange hair. In order for athletes to still be identifiable, I wanted to recolour athlete hair to blue while leaving the clothes as they are.
However, this doesn't seem to work - as the attached picture shows, the Climber still looks exactly the same as everyone else.
Does anyone have an idea what I'm doing wrong (the theme file is also attached)? ??? This issue hasn't occured with any other sprite recolouring I've made so far... except with the Spider-Man sprites, where it is intentional that athletes look just like normal lemmings (because they should of course especially look like Spider-Man when sticking to a wall as Climbers). Meaning, for the Spider-Man sprites, I deliberately set athlete hair and clothes colours to the same colours as for regular Walkers.
Here, in contrast, I specified a different colour for athlete hair, yet nothing seems to change.
So do I need to implement a channel swap for athletes? I noticed that this is being done for the L2 Shadow sprites, which are the only ones I know where hair colour and clothes colour is identical...
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So, I tried to make some Dutch lemmings with orange clothes and orange hair...
However, this doesn't seem to work - as the attached picture shows, the Climber still looks exactly the same as everyone else.
Does anyone have an idea what I'm doing wrong?
The recolourings for athletes, neutrals, etc, needs to be specified in lemmings>scheme.nxmi (I think!)
I'm not sure if it works by just applying the colours in the theme.nxtm file...
A suggestion for the Spider-Man sprites: maybe the normal lemmings ought to be Peter Parker coloured, and then recoloured to blue & red when they're athletes...!
Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with ways to get invisible lemmings. First, I went for a straight-up invisible set (by simply manually recolouring all lemmings hair, skin and clothes to Alpha 0), and a camouflage set where they're coloured the same as the background (i.e. hex #000030). Let me know which you think is best: I've attached a level which uses each set as well.
The invisiblems don't even show up in CPM! ;P
NOTE: these spritesets are intended purely for experimental purposes ONLY, and the level Cascade II is intended as a demonstration level for these spritesets.
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I had to laugh at Donald Trump lemmings, that was funny. :)
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@WillLem: It should work with theme files, because that's what I've used on previous recolourings (Soviet, Indian etc.), and it didn't cause any problems there.
Going via the scheme file is what you have done with your Lara Croft sprites; however, this also included recolouring every single one of your sprites by hand, which is precisely what we wanted to avoid having to do by introducing the recolouring feature in the first place. ;)
So is the reason the Dutch lemmings don't get recoloured as athletes rooted in the fact that the hair and clothes colour for the regular sprites is identical? ;) Does the colour you choose for an athlete's hair and clothes reference the default colours in any way? I thought you can simply pick a different colour for both, independently of each other.
I guess this question goes out to namida specifically.
Peter Parker as Walkers for the Spider-Man sprites sounds like a good idea on paper, but keep in mind that Shimmiers don't necessarily need to have permanent skills assigned to them in order to perform Spider-Man-like movements (if they jump or reach towards the ceiling, rather than climbing first to get there). ;)
@grams88: Thanks a lot! ;)
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Peter Parker as Walkers for the Spider-Man sprites sounds like a good idea on paper, but keep in mind that Shimmiers don't necessarily need to have permanent skills assigned to them in order to perform Spider-Man-like movements (if they jump or reach towards the ceiling, rather than climbing first to get there). ;)
Good point: maybe a way around this would be to ensure that any level featuring this sprite set requires a lemming to become an athlete before they need to shimmy...
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Well, I've also changed the colour of parachutes and bridges (i.e. Floaters, Gliders, Builders, Platformers, and Stackers) to white so that they look like made of web. Constructive skills can also be performed without the lemming being an athlete. So those levels would require the lemming to become an athlete to look like Spider-Man before they literally do anything. ???
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Well, I've also changed the colour of parachutes and bridges (i.e. Floaters, Gliders, Builders, Platformers, and Stackers) to white so that they look like made of web. Constructive skills can also be performed without the lemming being an athlete. So those levels would require the lemming to become an athlete to look like Spider-Man before they literally do anything. ???
Not necessarily: Peter Parker is capable of producing web when he's not in costume.
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Of course he is. He is also able to climb walls when not in his costume.
I'm still considering the idea - however, with the way athletes work in NeoLemmix, it could still be weird. For example, you could have other types of athletes - Floaters, Swimmers, Disarmers, for example - that look like Spider-Man and can't actually stick to walls. Now, they just all look like Spider-Man, independent of what they're capable of.
However, this "only athletes wear the costume" solution would work great with pioneer levels, because then there would only be one Spider-Man per level, and the rest would be civilians... :thumbsup:
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The invisiblems don't even show up in CPM! ;P
Interesting. Regardless of what people think about invisible stuff, that sounds like a bug. CPM should be using its own fixed color scheme for everything, that is independent of styles. Even if it isn't rendering things invisible in other cases, having any colors in CPM potentially mean something else, even while still visible, would defeat the point of CPM.
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Okay, so I solved the issue with the Dutch lemmings: Apparently, athlete recolouring is indeed not possible if clothes and hair of the regular lemmings are the exact same hexadecimal value. So I just changed the last digit for the clothes from 0 to 2. It still looks like the same shade of orange to the human eye, but it isn't for the program. :evil: That way, I can recolour the athlete - I chose to just recolour the hair to blue. The Dutch style is attached.
Regarding Spider-Man: Peter Parker for regular lemmings sadly doesn't work, because then, the athletes also have regular skin colour, thereby no longer looking like Spider-Man with mask, boots, and gloves on. To my knowledge, it isn't possible to separately recolour an athlete's skin - only his hair and clothes, correct? ;)
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To my knowledge, it isn't possible to separately recolour an athlete's skin - only his hair and clothes, correct? ;)
Not correct: you can use the .scheme file to change skin, hair and clothes colours independently of each other. That's how zombies are possible (e.g. the zombie lemminas are complete recolourings from within the scheme file - no manual recolouring at all).
Not sure how this would work in the .theme file, but it's certainly worth a try.
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Thanks for the reminder, I had forgotten about the scheme option! ;) So the real question is: Can we use a scheme file for recolouring without providing separate .png files? Since the only example I know - your Lara Croft lemmings - did feature separate sprite .png files, as do any other cases that use scheme files that I'm aware of (X-Mas, Millas, Lemminas).
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Here are the Swedish sprites!
Would still be good to know whether sprites can be recoloured using a scheme file without having to provide hand-recoloured .pngs for every single file. ;) Or whether it is possible to recolour an athlete's skin using a theme file as well.
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Would still be good to know whether sprites can be recoloured using a scheme file without having to provide hand-recoloured .pngs for every single file. ;) Or whether it is possible to recolour an athlete's skin using a theme file as well.
I've tested this is well: to recolour sprites from within .scheme, I'm pretty sure the source colours have to match the PNGs for any recolourings to work, which means manual recolouring if you want the lemmings' normal colourings to be different from the default.
The .theme, it seems, is able to recolour athlete's hair and clothes, but not skin. I'd agree that, if there were a way to make this possible, using .theme to create complex spriteset recolourings would certainly be easier and quicker than doing it manually.
However, there is something to be said for getting exactly the results you want by spending fifteen minutes with a decent PNG editor. For example, if I wanted Peter Parker lems with, say, brown hair, pink skin and blue clothes, I'd do this part manually (using a global flood-fill) and then use .scheme to recolour the athlete hair, skin and clothes to red, blue and red respectively for the Spider-Man costume. Since you can also specify shade recolourings from within .scheme, this is a much more versatile and targeted way to get the desired results.
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I know how to do such mass recolourings - I did them in Photoshop for my African lemmings, as well as when I did the L2 Beach sprites as an interim solution before recolouring via scheme files was implemented.
But as I said earlier, having a bunch of new custom styles with individual .png files that are still essentially just recolourings is precisely what we intended to avoid by having recolouring implemented. ;) So I'd rather have all the lemmings in that style look like Spider-Man, as I originally intended anyway, than going back to this, unless it's necessary anyway (which is the case whenever the actual shape of the sprite itself changes, like with X-Mas, Lemminas, or Millas)
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I'm getting an error message "Invalid pointer operation. Falling back to default sprites" when trying to use WillLem's Lara Croft sprites on a custom level (with the experimental editor)... ???
Since the same happens with Lemminas, I guess it's because there's no Jumper sprite yet? ;)
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I'm getting an error message "Invalid pointer operation. Falling back to default sprites" when trying to use WillLem's Lara Croft sprites on a custom level (with the experimental editor)... ???
Since the same happens with Lemminas, I guess it's because there's no Jumper sprite yet? ;)
That's correct!
Here are the Jumper sprites for willlem_lemminas and willlem_laracroft, including updated scheme files (this should be placed in the {name_of_style}/lemmings folder along with the low-res version of the sprite).
(Note that the scheme file may need updating again after the NL V12.9 stable release).
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An idea I just thought up would be entire tribe species called "Mighty Morphin' Lemming Rangers."
(These tribes will be a infinitely more to it than just Zyuranger)
This "Species of Lemming Tribes" (If you wish to call these loads and loads of designs that) will make use of the new running and jumping abilities in the upcoming Manytribe NeoLemmix versions.
These lemmings model themselves after all the tokusatsu heroes and villains of tokusatsu. (though these lemmings ideas of the villains' heineous acts are more akin to that of cartoon pettyness)
Their stunts never faked for they believe that they're expendible as long as they get the clear percentage of their fellow lemmings out in the seemingly never ending challenge.
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not sure if i can do it but im playing with the following
baywatch lemmings naked from the waist up little red shorts
robocop lemmings little helmets and mostly silver
pink panther easiest to do just different shades of pink
dr who lemmings (im sure these already exist if they do can someone point me to them) trilbys and long scarfs (tom baker) or fez's (matt smith)
a team (ba baracus) chains and a mohican
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Silly idea: Lemming sprites where the lemmings are actually lemmings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming).
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Silly idea: Lemming sprites where the lemmings are actually lemmings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming).
That's a great idea, get on it!
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Silly idea: Lemming sprites where the lemmings are actually lemmings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming).
That's a great idea, get on it!
would be quite hard to render the fur in that amount of pixels and theyd be hard to distinguish being mostly one colour
(https://i.imgur.com/HyCTrc4.jpg)
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We haven't had any new recolourings in a while. So here are the long-announced Naked Lemmings! :D
In order to make athletes distinguishable if they don't wear any clothes either, I consequently could only change the skin tone. ;)
So if you want "diversity" among your lemmings, simply make some of them athletes! :P
The funny part is that there actually is no option "ATHLETE_SKIN" available in the recolouring scheme; but when I changed the colour of the supposed clothes, the face any everything else except the hair changed along with it, exactly as I wanted. I would have expected the lemming to wear black clothes and still have a white head, which would have looked pretty weird. But for some strange reason, in this case fortunately, this was not the case! :thumbsup:
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Good news - the Lix have finally made their way over to NeoLemmix! ;) They probably fled from all the domestic violence they were experiencing over there, by evil players constantly hitting them with baseball bats... :P
Little did they know that of course, even within NeoLemmix, the Islemic State would still expect them to blow themselves up for the greater good occasionally... :evil:
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Here's an update / alternative to the Spider-Man lemmings at last:
In order to distinguish regular lemmings from athletes, I just gave the regular lemmings their green hair back, whereas the athlete's hair is red, as it used to be (see the Glider on the right).
In practice, this looks like a lemming gaining any athlete "super powers" dons his Spider-Man mask so he can start moving around the level parkour! :thumbsup:
In the screenshot, you can see what it looks like when athletes are moving within a crowd. I think they're easy enough to spot.
The side effect of this is that the lemmings on the skill panel have green hair, too, instead of looking like Spider-Man with his head entirely covered - because the lemmings on the skill panel always look like the regular Walkers of a given sprite set (including those skills which are actually athletes in practice).
Simply drop this modified theme file into your strato_lems_spider-man folder to replace the old one if you want to.
If you prefer all the lems to look like Spider-Man all the times (i.e. with no green hair to be seen), including those on the skill panel, leave it as it is. ;)
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All sprite sets have been updated to include recolouring data for neutral lemmings and lemming selected, as required for future use.
I will delete all the older attachments from my posts throughout this thread to avoid confusion.
Any style which you see screenshots of up to this divider post right here (date: 29th April 2021) can now be found in the archive "Strato Sprites Collection" in the starting post.
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Quick bump here: Something about recolouring the Lemminas sprites no longer seems to work as it used to:
- WillLem's Lara Croft sprites no longer work for me, but fall back to default sprites. Perhaps that's because they were hand-made as separate sprites (rather than being recoloured Lemminas), and don't have sprites for Slider and Laserer yet?
- My Lix sprites, which are indeed recoloured Lemminas using the "theme" file, and should therefore have red clothes and blond hair, suddenly look like regular lemminas (pink clothes, blue hair, switching to green clothes when becoming athletes).
@WillLem: Has anything changed about the Lemminas sprites over the last two years? ;)
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@WillLem: Has anything changed about the Lemminas sprites over the last two years? ;)
Definitely! :crylaugh:
For one thing, there's a more comprehensive list of spriteset recolouring data. The actual colours and shades themselves are still the same though, so I'm not sure why your Lix set isn't working.
I've attached here (https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4681.msg99762#msg99762) the latest NeoLemmix-ready copies of all lemminas styles, including laracroft. Note that three of these (classic, monochrome and slushworld) are recolourings rather than OG sprites, so you might be able to use the theme.nxmi from these to help with your own recolouring sets.
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Thanks a lot, WillLem! :thumbsup:
Seems like this only affects the Lemminas models, since all of my recolourings of the standard lemmings (Asian, Indian, African, Spider-Man, Trump etc. :evil:) have been working the entire time.
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No problem! Use the new theme.nxmi from willlem_lemminas to bring your recolourings up to date, and you should be good to go :)
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Your Lara-Croft Lemminas seem to be missing the Stoner sprites. At least the low-res sprites don't have them. I copied them over from the regular Lemminas.
Just FYI, for anyone who downloads this zip archive - if you use the low-res sprites, you'll have to copy over the Stoner image from the standard Lemminas into the Lara-Croft folder.
I've updated my sprites collection in the starting post with the fixed Lix sprites (I preferred to keep their clothes in the same shade of red, rather than two different shades :P ).
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Your Lara-Croft Lemminas seem to be missing the Stoner sprites. At least the low-res sprites don't have them. I copied them over from the regular Lemminas.
Ah, sorry about that. I've updated the zip. In fact, here it is again for easy access, with the fix included.