Hi all, apologies I've been a bit quiet over the summer. Been spending time doing IRL stuff and haven't been at my laptop so much. I'm hoping I'll be able to get back into NLCE and SLX over the next couple of months and get caught up with everything.

Thanks to everyone who's been supportive of the projects so far, it means a lot.

Looking forward to getting back into my Lemmingology studies!

WL

It seems that the easiest and best solution to this is simply to add the erasers to the styles collection as "erasers". Then, like "default", they can be a standard set that is supplied along with NLCE.

The benefit of this is that anyone can add pieces to it as they wish, so it can be collaborative and as-needed.

Pieces would of course need to be agreed upon before they are added to the set. If existing erasers can reasonably be used to create the desired shape, there shouldn't be any need to add more and more pieces exponentially.

Thoughts?

Currently unsure what to do about this. This one feels like it might get into "too many options" territory; I agree with Simon that this is a design choice that should be solved program-side. We don't want users spending too much time in the options menu.

Then again, it would be easy enough to add the option, and I imagine that for most people it would be a set-and-forget kind of thing. Maybe a choice of 3 options, whether it be different colours or different brightness/opacity, would suffice for this one?

Input needed. As it stands, nothing will change.

Thanks GigaLem. I'm afk at the moment (on mobile) but I'll take a look at these at some point for sure.

Namida, what did you mean about generating these images automatically? Would this be instead of creating the style, or as a way of quickly adding new pieces to it? Or as something in the Editor that can create them on-the-fly?

Quote from: GigaLem on August 16, 2025, 11:11:37 PMI can picture something like this

Sounds like you have a clear idea of what's needed. Go ahead and create the set and we'll add it.

Agreed, by all means create an "erasers" set and we can add it to the styles collection.

Quote from: GigaLem on August 05, 2025, 09:06:09 AMThe idea of the erased piece toggle would be to show a silhouette of the piece in a contrasting color.

I'm sure that can be done, in a similar way to showing clear physics.

Good idea, I'll report back when I've made some progress with this.

Updated the OP.

Community Edition now has the updated Replay Manager, plus .nxrp file association (so, clicking a replay file opens the player, loads the level, and readies-up the replay for playback).

Other features to follow, should have an RC release ready by the end of August.

Good idea, I've added this to the list.

It might be that grouped pieces end up being toggleable via hotkey (in the same way that terrain, objects, triggers, deprecated pieces etc can currently have their visibility toggled).

Erased pieces is a slightly different problem; I'll have a think about this one and see if I can come up with anything.

Ideas/suggestions welcome in the meantime.

Granted, but the egg is thrown at you and hits you in the face, so you literally have egg on your face.

I wish I had more consistent aim in Fortnite Blitz Royale.

Quote from: GigaLem on August 02, 2025, 12:24:59 AMmy suggestion would be the freedom of changing the RGB value at will with the default being the fuchsia it is.
The other part of the suggest would be Trigger area opacity or brightness, choosing how much of it to be opaque

Right, but let's not lose sight of what the program is: it's a lemmings engine, not an image editor. We'd be better off keeping the options as simple as possible rather than making the user spend too much time in menus.

Quote from: Simon on August 01, 2025, 01:25:03 PM1. This is both for game and for editor, right?

Yes, I'll aim to implement the same option in both.

Quote from: Simon on August 01, 2025, 01:25:03 PM2. You'll push a design task to the user that we should instead solve for the user. At least reconsider the default then, too. Is the pink default still good for 95 % of the levels?

3. You'll inflict Schopenhauer's porcupines:

...

The first hunch is to combine both ideas: Fill the rectangle at 10 % or 20 % opacity, and draw an 80-%-opaque 1-pixel-thick rectangular outline.

OK. Perhaps we keep the rectangle pink and allow the opacity to be adustable instead of the colour? Keep the default as it is now, and allow 5% increments in both directions to make it more (or less) opaque depending on preference. Less opacity makes it darker, then.

I'm not in favour of the outline idea. Messy, more code, more maintenance.

I'm aware of this one, I'll aim to get it fixed in the next update.

AFAIK, Mac lemming sprites are double the resolution of NL hi-res sprites. So, assuming it's possible to directly rip the sprites from Mac Lemmings, they'd then need to be downscaled by 50% to be NL-compatible, which may produce undesirable results and would likely require some manual editing to get them to look good.

Alternatively, if you wish to simply edit the existing NL hi-res sprited to follow the Mac colour scheme and add the eye details, that could certainly be done. As an example, I've edited the right-facing Ascender sprite using the colour scheme in Jeremy's example:



This took me about 3 minutes in paint dot NET (some of that time was fine-tuning the colour scheme; once this is established, the other sprites could be done more quickly). To do the full set would probably take around 4-8 hours, depending on how quickly you work.

Rather than add the set as an option in the player, it would be best if you create a style (name it [yourname]_macintosh or something similar) and include the sprites in that style. People can then use the set as part of their levels, or replace the defaults if they wish to do so.

I've marked this topic as resolved. I'll leave it open in case anyone wishes to create a Mac sprite set and share it here.

I've now added some examples to the previous post to show why outline-only trigger areas could be problematic. Let's agree to continue to show trigger areas on a pixel-by-pixel basis and address the OP's concern regarding the colour of the trigger areas as they are currently shown.

I'm happy to look into allowing the user to enter a hex code (or perhaps add a simple colour-picker if it's possible in Delphi) to specify the colour of trigger areas. For simplicity, let's have them continue to all be the same colour (in CPM, hovering over the trigger area already shows which gadget is which; this feature provides sufficient clarify without the need to allow different colours for different gadgets, which could get messy. I realise that isn't what's being suggested, but I'm pre-empting it just in case!).

@namida - Is there a reason why the trigger areas are all that very specific shade of pink (#F000F0)? I've noticed that Lemmini uses a very similar shade (#FF00FF), and that DOS variants of Amiga colours follow the pattern indicated by these colours (so, for instance, #4422FF in Amiga would become #4020F0 in DOS, and vice versa). I wonder, then, if the choice of shade for trigger areas is simply what was used in the base game that each clone was based on (so, #F000F0 for Lemmix's DOS base and #FF00FF for Lemmini's WinLemm/Amiga base).

If that's indeed the case, then the trigger area colour could potentially be anything we wish.