Quote from: WillLem on November 03, 2019, 03:55:10 PM

Does this mean invisible objects no longer supported by the Editor?

Is that even a thing in SuperLemmini?  There's certainly no invisible anything in the original Lemmings games.  Sure, some exits and traps are buried inside terrain or camouflaged into surrounding terrain, but nothing is literally invisible.  And heck, by Lemmings 2 onwards you don't even see buried stuff anymore IIRC.

Why start a thing that was never part of any of the Lemmings games?  Some people here don't even like the buried traps much, introducing actually invisible stuff into your packs would most likely just set a precedence for them to avoid playing your levels.

It is possible in SuperLemmini. I have made a level with an invisible bridge called Leap of faith. The idea is that the player runs out of builders before getting to this part of the level, but (hopefully) discovers that they are able to walk across anyway!

I would consider that a fair, if somewhat cheesy, use of invisible elements. It's obviously done as a nod to Indiana Jones and is not intended to troll the player, nor does it cause them to unnecessarily die. In fact - it's a help!

I do have another level which is made entirely of invisible elements, but that's the idea of the level and - again - it's done in a very obvious way, not intended to mislead the player at all. It's really a one-off gimmick level, and is done as such. If I was using invisible elements in almost every level without making a thing of it (for example, calling the pack "Invisible Lemmings") then I could understand people being put off.

The feeling here generally seems to be that invisible elements are not a good idea though, but I would disagree that if such things weren't included in the original game then perhaps they shouldn't be included now. The original games themselves (including the Oh No! Levels) featured plenty of amusing one-off gimmick levels here and there; Introducing SUPERLEMMING, Lost something? and Flow control spring readily to mind - all examples of ideas being used once for the sake of variety and inclusion, but generally not being applied to the rest of the game. Plus, NeoLemmix seems to be resplendent with new features (buttons, splitters, pickups, more than double the amount of original skills, the ability to assign Lemmings to a particular exit, etc) so why would the occasional well-used invisible element be such an issue?

It's a good debate, but for now (since I'm new and everything!) I'll stick to more traditional level designs and redo these two levels without invisible elements. After all, I do want people playing my packs!

EDIT - I've attached the Leap of faith level in .ini format. If you have a copy of Lemmini/SuperLemmini handy, you'll see that the invisible elements work and hopefully you'll agree that they're intended to enhance the level and not troll the player. It's made very obvious that the intention is to be a bit silly and gimmicky for the sake of fun, and the level is a fairly easy solve anyway!

Modern versions of NeoLemmix have no inherent support for invisible objects, and for good reason - invisible objects rarely serve any purpose other than being deliberately misleading to the player, which is considered a huge no-no in level design.

On top of this, it's pretty futile anyway - anyone playing NeoLemmix can just click into Clear Physics Mode, and instantly find out what and where any invisible / hidden-behind-terrain objects are. So if the intent is to mislead the player, not only is this considered bad level design, but it doesn't work anyway - as soon as the player suspects something is up (which will be right away if eg. they can't see a visible, un-hidden exit anyway), they activate Clear Physics Mode and know exactly what you've done.

The levels are intended as invisible-element levels, and they follow on from one another in the pack. There is no intention to mislead or troll, the invisible elements are part of the puzzle and this is made very obvious.

That said, I'll PM you the levels as .ini (as the invisibility currently only works in SuperLemmini anyway) and if you'd be happy to play through them and offer some feedback on whether or not they're worth including in my pack, that would be great. If you really think it's not worth it or if you think they'd be responded to negatively, I'll consider redesigning.

I really do like what I've done though, these are cool levels!

I used much the same thing to get around the removal of invisible objects, when I had a level that needed them for a special effect

Does this mean invisible objects no longer supported by the Editor? Is there any way to include a level that involves invisible objects into a newly created level pack?

If not, that's 2 of my levels up the creek...

Hi all,

When specifying music for a level in the new Editor, it comes up with a list of all the orig, oh_no and xmas music. This is great, but... what if you want to specify your own music. How do you make it appear in this list? Does it have to be in a particular format?

Thanks in advance,

-WillLem

Things I've tried:

1 Adding music to "music" folder in main NeoLemmix folder and then re-opening editor. Doesn't appear in drop-down list
2 Using PackToolKit to import music. Works, but there doesn't seem to be a way to specify which track goes with with level
3 Creating a "music.nxlv" file. Again, you can compile the music and specify the order here, but no way to assign each track to a specific level
3 Dragging and dropping the music file into the editor... thought it was worth a try!

See this post for full wish list.

---

Hi Tsyu,

I know I've already mentioned these in reply to a PM, but I thought it best to also post a topic on the main board as per forum etiquette.

Here's what I think would make SuperLemmini brill:

Backwards framestepping. A great feature which saves a lot of time replaying a level from the start each time you make a mistake.

User hotkeys/mouse button configuration. This would be a very welcome feature if possible.

A levelpack creator, right there in the levels menu. Since importing external levels is already possible, it would be even better if there were a way of compiling levels into a pack, complete with difficulty rankings, music selection, and other stuff generally associated with making a simple level pack. The current method for compiling levelpacks is way too difficult and frustrating if you don't know what you're doing (which I really don't!). The PackToolKit for NeoLemmix is kind of what I'm imagining, but integrated into the main GUI (I've attached a picture of what I mean - the creator itself could be a separate mini-application, but launched from within the level selector).

Compatibility with the latest NeoLemmix Editor, or - a SuperLemmini level editor capable of saving levels as .ini, .lvl and .nxlv. This might be a whole other project... I'm currently taking beginner lessons in Java so I might be able to get on this myself before too long. Maybe.

A "SuperLemmini" title graphic on the main menu screen, to distinguish it from the original Lemmini. I'd be more than happy to design one for you if you like.

That's it for now! Great to see you on the forum!

Best regards,

-WillLem

For a normal Lemmini/SuperLemmini level pack, the levels do need to be in INI format, not LVL. (Perhaps I can change that...) You also need to have a proper levelpack.ini in the same folder. If you want to see what it should look like, open root.lzp in any zip viewer, open the levels folder, then any subfolder. You should see a levelpack.ini there.

(And yes, I really do need to document this stuff. I hope to do that with the next release.)

Thanks, Tsyu I already did this, and I had a go at making a levelpack.ini file. It crashed SuperLemmini

I'm the kinda guy that needs a nice user interface with buttons and menus and stuff. At least, I have been up until now. I'm currently seriously considering learning a developing language so I can go the extra step and understand what's behind all the magic.

Great to hear from you, anyways

The menu isn't a single graphic, but rather is made up of several graphics - some of which, individual packs have custom graphics for. It would be quite messy to replace it, so there would need to be a lot of support for this, not just "one person would like it changed". (By comparison, the in-game higher-resolution is likely to see wider support, and while it might be tricky code-wise, it shouldn't break any existing content.)

One thing we could consider for the "squished main menu graphics" issue is to actually modify the graphics parts to compress them in the horizontal direction, to get them back to the intended aspect ratio, at least for the default non-customized graphics.  So we still leave all the parts at the exact same positions as before, but narrower (with the now-unoccupied areas of graphics be left transparent).  Existing customizations would be left unaffected this way (and would look exactly the way it is today) although they'd probably look squished now by comparison to the defaults, but level authors could potentially update the graphics to account for this.  Alternatively but still along same lines of thought, we could also experiment with automatically always applying the graphics transformations this way as a user option, it might work reasonably well even on customized graphics.

Every level in the game has a specified background, as every level has a main tileset theme that specifies it and this way it is ensured that the background color matches at least reasonably well with the terrain+objects so nothing becomes invisible.

It's worth pointing out that all of this is fully customisable on your own copy.

orig_crystal contains a text file called "theme" with exactly the following text:

Quote

LEMMINGS default

$COLORS
  MASK xF0F0F0
  MINIMAP xF0F0F0
  BACKGROUND x080810
  ONE_WAYS xF02020
  PICKUP_BORDER x4040E0
  PICKUP_INSIDE xF0F0F0
$END

To get that dark blue background on other styles, just copy the "background" line from this theme into another style's theme.

Thanks for this, guys. Your comments have helped me realised that, in fact, it's ridiculously easy to customise a lot of these things by playing around with the graphics and "theme" files in the styles folders.

By modifying the logo, background and menu items I was able to create the following (see attached "NLmenuWillLem). The Lemmings logo is smaller horizontally but now in the correct aspect. The menu items now appear slightly further away from each other, but if the alloted "size" for each could be increased by a few pixels each way, this could be easily remedied. Also note how I got around the need to keep the rank graphic card the same size - there are 2 Lemmings sharing this duty! I also sorted out the scroller text Lemmings so they're less stretched and adapted some of the colours to suit my own preferences, but this is a minor point.

Further to this, by changing the background colour in all of the default themes to 000030, I was able to get the dark blue colour I generally prefer (thanks again Proxima - ridiculously easy! - see attached "NLfun24WillLem). Also note the customised skills panel - this is an indication of what I'll be aiming for in the hi-res version. If you like it, let me know and I'll carry on creating the 2x res versions of this.

To be fair, the more I learn about NeoLemmix the more I realise how capable an engine it is. Keep up the great work!

Finally, I managed to get the menu_font to look like the Amiga text simply by doubling the vertical size (see attached menu_font2). However, it then only displayed half of each letter (of course!) I wonder whether the display aspect for font could be increased to 32 pixels height?

By the way, Namida - I'm playing through the Lemmings Plus packs at the mo - very nice work! I'll let you know how I get on

All best,

-WillLem

P.S.

Quote

(Aside: Does anyone happen to have the code for SuperLemmini btw?)

There's a link to the source code right below the main download link, in the main SuperLemmini release topic: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=1793.0

Can't believe I missed this! Thanks!