NeoLemmix (Player: V1.26n-C | Editor: V1.26n-B)

[Wafflem]

Great job with converting the Orig levels, especially the skillsets of the two levels. Although it does defeat the purpose of Tricky 17.

Two more bugs in the NeoLemmix Editor:
1. The editor refuses to load levels that are at a release rate of 0.
2. Sometimes, when I exit the editor, it gives me an error: "memory leak: 88" (not sure if that's the right number). This error also happens in EricLang's version.

[namida]

1. Probably because levels aren't meant to have a release rate outside the range of 1 to 99? But since there are levels out there that have done so anyway, I'll make sure to fix that.

2. I've never seen this; any ideas on exactly what causes it? (eg: does it happen after performing a certain operation before exiting? does it happen when a certain level is in the editor? etc)



I'd say the big difference between Fun 6 and Tricky 17 is that Fun 6 gives you a few extras to spare; whereas Tricky 17 you must place the second one correctly (I'd say it's fairly hard to muck up the first one, unless you're doing so on purpose ) or restart the level (or revert to an earlier save state). However, my logic here was removing the duplication of training levels involving blockers, especially since their only purpose in this level is to position the bombers which is no longer nessecary under NeoLemmix. Fun 18 on the other hand keeps them, because if you mess up and bomb into a fire pit (not that that's likely to happen with the instant bombers), you may be able to use the blockers to save yourself - and that is what differentiates it from Taxing 19; though obviously, there's only so much that can be done when these levels were originally designed with timed bombers in mind. Taxing 27 keeps them similarly because they have uses there outside of timing the bombers. This is also true of Mayhem 26, but the level is possible without them, and becomes much more suited to its position that way - and while not the sole use, I think it's fair to say timing the bombers was the main use of them here.

It's similar logic to how I removed the blockers in Mild 22 and Medi 17, but not Medi 5, in LPDOS.

[Minim]

Hey, I noticed that you created left-facing levels! (You did forget Mayhem 2 however, but that can be easily fixed in the next update) These will certainly make levels such as Taxing 11 and Taxing 13 a lot less intimidating. As for 2P mode, you forgot to change the screen start for 10, but that can also be fixed easily.

[namida]

For some reason, making the entrance left-facing never even crossed my mind for Mayhem 2. I probably should do that.

Aside from those, one other thing I noticed is that there's three pixels on Mayhem 18 that aren't steel but should be (in the steel block across the water from the bottom-right entrance). You can easily see this if you turn debugsteel on.

[namida]

Problems I'm aware of in V1.12n:

> If a climber climbs a wall that's exactly 7 pixels high, he ends up one pixel too high and thus becomes a faller for one frame before walking as normal.
> Certain situations that would previously have caused the Rough 5 bug now result in the basher stopping but *not* turning around. (Trying to bash very close to steel but underneath it, where there *is* non-steel terrain below it, is one way to trigger this.) I don't know exactly what approach I want to use here, but the current result just feels weird. Adapted behavior: If all solid pixels in the normal check area are steel (or wrong oneways), it also checks the row of pixels one below the normal two and acts based on that - if these are also unbreakables, the steel check is triggered, if they are empty space, the lemming becomes a walker. This fix is much tidier.
> If you instant RR99 / RRmin while paused then further change the release rate before unpausing, it reverts back to min/max as soon as you unpause.

I'll release an update soon to fix these, as well as the couple of minor issues identified in the Orig conversion.

[namida]

Alright, V1.13n is up!

NeoLemmix V1.13n changelog
*  Fixed a bug introduced in V1.12n which caused climbers to be positioned
   one pixel too high after climbing a 7-pixel wall.
*  Fixed some weird behaviour caused by the "Rough 5" bug fix when bashing
   through non-steel terrain with steel right above it.
*  Fixed some errors with applying the "Rough 5" bug fix to one-way walls,
   including a complete lack of acknowledging one-way downs.
*  Fixed a bug with the instant min/max release rate while paused.
*  Fixed a few levels in the Orig conversion, namely Mayhem 2, Mayhem 18,
   and 2P 10.
*  As the LPIII cheat code has now been revealed, cheat codes can now be
   enabled in the INI file in LPIII.
** Players can now have up to 15 difficulty ranks instead of only 5.
** Fixed a few levels in the Orig conversion, namely the VGASPEC ones.
** Fixed the versions of the DOS and LPII styles in NeoCustLemmix.
** Added the 2P levels to OhNo.
** Added the PSP levels and the SNES version Tricky 21 to Extra.

Features marked with ** instead of * were added in a later update, which was only applied to the players that are actually affected by the change.

You can get the players here, except for the LPIII one which can be found in the LPIII topic.

[namida]

I've added support for >5 difficulty ranks; a NeoLemmix player can now support up to 15 ranks. I decided to set the limit there due to a) I doubt there'll ever be a need for more than that, and b) when setting the destination secret level on a trigger, you can't set a rank higher than 15 (actually currently you can't set higher than 7, but it can be easily expanded to allow up to 15 - anything more would require reworking how it stores the info).

I've also (despite that the appropriate version of NeoLemmix is not yet released) updated my MAIN.DAT tool to support this.

[namida]

Updated the Extra player based on this fix (still otherwise V1.13n), it's in the same folder. Going to do the same with OhNo to add the 2P levels. Note that I didn't yet update the version in the AllNeoLemmixPlayers zip due to the pending ONML update; so if you want this updated version, be sure to grab the individual download for Extra.

Changes:
> Added an extra rank, "PSP". Thanks to Luis for these levels.
> Added an extra level to "Other", "Ohayo Lemming San". Thanks to DynaLem for remaking it.
> Fixed the ordering of budget amiga Taxing 15 and bookclub amiga Taxing 20 in the "Other" rank.


EDIT: Okay, reuploaded the all players ZIP with fixed versions of (individual downloads are also fixed of course):

> Extra: See above.
> OhNo: Adds the 2P levels.
> Orig: No longer has hardcoded music for the VGASPEC levels, instead it uses the NeoLemmix feature of selecting music (it should've done this before but I forgot xD)
> Cust: Uses the fixed versions of the upgraded styles that I was going to wait for V1.14n to include (though they're avialable as a seperate download)

[namida]

So going back to what I said about having "something else" I'm working on before I do the LPII conversion. I have the three easier-to-do styles out of the way, but the Tree and Desert ones might take some time...

The Psychedelic and Metal ones were completely touched up by hand, while some parts of the Purple one were scripted. I also haven't done the objects in the purple style yet, except for the trap. Pixel-perfect accuracy to the originals is being maintained in terms of what is or isn't a solid pixel, so the update is purely graphical.

I don't expect the final result to look quite up to LPIII standard (though I must say, the Metal style comes very close), but a bit of improvement never hurt.

[Wafflem]

I was sure you were going to do that for LPII, considering how you showed a preview of updated graphics for Nice 2 before.

Will you also change the exits of the Tree, Desert and Metal styles to completely new exit designs? Will you also update the graphics for the traditional styles?

Another NeoLemmix suggestion, based on what you've done with the trapdoors in the 2P levels: one trapdoor can have both right-facing and left-facing lemmings, instead of overlapping two trapdoors.

Another NeoLemEdit suggestion for later: Add a prompt on whether you want to overwrite a file or not, since this doesn't happen in the original version.

[mobius]

I apologize if this has been asked and covered before but I don't have time to keep up with the forum.

Do you have the individual graphics files of all of your new styles? If you can upload them, I'd like them as I'd like to use them for Lemmini. [Lemmini requires GIFs but I can convert most common file types to GIF]
You can send me the objects as well but don't anyone look at me to get those working in Lemmini as it's quite a bit more difficult (well maybe I Don't actually know much about it)
I will give you credit for any styles of yours that I use if I do use them.

[namida]

I was sure you were going to do that for LPII, considering how you showed a preview of updated graphics for Nice 2 before.

Will you also change the exits of the Tree, Desert and Metal styles to completely new exit designs? Will you also update the graphics for the traditional styles?

Another NeoLemmix suggestion, based on what you've done with the trapdoors in the 2P levels: one trapdoor can have both right-facing and left-facing lemmings, instead of overlapping two trapdoors.

Another NeoLemEdit suggestion for later: Add a prompt on whether you want to overwrite a file or not, since this doesn't happen in the original version.

I actually had no plans to do that originally; I only used the "updated" graphic to test the 32-color code without having to make a whole new style. However, once I got into creating new object types, I felt I may as well work on a new style, and made sure it was of decent quality so that I could use it with LPIII rather than it serving no real purpose in the end.

I don't plan to make entirely new exits for those styles, but I did touch the metal one up a little bit. And I don't plan to update the traditional styles, though if anyone else does so, I'd be more than happy to include them provided that, as how I'm doing with the LPII ones, the shape of the terrain pieces remains pixel-perfect to the originals.

The two-way entrance isn't a bad idea, but the question is where to squeeze it into the object data - that's become *very* packed by this point! There are only three bits that remain unused IIRC out of the entire 8 bytes. It is simple enough to just overlap it with another entrance that's left-facing.

I don't plan on making further updates to NeoLemEdit since the interest is more in the NeoLemmix editor; that's also easier to work with due to similarity in code between it and the player. However, anyone is welcome to make whatever changes they want to the source code which has been released. Although I'm pretty sure it *does* give a prompt for overwriting files, and the original LemEdit definitely does... do you perhaps mean the NeoLemmix Editor? I'm not sure if that one does.

I apologize if this has been asked and covered before but I don't have time to keep up with the forum.

Do you have the individual graphics files of all of your new styles? If you can upload them, I'd like them as I'd like to use them for Lemmini. [Lemmini requires GIFs but I can convert most common file types to GIF]
You can send me the objects as well but don't anyone look at me to get those working in Lemmini as it's quite a bit more difficult (well maybe I Don't actually know much about it)
I will give you credit for any styles of yours that I use if I do use them.

I'm not at home at the moment, but yes I do have them. They're in BMP format; you may need to manually handle the transparency because the way LemSet works is simply "any color not in the palette is treated as transparent" - in some cases I've used more than one transparent color in an image, to help with alignment or things like that.

[Wafflem]

I don't plan on making further updates to NeoLemEdit since the interest is more in the NeoLemmix editor; that's also easier to work with due to similarity in code between it and the player. However, anyone is welcome to make whatever changes they want to the source code which has been released. Although I'm pretty sure it *does* give a prompt for overwriting files, and the original LemEdit definitely does... do you perhaps mean the NeoLemmix Editor? I'm not sure if that one does.

I meant the NeoLemmix Editor, which doesn't prompt whether you want to overwrite files or not.

[namida]

I'll get onto doing some upgrades/updates with the editor this weekend, hopefully.

Anyway I'm wondering (and I put a poll up) - do you think the maximum score should be increased? Case in point - Dodgy 6 of LPIII, where it is impossible to get any score other than 100, as the amount of skills needed to pass the level even without other considerations reduce the score to almost nothing. Fierce 5 is also very hard, though not impossible, to get a score that isn't 100.

The only change would be the maximum value - so converting old scores to the new system would just be a matter of adding the difference. (EG: If the max is increased by 30,000, old scores can be converted by simply adding 30,000 to them.)

[namida]

Okay so, in preparation for some editor work, want to make sure I've compiled all the bugfixes or major missing features, and updates.

If I've missed a bugfix on this list, please point it out. However, if I've missed a suggestion, it can wait, unless I've specifically said "I'll do it in the next update." Especially if you've mentioned it to me by PM rather than this topic, I might miss it - I generally don't save my PMs for very long, nor is it too easy to go through them to find those specifically relating to a certain matter (it took me ages to dig up the old PM where DynaLem had sent me the remake of SNES Tricky 21, for example (only for me to then find I had already saved a copy of it to my working folder xD)), so this topic is a more reliable place to put suggestions / bugfix requests / etc. I also don't guarantee everything on here will make it in; it's just a list for me to use as a reference, but I will try to do as much as possible

• Changing graphic sets within the editor. Extended the Change Style menu (when you click that "..." button in the Level Properties window) to also allow changing the graphic set.
  
• Fix the clearing of default style for DATs when the editor is closed. Can't find how to completely *fix* it, so I made it default to NeoCustLemmix whatever the first style in the INI file is, which by default is NeoCustLemmix, rather than blank.
  
• Allow loading levels with a release rate of 0. Changed the minimum release rate to 0 instead of 1.
  
• Confirm overwrite popup box when saving over a file that already exists There doesn't appear to be any easy way to use the proper Windows confirm overwrite box, but it is possible (and I have done so) to make a custom one and use that.