Author Topic: Level Editors  (Read 9418 times)

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Lemming122

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Level Editors
« on: April 18, 2014, 05:52:39 PM »
Hi all!

Does anybody know if there has been a level editor released yet for Lemmings Revolution? Or maybe 3D Lemmings?
Thanks!

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #1 on: April 18, 2014, 07:53:44 PM »
Sorry, AFAIK neither has any level editors.  In fact for Lemmings Revolution no one has even figured out how exactly levels are stored and represented so there isn't even enough information at the moment to write an editor for it.  I think for 3D Lemmings at least we have that information (or some of it), but I don't know if we have anyone here who has experience programming 3D graphics.

Offline grams88

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #2 on: April 18, 2014, 09:09:23 PM »
I wonder if there might be a lemmings paintball one but by the sounds of it that might not be the case either.

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #3 on: April 18, 2014, 10:18:09 PM »
You may well be the first person here who has ever mentioned the idea of an editor for lemmings paintball. :XD: :-\

Offline DragonsLover

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #4 on: April 25, 2014, 11:11:41 PM »
There IS a level editor for Lemmings Paintball stored inside of the game itself, but nobody knows how to activate it. It seems to be activated using command lines, but their use are unknown and may cause the game to crash. By using a resource hacker program, we can clearly see the windows that are used to edit levels. I mentioned these over there.

Once someone figures out how to activate the level editor within the game, it will therefore be possible to edit our own Lemmings paintball levels.

Lee, author of his old Lemmings Paintball fan website, had started his own level editor, but the project seems to be abandoned.
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Offline ccexplore

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #5 on: April 25, 2014, 11:42:46 PM »
 :thumbsup: Interesting.  That might actually be up my alley to figure out, though I'll have to first start by actually installing and playing that game as I have never done that yet. :P

And of course as a disclaimer, it is quite possible for the resources to be left over in the game but the actual coding for the editor may not be (fully) there.

Offline namida

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #6 on: April 26, 2014, 03:44:52 AM »
Didn't Mike once mention that the editor for original lemmings may remain in the Amiga version of the game, too?
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline DragonsLover

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #7 on: April 29, 2014, 12:38:37 AM »
:thumbsup: Interesting.  That might actually be up my alley to figure out, though I'll have to first start by actually installing and playing that game as I have never done that yet. :P

And of course as a disclaimer, it is quite possible for the resources to be left over in the game but the actual coding for the editor may not be (fully) there.

If you could put your hands into that, that would be neat.
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Offline namida

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #8 on: April 29, 2014, 03:30:07 AM »
I'm still somewhat hopeful we'll see a L3D editor someday. I used to have millions of great ideas for 3D levels... :/
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline DragonsLover

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #9 on: April 30, 2014, 01:12:29 AM »
I think for these days, a 3D Lemmings clone in Minecraft would be much better. It would be easier to build levels and customize everything. With the Spectator mode Mojang have implemented, it would become handy to move around and take a look at the "levels"and assign skills. The only downside: you must have Minecraft, which isn't free.
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Offline ccexplore

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #10 on: May 06, 2014, 01:48:30 AM »
There IS a level editor for Lemmings Paintball stored inside of the game itself, but nobody knows how to activate it. It seems to be activated using command lines, but their use are unknown and may cause the game to crash.

I started a little bit over the weekend.  From what I can tell so far, you can pass in "/EDIT@" on the Command Prompt to make the game try to load a level stored in a file.  For example:

lemball.exe /EDIT@nofile.xyz

The game will launch looking normal, but when you click on the 1-player icon on the main screen, instead of loading Fun 1 it will try to load a level from file nofile.xyz in the current directory.  Of course that file doesn't exist and you end up with a rather funny error message which I'll leave it to discover for yourself. ;P  If you do have a bogus file named nofile.xyz placed in the correct location, then as expected the game will crash trying to load that bogus level file, when you click on the 1-player icon on the main screen.

This of course doesn't quite prove that there is a working editor in the game, but it clearly points to the next step:  figure out how levels are stored in PBAIMOG.VSR.  That should then hopefully allow for individual levels to be extracted from the VSR into standalone files, which then might be loadable and editable using the command line switch above.

====================

sidenote: the full list of command line options I can see in the EXE are as follows:
/NOMUSIC
/NOEFFECTS
/SNDDEBUG
/STATDEBUG
/MEMDEBUG
/NOANIM
/NOZOOM
/320
/TESTALLLEVELS
/?
/TESTSTARTSKILL@
/TESTSTARTLEVEL@
/EDIT@
/PLAY@
/GRAPHICS

I've only tested very few of them so try them at your own risk.  Some might not do anything observable.  For /TESTALLLEVELS it appears the game will proceed automatically to load each and every level on its own, one by one.  It is clearly a test mode and doesn't appear to allow you to intervene short of using Task Manager to kill the program.

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #11 on: May 06, 2014, 04:37:04 AM »
I made progress with regards to extracting individual level files from the VSR.  Attached is Fun 2 extracted from the demo version's VSR.

As far as I can tell, the level loads and plays successfully if you run lemball.exe in Command Prompt with option /PLAY@TEST.LVL

The level also loads successfully with /EDIT@TEST.LVL, however after clicking on "OK", the program eventually displays an error message and quits. :(

That could mean a number of things:
  - the code for the level editor is missing in the game EXE (despite the presence of the dialog resources), and so the attempt to go into editor mode ultimately fails and this is futile; or
  - additional data needs to be included in the level file in order to edit it; or
  - there may be different file formats between editable levels vs the release versions of levels found in the VSR

Bottom line:  more investigations needed, and potentially no editor in the game EXE.  The easy part is more or less over so don't hold your hopes up..... :-\

Offline Prob Lem

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #12 on: May 06, 2014, 03:35:31 PM »
Didn't Mike once mention that the editor for original lemmings may remain in the Amiga version of the game, too?
I wonder if that's how New Year Lemmings '92 (a hack of the Amiga demo, Xmas Lemmings '91, by a member of the group Fairlight) came to exist? To the best of my knowledge, those were the first custom levels ever made for the game.

Personally, I often find myself wishing there was a Lomax level-editor for the PSX version, since the chances of a new game for him are slim to none. :P

Offline grams88

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #13 on: May 06, 2014, 11:03:40 PM »
Thanks ccexplore for giving this a go.

Offline DragonsLover

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #14 on: May 10, 2014, 04:51:42 PM »
I made progress with regards to extracting individual level files from the VSR.  Attached is Fun 2 extracted from the demo version's VSR.

As far as I can tell, the level loads and plays successfully if you run lemball.exe in Command Prompt with option /PLAY@TEST.LVL

The level also loads successfully with /EDIT@TEST.LVL, however after clicking on "OK", the program eventually displays an error message and quits. :(

That could mean a number of things:
  - the code for the level editor is missing in the game EXE (despite the presence of the dialog resources), and so the attempt to go into editor mode ultimately fails and this is futile; or
  - additional data needs to be included in the level file in order to edit it; or
  - there may be different file formats between editable levels vs the release versions of levels found in the VSR

Bottom line:  more investigations needed, and potentially no editor in the game EXE.  The easy part is more or less over so don't hold your hopes up..... :-\

Yeah, that's exactly what I tried myself. It gives me a memory error.
I have all of the levels extracted if you're interested. Also, I have some kind of alternative files for LEMBALL.EXE and PBAIMOG.VSR. The executable contains extra commands to use (such as displaying the console) and the PBAIMOG.VSR file size is strangely smaller. How can I send the stuff to you?
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Offline ccexplore

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #15 on: May 10, 2014, 11:57:28 PM »
Try emailing them to my ccexplore at yahoo address.  You probably want to zip them up (especially the VSR) to reduce sizes, hopefully enough so that yahoo doesn't drop the attachments due to size.  No need to send me the extracted levels, just the EXE and VSR (and really probably just the EXE) suffices.

I already tried both the demo and non-demo versions of the game as downloaded from the web, and since even on your version you seem to be getting the exact same errors, I'm still not optimistic about it all. :-\   But I'll take a look anyway.

Offline DragonsLover

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #16 on: May 11, 2014, 07:52:31 PM »
Files sent.
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Offline DragonsLover

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #17 on: May 12, 2014, 08:29:31 AM »
I really think THIS is going to interest you. They even show the dialog boxes that I could also get myself through ResourceHacker.

The level editor was clearly inside, but as stated: "...the EXE only contains code to display one dialog: the About box. It seems that prior to release, the developers decided to simply render the level editor unusable rather than removing it completely."

They tell how to make the /EDIT@ command working by changing one byte in the executable to double the amount of memory available. I tried and it indeed works, but there's no edition possible.

Now the trick is to make these windows usable again and if you manage to get this to work... :thumbsup: Otherwise, what a shame. :(
I like dragons! They're the center of my life! I'll never forget them...

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Level Editors
« Reply #18 on: May 13, 2014, 02:31:03 AM »
Hmm, I wish you've found this earlier as it basically collaborates some findings I've had with what I've done so far.  That would've saved me quite some time and give more confidence in some of my unreported findings.

One thing I did not mention is the same conclusion noted on the website, that I too can only find code displaying the About box dialog.  Basically there are only a small set of functions from Windows that consume dialog box resources, and by doing a search to track all places where the code is calling those functions, I only found the one place that is hard-coded to the About box dialog resource.  The only reason I held back on reporting this is because theoretically there may be other more indirect ways that the Windows function call may happen that is not caught by the fairly simplistic searches I performed, however I do consider that unlikely, since there would be little reason for the editor code to be written to go through more roundabout ways to invoke the function compared to the expected normal way it did so with loading the About dialog (code for which I did find with my simple searches).

Also note that in the EXE has resource for the menu as well, but it contains no extra commands aside from the normal ones available.  Even a search for extra strings that may suggest extra menu commands added dynamically to the menu yields nothing so far.  This suggests there is no entry point from the menu to any of the dialogs, which is also consistent with finding no code whatsoever that seems to do anything with any of the dialog resources except About.  Basically unless they for some reason decide to re-code the editor user interface without making use of those dialog resources, the more logical conclusion is that the editor functionalities have been stripped out.  The final nail in the coffin is the observation that the error with the /EDIT@ is due to memory, but increasing the memory, while fixing the error abort, did not yield a working editor mode.

So sorry, I think all the information so far strongly suggests that the programming for editor functionality is probably removed in the game EXE, especially given that no snippets of code can be found by both me and that guy on that website, to load any of the dialog resources except About.  Since the resources go through a different compiler than the code, it is not unexpected that they may have set things up to strip out the code for the editor during compilation, but forgot to do so (or did not set it up correctly) to strip out the dialog resources.

If the code are indeed removed from EXE, then there is no easy way to "make these windows usable again" short of basically rewriting the editor yourself and then shoehorn it back into the EXE via hacking.  At that point you might as well just write your own separate editor program.  I will grant you that it is difficult to rule out 100% that the editor code is truly removed without going through a detailed and time-consuming disassembly of the game (outside of the quick tricks we've already tried), but with all the evidence thus far pointing more towards the possibility of no editor code left in the EXE, and the game being relatively unpopular, I don't feel motivated to do more involved investigations that seems likely to yield negative results anyway.