@Gronkling: Well, Old Formats also credits Electric, Ancient, and Digital to you. Especially the Ancient tileset appears in pretty much all of my city levels. So whoever made that one contributed hugely to the development of LWT!
Well, Wafflem does lots of conversions of existing styles. So if you want to have your style converted, perhaps say pretty pretty please to him. 
I think I'll try that myself first, the graphic set conversion tool is available, after all, and I didn't include anything outlandish in it. I just want to be certain that I won't change anything about the Instruments tileset anymore before I upload it for either format.
Well, in my view the new-formats is already better than the old-formats - if not for the amount of in-game object types, then at least regarding UX-improvements
Did I miss any in-game objects?
Because apart from custom Lemming sprites and a couple of new graphic sets, I don't see any new object types (as counting exits would be) in New Formats yet.
With regard to UX-improvements, I have no idea what that is...
Customisable water pond width, which has been raised as a new feature by some, has never been an issue for me either - if I really need a small gap, I bury the remaining pixels in the adjacent terrain or steel.
So I really wonder what else I have to do, to convince you that the new-formats is pretty stable physics-wise
Well, since no-one is going to change anything about Old Formats ever again, that's the most stable and consistent thing ever now, isn't it?
I'm willing to discard that "safe ground" once New Formats actually has
new ground to offer. Merely the fact that it's "stable, too" doesn't cut it if there isn't any specific upside to New Formats. Except that it's trendy now, and there is somewhat of a peer pressure to use it.
And I do use the New Formats player of course, for packs which were released exclusively for it. But not for my own, and if it's just for that new level preview screen that I hate so much...
With regards to the editor - even though the Avira issue was easily fixed - have you seen Arty's level creation video? I wasn't even aware that this feature wasn't present in New Formats yet, but like Arty, I really made use of that "select a piece --> press F9 --> change it for a piece from the same tileset" feature a lot, especially in Lemmings World Tour, since a lot of the levels feature heavy tileset mixing.
- New additional slower RRs at the designers's disposal (as the old range is now 50-99).
Interesting corner-case - I never felt the need for that before, since it's not possible in original Lemmings either to lower the release rate below the starting one. In cases where I really need the whole range, I just set the release rate to 1 and let the player figure out when to raise or lower it. It thereby becomes part of the puzzle, rather than the starting release rate giving away a hint already. Of course, you could imagine levels where you want a high release rate in the beginning and a lower one later on, but no such design has popped up in my head yet. It's certainly a good feature to have, but not critical for me.
- No NL restarts upon switching packs anymore, with pack themed menus still being there.
Yeah, that's actually a
downside for me. I prefer the level selection window to be part of the game itself, rather than a standard Windows window opening up - not only when I actually want to switch packs, but simply for selecting a level. It reminds me more of when I was playing WinLems back in the day, which was overall much... "cheaper", for lack of a better word.
The level preview screen was changed for the same, purely mechanical reasons. But the aesthetics suffered from it, in my view, and given that I don't really care about talismans, even though I included some for the first time in LWT, I don't really see why optional talisman info on a couple of levels necessitated that huge waste of space on all other level preview screens.
- New format editor easier to handle + new tools for faster level creation (example: tile grid).
That's highly subjective and dependent on what you're used to, isn't it?
For example, I find it very irritating that, in case of copying an existing tile, it is inserted into the level a couple of pixels-off, rather than exactly on the copied piece. Of course, the displacement makes it easier to spot that it's a new tile, but especially when creating "blocky" structures, I now have to adjust for that misplacement every time, rather than just quickly hitting "Strg + C, Strg + V" a couple of times.
And yeah, there's that tile replacement feature via F9 I mentioned above
.
- More tilesets compared to the old format.
Well, that's mainly just a result of the collective having moved towards New Formats, thereby creating their graphic sets exclusively for it
. Since there is forward compatibility from Old Formats to New (except for the culled objects), but not the other way around, I'd always create any given level or graphic set in Old Formats first, with the option of converting it to New Formats, than barring myself from that option from the getgo.
I also write all my music in the notation software Guitar Pro 5 for that same reason, even though I also own version 6 and 7.
The latter I only use when I specifically need certain features only they have to offer (like writing stuff with 8-stringed guitars or similar).
Use the new RRs or the new tilesets as an example and you have your new format replacements.
If I really wanted to force that, I'd simply use my custom Egyptian Lemmings
. But just like radiation and slowfreeze wouldn't be reason for you to keep using Old Formats, mere new aesthetics as provided by new graphic sets or Lemmings sprites don't suffice for me to do the same - even if I created some of those Lemmings sprites myself
, I don't feel any particular urge to use them yet.
Funnily enough, the whole idea to Lemmings World Tour came up in context of New Formats; in fact, it was supposed to be created specifically for New Formats: The core concept of song-based levels was inspired by the very first two level ideas I had: "Taking orders from Van Halen" (featuring the Jumper) and "Keep Holding On" (featuring the Shimmier). These are also two of the levels which are going to eventually appear in the New Formats version of LWT: Probably, these Jumper- and Shimmier-introductory levels are going to replace the current radiation- and slowfreeze-introduction levels
- 1 for 1.
But these aren't the only levels which are going to be affected - for example, the removal of fake objects makes the "Irish Rover" level pretty pointless, because the Highland hatches I put in the haul as barrels are going to disappear. I also used the candles on various exits for diverse artistic purposes, like Arty. So while the merging with the exit is generally convenient, and I would have welcomed it for a pack like "Pit Lems", simply because it means less work, for a pack with a more artistic approach, it's better to have more smaller pieces which can be moved independently from each other
.
On a final note: I just tried opening the last level of "Lemmings World Tour" in New Formats, given that it is a very big level which, despite featuring only two tilesets, sometimes leads to slow performance of the NeoLemmix player (other times, it runs smoothly). I wanted to check whether maybe New Formats would run more smoothly in general. Some people had also mentioned that NeoLemmix crashing due to too many different graphic sets being used in succession would be a less frequent phenomenon. This is something LWT is of course very susceptible to, so I can't put too many "city levels" with heavy graphic set mixing back-to-back (at least not without the player potentially having to restart). So that would make a convincing case for New Formats, of course.
The result: New Formats can't even open the level - it cuts it in half, because it exceeds the maximum width of 2400 pixels.
Since that level is one of my favourite ones, the fact that a New Formats version of LWT would have to exclude this grand finale really doesn't raise my motivation of converting the pack any time soon
.
