Is it still possible to combine arrows of different colours in one and the same level, anyway? This formerly could be done by simply taking one-way arrows from a different tileset, because every tileset had separate ones. But now, they usually switch to whatever is the "theme" colour of the tileset, don't they? Meaning you can of course still use differently-shaped arrows by taking them from various tilesets, but whenever you use arrows from any tileset that refers to the default ones, they all switch to the same colour, don't they?
This falls well into "not worth the effort" territory. First, the editor would need a color picker - maybe not too difficult, I assume this is a common enough need that there's something open-source out there, or something already provided by the .NET runtimes. The editor already recolors one-way-arrows on the fly, so that part isn't too much of a problem - just have to make sure each one's recoloring to a different color. However, NL does not. It recolors the arrow graphics during loading, and then uses the recolored graphic during gameplay, rather than recoloring on the fly. (The same is true for pickup skills, as well as for style-based (but not state-based, which IS on-the-fly) recoloring of lemmings.) And this is the really tedious part - this would basically be an entire rewrite of how recoloring works on NL's side, and on top of this it would have a performance impact (though probably not
too severe - but especially with high-res mode, it's an "every bit counts" situation, as NL's rendering is CPU-based and already ends up quite CPU-intensive, especially on larger resolutions; ideally I'd like to do a rewrite in the future using MonoGame or something else that can do GPU-based rendering, but that's another
huge task and I almost feel, if I was going to go to that extent, my effort would be better spent on something original).
And that's without getting into the question of abuse potential. Sure, it's currently possible with workarounds, but the ways it'd be achieved are generally obscure enough that anyone who can figure it out without asking (and thus drawing attention to what they want to do, at which point the reason it's a bad idea gets explained), would already be familiar enough with NL culture in general to know they
shouldn't do it - or at least, shouldn't do it without a
very good special-case reason.
Two possible alternate forms which mitigate, but don't entirely solve, the above issues (and these two are mutually incompatible with each other):
- No outright "pick an arbitrary color", just "it'll use the color of the style selected at the time the object was placed". This averts the need for a color picker in the editor, and is somewhat of an obstacle (though not a huge one) to abuse of the feature, but the biggest problem (rendering on the NL side) is still a thing.
- Instead of setting it per-object, set it per-level. NL's "recolor once during load" setup could still work with this, though some minor tweaks to how it works would be needed. In general, this would be
much simpler to implement. However, abuse potential is still in (almost) full force with this approach.
At any rate, this is a different suggestion from tidying up the official ones in their default colors, so it should have a separate topic if you really think adding it is justified. As usual, you're welcome to create the topic (and I might change my mind if there's really strong support for it), but I don't expect this will actually happen.
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