[Suggestion] Pre-level images

[Proxima]

This is inspired by the currently ongoing revamp of the NeoLemmix Introduction Pack, but is something that pack creators might find useful in general.

Allow creators to pair levels with image files, which get displayed where the pre-level text normally would be. (The image would take up less than the full screen, so as to leave a border of the preview screen's dirt texture.)

For the intro pack in particular, this would allow us to show the new feature the level is teaching, avoiding the situation where the new player can't work out which object is, for example, the unlock button. Anything we want to say about the UI, such as the number that indicates how many lemmings remain in the hatch, could be shown much more clearly with a partial screenshot and an arrow pointing to the feature.

Also, the Lemmings font (don't know if it has a name) is nice and comfortable for level preview screens, where the amount of text is limited to the level name and single words, but dreadful when trying to read whole paragraphs. We'd be putting new players off before they've even had a chance to start the first level. The ability to make our own pre-level images (which can contain text) would allow the player to read about the game mechanics much more comfortably, and when necessary, we could fit a lot more text on one screen than we can now.

[Nepster]

I can see where you are coming from, but at the moment this seems to be a rather low-priority suggestion to me. Especially as adding pure text is a lot easier to code than adding images: For example you can simply add text to the level file, but for images you would have to add the image file path, look whether (and where) this image exists, load it from another file, display it at the correct user-specified position, ...

The same is true for the lemmings font: Using the purple lemmings font is a lot more convenient to code than anything else, because the functions for this already exist in the code. The easiest way to fix this, would be to replace the purple font entirely and everywhere with better readable characters. If someone has suggestions for that, please post your proposed font here (but please use the same size for the letters as does the purple font).

[namida]

A duplicate of this suggestion came up: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4461.0

The other topic has now been closed, but before I realised it was a duplicate I ran a poll in there - which didn't show much interest in such a feature.

[Proxima]

Not exactly a duplicate -- if you think of the letters as terrain pieces in a style, my suggestion is "be able to add any image as another terrain piece" while the other is "be able to add a background image".

However, now that development has progressed on the intro pack and it's clear that we are able to do most of what needs doing with text alone, the original use case that prompted my suggestion is no longer relevant.