[Player/Editor][SUG] Sprite mixing / Assign sprites to objects, not level themes

[Strato Incendus]

It has come up in a couple of posts recently, most of them linked to WillLem introducing the Lemmina sprites (=female lemmings).

That begs the question: Do we really want to keep male and female lemmings separate all the time? Can we really be that cruel to them?

Also, a more "historical" / "traditional" application:

In Lemmings Revolution, it is commonplace for regular lemmings, water lemmings, and acid lemmings to appear on the same level. Those are the ones with separate balloons (=exits) per "tribe", or, alternatively, with a red balloon that accepts all types of lemmings.

Since Arty has already made Water Lemmings for NeoLemmix a while ago, it would be nice to have the option of combining lemmings of different sprites in one and the same level.

You could even create a "convergence" level where all the tribes from Lemmings 2: The Tribes come together to finally board the ship, for which they have been collecting the talisman pieces all along.

I know that currently, the sprite type is tied to the Theme selected for a given level.

Wouldn't it technically be possible to tie the sprite type to objects in a level, specifically hatches and exits, instead?

This would allow for several things:
- sprite mixing on a level
- exits that only accept lemmings of one sprite type (like in Lemmings Revolution)
- if lemmings of different sprites should come out of the same hatch, simply use overlapping hatches; you could also have overlapping exits the same way
- usually though, whenever you just want a standard, generic exit that accepts all kinds of lemmings, you would simply not specify a sprite type (meaning: exits should have the option "all", because "default" would mean they only accept default lemmings, i.e. blue-clothed, green-haired ones, and their variations)

Finally, the option already exists in Lix, and technically existed in original Lemmings as well, because Multiplayer levels don't work without different sprites per player.

You could even argue that NeoLemmix already has the basic capacities for sprite mixing in form of Neutral lemmings - which look different, can also be saved, but are treated as if they belonged to a different player in a Multiplayer game (=you can't assign skills to them). And as you know, whether lemmings are "regular", "zombie", or "neutral" is determined on a hatch-per-hatch basis, not on a level-by-level basis.

Wouldn't it be possible to add a drop-down menu to those object preferences (on the same page where you can also select pre-assigned skills for a hatch), so that you could select the Theme of any given graphic set / style there?

By extending that logic, just like with the Lemmings Revolution balloons, you could also create exits that only accept regular lemmings vs. exits that only accept neutrals... might also lead to some interesting puzzles...

In order not to cause a massive need for level conversion in the process, the option of selecting the sprites for the entire level by picking the theme in the level preferences should still remain. The default theme of a given level would then only be overwritten specifically for hatches and/or exits for which the level creator manually selects a different theme.

[namida]

It would be a lot of effort to allow multiple different recolors of the same spriteset on a level. As you mention, there is some precedent already in neutral / zombie lemmings - although it should be noted, these are just recolored in the same kind of way that athletes are, they're not new sprites (you can see this for yourself if you examine any spriteset's scheme.nxmi file).

It would be even more to have multiple spritesets running around at the same time. There's nothing whatsoever that would form the start of support for this; it would need to be fully implemented as a new feature.

And unfortunately, at this stage of wanting to get things wrapped up, this is not a feature I'm willing to put in the work for. I don't disagree that it would be an interesting feature, but yeah - too much effort at this stage, sorry.