Background assignment during pack conversion

[Strato Incendus]

So, I've done my first conversion of Lemmings World Tour to New Formats, and now while going through the levels to check whether everything works, I notice that a lot of levels don't have the correct background assigned to them.

For some, this is obvious - because I used custom backgrounds for e.g. Sports or Medieval that may or may not have officially been ported to New Formats yet (I uploaded them in the thread for single additional pieces, but I guess the way to have a background officially added is sending it to Nepster?)

For others, however, the correct backgrounds are definitely available - for example, for the original tilesets (Fire, Crystal, Marble, Pillar) which were given non-black backgrounds

I noticed that for the Lemmings 2 tilesets, the converter does indeed pick the correct backgrounds.

Was there a decision during the inception of New Formats to have the default background for the Classic Lemmings tilesets be mono-black again?

Because the terrain-based backgrounds for Fire, Crystal, Marble, and Pillar are available in the editor - it would just be a mess to manually re-assign them all again (especially with 320 levels in total ). So I might just leave all these levels with a black background and have the New Formats version of LWT look more like Classic Lemmings again as a consequence.

[namida]

The official graphic sets gained the backgrounds after the move to new-formats. There may have been unofficial modifications with them in old-formats, but they were never officially part of those styles; the only background difference that was ever official in old-formats, was a slight tweak to the background color in the Crystal tileset.

However, it is known that the conversion tool doesn't always convert backgrounds correctly. We never looked that closely into the "why". But it might work properly, if you add the backgrounds to the translation tables yourself. Even if the conversion tool doesn't, NeoLemmix itself should - can you confirm, if you open one of these old formats levels (with a background entry in the translation table), using the current NeoLemmix editor, is the background preserved correctly? Let me know if so, and I'll see what we can do here.

[Proxima]

Here's the topic where these backgrounds were created.

namida has it right -- these were only ever unofficial, so backgroundless was always the "default". Probably the reason for the confusion is that in old formats, users who wanted to have these backgrounds would install mobius's adapted versions of the styles, and thereafter would have the backgrounds in every level using those styles, without having to do anything special on a per-level basis. In new formats, the designer can freely choose backgrounds for each level in the editor, and if they don't, the levels will have no background.

[Strato Incendus]

@namida: No, that doesn't work - that's what I've tried with the styles for which I re-wrote the translation tables, like e.g. grnk7_ancient. You can add the background to the translation table, but the editor doesn't actually find it when opening an Old Formats level.

I've looked at the New Formats Shadow tileset again to see why it works there - but that background isn't even listed as a background of its own. I guess with the L2 tilesets, it works because those backgrounds are all monochrome and stored somewhere else - the translation table doesn't actually need to point the converter to any background folder for Shadow, Medieval, Sports etcs., because that's not where they're being taken from.

Then again, these monochrome backgrounds, as they are just e.g. by the L2 tilesets, aren't stored in the "default" style folder either.

My guess is that, if we know where these are stored, we just need to put all the other backgrounds there and it should work as well.

Or does NeoLemmix create these monochrome backgrounds "on the spot", according to a fixed RGB value or similar, rather than using an actual image file?

[namida]

Or does NeoLemmix create these monochrome backgrounds "on the spot", according to a fixed RGB value or similar, rather than using an actual image file?

Those backgrounds are indeed created at runtime, if you can really call it "created". Basically - the background layer is initialized with a solid color before anything's drawn to it, and the theme.nxtm file defines what this color is. When there's no background image - or, I believe, a background image with transparent pixels - this color will be in the background.

If the background is lost when you use a current version of the editor, next to a current version of NeoLemmix (stable is fine, doesn't have to be the cutting-edge experimental), to open an old formats level, please report this as a bug with the player (I know this sounds weird, but trust me, this is correct - it's because the editor doesn't have any support for LVL files, it gets the player to convert it to an NXLV file, thus if the background is lost, the player is responsible for losing it).

[Strato Incendus]

Alright, thanks, bug report is done!