SuperLemmini 0.104a

[Colorful Arty]

Is there a way to unlock all the levels in a given SuperLemmini pack by entering a code? I know you could do that in Lemmini, but was that removed from SuperLemmini?

[IchoTolot]

I could start the discussion about the default setting should be "everything is unlocked" here aswell.

But I think everything what had to be said about this has already been said in another topic.

Topic: http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=2136.msg51613#msg51613

My post there:

For a long time my opinion was against unlock all. It's not Lemmings like and you need to progress to the final boss level.
But after this thread appeared I thought about it and now I ask myself why Lemmings wasn't unlock all in the first place!

It has to do with a (and maybe even the) main point of the game:

You get stuck!  (and sometimes over weeks and months)

It's is a puzzle game, so you need to think about a solution to a puzzle. Here the puzzle is to manipulate the terrain to get from A to B.
If you think about a solution and don't get it right away you are stucked at this point.
If you don't get stucked in a pack (getting all the solution after a few tries) the whole puzzle aspect of this pack falls short.
And remember: What are the levels which you will remember forever?
The ones you got stuck really hard and solved them finally after days, months or even years. And often they are the best ones! Example: The original games!
"No added colors or Lemmings" and  "There's madness in the method" are the levels where nearly everyone got stuck (I got stuck for a year back in the days and there are my favorites).

But there is one point that keeps pushing these type of puzzles down:

The levels from this point onward lay dead!

If you get stuck hard you often need to take breaks from this level. What do you do?
Play another rank or take a break from the game.
If you are stuck for a long time you maybe loose interest in the pack even if you played just a part of it, because you cannot access the rest! (which usually has a lot of levels where you won't get stuck)

And that's the point why unlock all is in my opinion the best option.
A big part of the game lays dead and some people might loose interest after some time. With unlock all they can explore the game further on and come back to the level they couldn't solve before. (And they will, because that level will haunt them in their dreams! I know it from myself!)
Now they can see the pack in all it's glory and save the frustraiting part for the end.
But don't leave out the frustraiting part, because as explained above it is often the best one when you have beaten it!

At the end of this post a little quote from me I said to Simon at our meet up as we spoke about this topic (translated):

"Frustraition at it's core, if you are too dumb at this point to get the solution, but that is one of the main point of the game"

[Tsyu]

Is there a way to unlock all the levels in a given SuperLemmini pack by entering a code? I know you could do that in Lemmini, but was that removed from SuperLemmini?

In both SuperLemmini and Lemmini, you can enter "0xdeadbeef" as a level code to unlock all levels.

By the way, did you manage to get the extraction to work?

[Colorful Arty]

Thanks!

And yes I did get the extraction to work, but I had to use the Lemmini files instead of the SuperLemmini ones.

[Tsyu]

And yes I did get the extraction to work, but I had to use the Lemmini files instead of the SuperLemmini ones.

I meant using SuperLemmini to extract the files. It's very important that you do this because SuperLemmini does not use the same file structure as Lemmini, and even some of the files are incompatibly different.

Keep in mind that the current version of SuperLemmini crashes at a certain point during extraction if the destination folder doesn't exist. Once I figure out why extraction is failing for you, I will release an update that fixes this. In the meantime, make sure you extract to an existing folder (and make sure it's empty!).

I might be able to figure out what your problem really is if you post the directory list of your "src" folder. Here's how to do it:

• Open the Command Prompt. (You should be able to do this by searching for Command Prompt or cmd.exe. If you're running XP or earlier, you can enter cmd.exe into the Run prompt.)
• Enter cd C:\Users\ColorfulArty\Desktop\src.
• Enter tree . /F /A > tree.txt.
• A file called "tree.txt" (or just "tree" if file extensions are hidden) should now be found in C:\Users\ColorfulArty\Desktop\src. Open it to make sure it's readable, then post it here.

[namida]

Tsyu: On the subject of extraction failures, people elsewhere have mentioned that extraction sometimes fails if files are set to read-only; specifically it seems to occur most often with the sound files. Since (I would assume) SuperLemmini only reads from the WinLemm files, not writes to them, surely this can be fixed?

[IchoTolot]

As I remember   Here's some feedback with SuperLemmini on Linux:

I've actually gotten SuperLemmini to work on ubuntu (on my laptop), but with some problems with the file extration/custom levels.

Ubuntu seems to be very sensetive about upper/lower case letters and therefore fails to find certain files.

At some point it searches for sth like "BUBBLES.dat", but finds "Bubbles.dat"   I cant remember the failure exactly so it can be the other way round or so, but nevertheless I had to do some manual renaming in order to make it find the files.
Custom levels:
The editor for example writes tileset: "Bubble" into a ini file of a level, but the tileset acually is named "bubble" ---> manual renaming required
I didn't test the official levels there, but it could be that the error also accours.

[namida]

The extX file systems generally used under Linux are case-sensitive, so "BUBBLES.dat" and "bubbles.dat" are two different files as far as it's concerned; you could indeed have both names in the same folder.

There are ways to deal with this - eg. SuperLemmini could get a list of files from the target directory, look for ones that match the desired ones in a non-case-sensitive way, then use those. This would be a bit of extra coding effort, but it would greatly increase compatibility and ease of use, especially since it appears different copies of WinLemm may have different capitalization.

NeoLemmix Editor should be always saving graphic set names as lowercase (although it might only be doing this for NeoLemmix levels, not SuperLemmini ones). However, of course, this could still cause problems if SuperLemmini expects a mixed-case one (though I believe Tsyu once mentioned that it generally expects lowercase, at least by default).

[Colorful Arty]

This is a really minor issue, and it may not even be SuperLemmini causing it, but on marble levels only, objects that are flipped upside-down turn a much brighter shade of pink than usual. Am I the only one having this problem?

[Tsyu]

This is a really minor issue, and it may not even be SuperLemmini causing it, but on marble levels only, objects that are flipped upside-down turn a much brighter shade of pink than usual. Am I the only one having this problem?

It appears to be a Java bug, and it only happens on some systems. I've got a few ideas on how to work around this, one of which will be implemented in the next version.


Regarding extraction, please follow the instructions that I posted here: http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=1793.msg57262#msg57262. If you don't, then I can never know for sure why SuperLemmini extraction isn't working for you. If this really is a problem with SuperLemmini, I want to fix it for you and others who may have the same problem. (And please don't ignore them just because you can just copy Lemmini files over to SuperLemmini. This may seem good enough to you, but trust me, it isn't, for reasons that I've already stated.)

There are ways to deal with this - eg. SuperLemmini could get a list of files from the target directory, look for ones that match the desired ones in a non-case-sensitive way, then use those. This would be a bit of extra coding effort, but it would greatly increase compatibility and ease of use, especially since it appears different copies of WinLemm may have different capitalization.

I'll give this a try. I can't guarantee that it will be in the next version, but it should come soon.

NeoLemmix Editor should be always saving graphic set names as lowercase (although it might only be doing this for NeoLemmix levels, not SuperLemmini ones). However, of course, this could still cause problems if SuperLemmini expects a mixed-case one (though I believe Tsyu once mentioned that it generally expects lowercase, at least by default).

I added a hack to SuperLemmini 0.102 that looks for a lowercase version of a graphic set if the set couldn't be found the first time, mainly because Lemmix didn't use all-lowercase names and LZP files (which are just renamed ZIP files) use a case-sensitive structure.

Tsyu: On the subject of extraction failures, people elsewhere have mentioned that extraction sometimes fails if files are set to read-only; specifically it seems to occur most often with the sound files. Since (I would assume) SuperLemmini only reads from the WinLemm files, not writes to them, surely this can be fixed?

I can't reproduce this on my machine (which runs Windows 7), but I remember being unable to extract directly from the CD under Ubuntu. I will have to test it again and find out what the problem is exactly.

[namida]

It seems to work fine up until the sound files in most cases. With that in mind - is there any difference in how it reads them? (eg. it opens the other files and reads binary data I assume; while for the sound files perhaps it just copies them directly? If so, perhaps it could open the sound files the same way, read the binary data, then write it as-is to the destination file?)

[Tsyu]

During extraction, most files are opened with Files.readAllBytes, which reads the binary data into memory. Sound files, however, are copied with Files.copy, which just copies the file to another location. As far as I can tell, this shouldn't fail just because the source file is read-only (and, on my machine, it doesn't).

[namida]

As seen in this post, Flopsy86 is having this issue, on the file that's the usual culprit, "bang.wav". So perhaps try making a modified version that simply changes to using readAllBytes instead of copy, sending it to him, and seeing if this works better. If it does, it may be worth using that for all files in future versions.

[Colorful Arty]

So here's what I'm doing. When I launch SuperLemmini and it asks to extract Lemmings from Windows, I input

C:\Users\ColorfulArty\Desktop\src

for the source path and

C:\Users\ColorfulArty\Desktop\New SuperLemmini

for the target path. The former is the src file that has been unmodified, and the latter is a completely empty folder on my desktop. When I push "extract" I get the error message

Validating WINLEMM
GFX/BLINK.SPR
File C:\Users\ColorfulArty\Desktop\src\GFX\BLINK.SPR not found.

So mine does not fail on bang.wav like most people. I followed your instructions on the command prompt and apparently tree.txt does exist in the src file (since terminal didn't raise an error message when I typed the command), and I can absolutely assure you both of the files I used exist in those locations specified.

[IchoTolot]

Actually I have another thing to report, too:

As I downloaded the last SuperLemmini version together with "Prince Jamie Super Challenge Pack" (link: http://sta.sh/0200tf2xesh), everything worked fine. The pack adds a few objects to certain tilesets and places these into the dedicated mod folder.
After the recent update, SuperLemmini tells me that the rest of the tiles and objects were missing via an error message and it seems that it expects the whole tilesets to be in the mod folder rather than just adding the new objects. For now I could fix this on my own by copying the Lemmini tilsets into the mod folder aswell, but now some replays are not working anymore due to different trap trigger areas.
This seems like a new bug to me that SuperLemmini doesn't count the mod files as a simple addition to the standard tilsets anymore.