Cheapo content to NeoLemmix conversion

[namida]

where are the Cheapo style versions of the original pillar/marble/fire/crystal and dirt sets? the ones that appear in Neolemmmix are the newer custom made ones that only vaguely resemble them.
I can't find them in the Cheapo folders yet they must be there since plenty of levels like those by Ben Bryant use them.

the rock, snow, brick and bubble sets look almost identical to the original but the others are total recreations.

These haven't been included in NeoLemmix or the addon style pack, but if I'm not mistaken a copy of the style files are included with Cheapo itself? From there, you can simply run them through Essman's extractor, then through either GSTool or LemSet. (I'm aiming to make the extractor no longer needed as of the next update to GSTool, ie: allow it to work with STY files directly.)

[namida]

The recent Graphic Set Tool update enabled loading Cheapo styles directly, without the use of Essman's extractor.

I plan to write a whole new replacement for CheapoCon that'll do the same for levels. While this could be built into the level editor, I think it'd work better as a seperate app.

As well as just converting the levels, I plan to make it also able to pack them into DATs and create an accompanying SYSTEM.DAT file, allowing it to more or less output a ready-to-use set of data files that can be used with the Flexi player.

[mobius]

big thanks for the help and the new extractor.

where are the Cheapo style versions of the original pillar/marble/fire/crystal and dirt sets? the ones that appear in Neolemmmix are the newer custom made ones that only vaguely resemble them.
I can't find them in the Cheapo folders yet they must be there since plenty of levels like those by Ben Bryant use them.

the rock, snow, brick and bubble sets look almost identical to the original but the others are total recreations.

I found them: there titled "Michael pink/Micheal dirt" etc...  [as well as the ONML sets]
You might find interesting; he also has a style "Micheal xtnd" styles which are the Special level graphics from Original game but split up into actual pieces instead of one big piece.

Question: each style is duplicated (or I think) that is there's a "Michael Blue" then a "Michael Blue2". They seem identical? Is this important?

Btw, I'm using a version of Cheapo which geoo gave me long ago. It has a huge number of levels and styles but I don't know if it's the definitive version. If anyone wants maybe I should upload this somewhere? [here?]

[Proxima]

Question: each style is duplicated (or I think) that is there's a "Michael Blue" then a "Michael Blue2". They seem identical? Is this important?

They just have different music. Cheapo allows each style to have up to 40 music tracks, and back when I had big plans for a Cheapo level megapack, I wanted to include more different tracks than this, so I made two copies of each style, with different music as follows:

MichaelBlue
1-17: ccexplore's remakes of Original Lemmings tracks
18, 19, 21: ccexplore's remakes of Beast, Menacing, BeastII (slot 20 was left open for Awesome, but ccexplore never got round to doing it)
22-27: ccexplore's remakes of ONML tracks
28-38: Lemmings 3 or 3D tracks (can't remember which)
39-40: Repton and Repton 3 music

MichaelBlue2
1-17: same
18-20: extra tracks in SMS Lemmings
21-30: Lemmings 3 or 3D (whichever one isn't used in the other style)
31: "The Lamp and the Sun" (my own setting to music of a poem by my then-girlfriend (yes, the same one who appears in my "Lemmings of the ZBB" level))
32: "One-Winged Angel" from Final Fantasy VII
33-40: a selection from Adam's remakes of Original Lemmings tracks (at one point I had Sailor Moon music in these slots, but the copies I have on my computer at the moment have the Lemmings tracks)

[namida]

Btw, I'm using a version of Cheapo which geoo gave me long ago. It has a huge number of levels and styles but I don't know if it's the definitive version. If anyone wants maybe I should upload this somewhere? [here?]

I don't think there is a "definitive" version as such. I remember that a long time ago when I first discovered it, via Essman sending it to me via email, it also included a Spice Girls-themed graphic set that I don't think I've seen anywhere since; as well as a couple of extra level packs that aren't in the version generally found online.

[GigaLem]

Question: each style is duplicated (or I think) that is there's a "Michael Blue" then a "Michael Blue2". They seem identical? Is this important?

They just have different music. Cheapo allows each style to have up to 40 music tracks, and back when I had big plans for a Cheapo level megapack, I wanted to include more different tracks than this, so I made two copies of each style, with different music as follows:

MichaelBlue
1-17: ccexplore's remakes of Original Lemmings tracks
18, 19, 21: ccexplore's remakes of Beast, Menacing, BeastII (slot 20 was left open for Awesome, but ccexplore never got round to doing it)
22-27: ccexplore's remakes of ONML tracks
28-38: Lemmings 3 or 3D tracks (can't remember which)
39-40: Repton and Repton 3 music

MichaelBlue2
1-17: same
18-20: extra tracks in SMS Lemmings
21-30: Lemmings 3 or 3D (whichever one isn't used in the other style)
31: "The Lamp and the Sun" (my own setting to music of a poem by my then-girlfriend (yes, the same one who appears in my "Lemmings of the ZBB" level))
32: "One-Winged Angel" from Final Fantasy VII
33-40: a selection from Adam's remakes of Original Lemmings tracks (at one point I had Sailor Moon music in these slots, but the copies I have on my computer at the moment have the Lemmings tracks)

No remake for "AWESOME"? noooooooo D:

[mobius]

apologize if this was already covered:
some levels use no style at all, images were copy and pasted into the editor. Could those level be converted? how?

[namida]

They still use a style; it's just harder to tell which one. The easiest way to tell is usually by looking at its objects; if this doesn't help, try looking at the level's XML file after extracting it with Essman's tool.

They definitely can be converted. Even levels that do use a style, it's almost impossible to revert them to actual terrain pieces, because Cheapo doesn't save terrain pieces like Lemmix / Lemmini / Lix do; it's just one huge image (essentially, when you place any terrain piece, you're just copying and pasting from the style's terrain graphics, rather than actually placing a piece as such). Thus, the conversion tools work by creating a VGASPEC based on this level image, and because of this, it makes virtually no difference whether the level is copied/pasted images or actual terrain pieces from the style. (The only difference is that terrain check passes aren't likely to acheive much if it's a copied/pasted image.)


By the way, I haven't forgotten about the updated tool! I just... haven't done much about it yet, due to spending my Lemmings time on LPIV and NeoLemmix fixes instead.

[namida]

Okay, I finally started working on the updated tool. As I said, it's going to work directly from SET / LEV files rather than requiring the use of Essman's extractor; it'll also be a GUI application rather than a command line-style thing. And, it'll use the newer NeoLemmix formats, not the old ones.

So far, I've successfully managed to extract a SET file back to LEV files. In practice the tool won't have to do this to output files, but will have to do it in memory, so simply outputting these to files was a good way to test that SET extraction was working.

I'm also going to include functionality to convert the graphic sets in it, as it's already re-using enough GSTool code (in order to create the output VGASPEC files) that this is a very small jump to include (and most of the code to do so can also be copied from GSTool).

[namida]

So, I just put it through its first full-scale test run, and it worked VERY impressively. There was a minor issue with the skillset, but that's all - everything else seems to have worked perfectly, at least at a quick glance.

The skillset issue is that it sets the number of climbers to 8, and shifts all other skills one to the right (eg: if the original level had 5 bombers, the converted level will have 5 blockers instead). Going to look into that now.

[namida]

Okay so, I've finally put together a new tool.

This can work directly from a set file, rather than needing Essman's extractor first. It still needs copies of the graphic sets to be in the same folder as the input level set files; these can be in either Cheapo format (STY) or NeoLemmix format (single DAT file; it doesn't support ground/vgagr combo). In the case they're in STY format, it'll automatically create DAT format versions of them during the conversion.

Note that if using STY files, you must also have copies of any other STY files that are referred to - most commonly Default.sty, but in some cases you may need others.

The new version doesn't have anything like the old version's terrain rebuilder option - the results are quite messy behind-the-scenes, and between the new graphic set format and the more-efficient DAT compression code, the filesizes aren't too bad anyway.

Try it out and let me know if you run into any issues.

[namida]

There don't seem to be any issues with the new tool as far as bad output goes, so I've updated the original post with a link to the new tool, and instructions on how to use it rather than how to use the old one. This means Essman's tools are no longer nessecary for converting any Cheapo content to NeoLemmix (though they may still be useful for conversion to other engines; and indeed I would not have been able to make these tools that work directly from STY / SET / LEV files without access to the source code to Essman's tools, so they were definitely very helpful!).

The new tool does still need some improvement in terms of user-friendliness, though I would say it's already more user-friendly than the old one was.

One feature I would like to add is detecting if a style takes *all* its data from other styles (or at least all the data that's relevant in a conversion to NeoLemmix; so not worrying about stuff such as music or preview screen backgrounds) and if so, using that style instead. This would be useful with, say, the "Lemmus" styles, which just replicate the Orig-xxxx/OhNo-xxxx styles with different musics.

[Wafflem]

Anyway, (at least at the moment) I'm not going to go through and convert all those - I don't really want to have multiple copies of essentially the same graphic set (which is also why I skipped some of the ones I had); but of course nothing is stopping anyone else from converting them with the tools.

For the things like the "____Lemmus" styles; I'll probably make a modification to CheapoCon that allows simply pointing them towards the style they're based off. Eg: You can tell it to use "Orig-Dirt" in place of "DirtLemmus". Since NeoLemmix graphic sets don't include music etc; these pairs are ultimately identical under NeoLemmix.

Here are some more Cheapo Styles I have managed to convert. I made sure not to include the ones that are basically exact copies of the Cheapo-Orig and Cheapo-OhNo styles with different musics. There are some styles with the same terrain but different objects, and vice versa.

They are Adventure, Cube, Dr. Who, dragon, Duke Nuke-lem, Dust, Gblems, Generic, hellspawn1, Islanders, ISWorld, Judge-Lemm, the Classic Style of Lemmings 3, Monkey, Oldies, Prince, RedDragons, RedDragons2, Repton, Rev-Concept (basically Cheapo graphics version of Lemmings Revolution), Super Mario Bros., Space (Garjen version, not the LPIV version), Spice Girls, Lemmings 2 Sports style, Style1 (a mix of Cheapo Dirt Terrain and Cheapo Bubble objects), Supaplex, Ultimate, Xstyle and Xtnd-Dirt.

[namida]

I'll put that up on the website, though I'll remove a few of them:

- Generic: If it's the one I'm thinking of, it just contains a single terrain piece which is just text telling the user to "create a style in MS Paint", and objects from Orig-Columns. It doesn't belong in a style pack.
- Style1: If it's just terrain from one and objects from another, I don't see the point in that either. I'd rather the addon packs be actually *new* styles, not just old ones mixed-and-matched in different ways.
- Space, Xstyle: These are already included in Cheapo Pack #1.

That's just off the top of my head; I'll need to look through them. If I remember correctly (but I don't for sure), Islanders was also just Tribes-Beach with different lemming graphics? Some of those other names also sound like they might've been among the list of ones I considered but didn't convert. On the other hand, some will definitely be nice to put into a Cheapo pack, such as SMB, Spice and Sports.

I'll look at them in more detail tomorrow before putting anything up. Of course, those I don't put up, you are more than welcome to distribute them still - I don't hold exclusive rights to distributing NeoLemmix content (I'm sure there's some obscure legal argument I could use to say that I do have that; but it'll be a cold day in hell before I actually try to do so), and I definitely don't hold exclusive rights to Cheapo content. It's just a matter of wanting some degree of standards with what's actually presented on the NeoLemmix website.

[mobius]

thanks to everyone whose been converting styles!

I don't want to ask anyone to convert for me; but if you are for just whatever; can you convert all of Proxima's styles? [Michaelxxx (rehashes of original styles), the Prince of Persia, and the mixed original special graphics style]

The reason I haven't done it myself yet is because I ran into lots of trouble and hadn't the time to work it out yet.