[Suggestion] Amiga skill buttons

[keiya]

I always thought the DOS skill buttons were... kinda ugly. Especially the christmas ones. Is there any chance of neolemmix ever getting an option to use the much nicer amiga ones?

[ccexplore]

Is this just about the skinning of the backgrounds of the buttons, or does it also cover the actual depicted lemmings on the buttons?  If the latter I think you might find a hard time to get someone to produce alternate Amiga-like graphics of skills that are new to NeoLemmix (ie. not one of the original 8 that you could've ripped graphics off of the Amiga version).

Otherwise I suppose we could potentially generalize this as a suggestion to basically allow some user modding of certain graphics by (say) adding or replacing certain graphics files.  IMO I would not opt for a specific option only between DOS and Amiga since they are hardly the only versions out there and would just invite more similar requests in future, and I would also not opt for supporting this in a more integrated way in the game (ie. something more than just documenting to users what files to add or change, once the support is in place in code) since it seems a rather niche feature.

[Nepster]

Otherwise I suppose we could potentially generalize this as a suggestion to basically allow some user modding of certain graphics by (say) adding or replacing certain graphics files.  IMO I would not opt for a specific option only between DOS and Amiga since they are hardly the only versions out there and would just invite more similar requests in future, and I would also not opt for supporting this in a more integrated way in the game (ie. something more than just documenting to users what files to add or change, once the support is in place in code) since it seems a rather niche feature.

Once we fully move to the new file format and in particular use single image files for styles and other sprites, exactly this will be possible (at least according to the current plans). Then one just has to replace a certain image, which in the current (unreleased) beta version is located under "gfx/panel/skill_icons.png" and "gfx/panel/icon_[skillname]".

[namida]

Otherwise I suppose we could potentially generalize this as a suggestion to basically allow some user modding of certain graphics by (say) adding or replacing certain graphics files.

Already possible to do when putting together a custom level pack. Theoretically it could be done for in general too, but this would require some resource hacking (or rebuilding from source code) in the current versions.

To elaborate on this, the backgrounds and the lemming icons can be modified independantly. The skill panel is actually generated from a number of seperate graphics files: "skill_panel.png" which contains one (or more, in which case it'll loop through them each time it generates a button) blank panels; "skill_count_erase.png" which is a bit of a misleading name and actually contains an empty digit area; "empty_slot.png" which is used for slots that are normally occupied by skills in levels with less than 8 skills in the skillset (this allows them to have a different graphic from a blank panel, which is used in the default graphics as well as some of the Lemmings Plus custom panels); "minimap_region.png" which contains the border for the minimap; and "icon_<name>.png" which is a seperate file for each icon that can be drawn onto a panel, be it a skill or otherwise.