Converting Leves from WinLems to NeoLemmix

[Strato Incendus]

Hi everyone,

as I've mentioned in a different thread, for the first levels I made several years ago, I used a Lemmings clone called WinLems. While it did have a level editor that worked similarly to the NeoLemmix one, one could only choose from among the original tilesets, and it was not possible to combine tiles from different graphic sets (whenever one would change the graphic set, the terrain pieces and objects would change into their respective counterparts, if available, of that different graphic set).

I have now begun to manually recreate these levels in NeoLemmix to fill up my pack with my former ideas, because I still like many of them today. For the smaller, "block-based" and more mechanically-driven levels, this was easy, but recreating huge levels where the terrain in the original version was placed quite randomly obviously is quite a hassle.

Has anyone else here ever worked with WinLems or knows a way to convert these levels into NeoLemmix format? Because as I said, the way the two editors work is really quite similar. WinLems however saves each individual level as a .dat-file.

[namida]

Is this the game in question?
http://winlems.en.uptodown.com/windows

It appears to use a custom binary-based format, but it isn't compressed or encrypted in any way. It has no strong relation to either the DAT format from the DOS Lemmings games, or the LVL format from Win95 Lemmings. The source code for WinLems doesn't seem to be available, so it would have to be figured out by trial-and-error, but it doesn't look like it would be too hard to do so. Can't make any promises, but I'll try and take a look at some point and see if I can put together something to help you out with this. (Most feasible option is to add support for it to the new-formats version of NeoLemmix, since this is already designed to be able to support importing various other level formats; but I don't know how long until that will be ready for general use as I haven't been working much on it lately, so ideally you'd probably like to be able to convert them to LVL files for the current version of NeoLemmix.)

[GigaLem]

I remember using such a thing, I made a level pack with it called "Lemmings Gold" unfortunately the pack is lost to time since it was on an older computer
so anything from there, I can't salvage

[Strato Incendus]

Ah, great, namida, you've found the link again! ^^ My brother and I weren't sure anymore where we got the game from originally.

Many of my old levels I have migrated to Neo Lemmix manually by now, but there are indeed a couple of bigger ones that would be a pain to recreate in such detail by hand. So it isn't anything super-urgent. However, if you're working on a new version of NeoLemmix anyway and ensuring compatibility with as many different clones as feasably possible, and that's how I've understood it, then WinLems would certainly be worth including on the list of clones .

[Nepster]

namida currently does not code any more for NeoLemmix. For me figuring out the binary format is more a chore than a fun project, so this is rather low-priority for me. If you (or someone else) can figure out the binary format and tell me what piece of information is stored where, I will gladly add support for WinLems.
I don't know this clone, but if it allows exporting level images, then perhaps the easiest way to convert the remaining levels is to create VGASpecs out of these level images and load them into a new NeoLemmix level?