Lemmings Hall of Fame [120/120 levels completed; Test Phase Has Begun]

[Strato Incendus]

Almost a year later, a little update at last on how things are going!

Though I haven't updated the ZIP file yet with these additional levels; I may or may not do so - the question is how useful a second "interim round" would be, or whether I should try to finish the whole pack first, and then send it around to testers. There are about 40 levels left to go now, so around 80 are completed.

As you can see, I've also changed some of the level titles, compared to the list I had originally compiled on page 1 of this thread. I'm trying to have a few more well-known songs in here, while still picking such that fit with the respective theme. In Lemmings, Drugs, & Rock 'n Roll, meanwhile, I have more freedom with regards to the titles I choose.



CIRCUS


Tears of a clown

CLASSIC


The Well-Lempered Clavier

HIGHLAND

"Sing me a song of a Lem that is gone..."


Skye float song

MEDIEVAL


Heroes of our time

OUTDOOR

Who says stupid bee puns are reserved for the Honeycomb tileset?


Let it bee

POLAR


Last of the wilds

Slider levels really make my pre-placed Builder staircases (from strato_generalmd) come in handy... ^^


Trapped under ice

SPACE


Faith of the heart


The dark side of the moon

SPORTS


Let's get physical

[Strato Incendus]

The first two ranks are completed now, with both having 30 levels each. The Gold rank is still at 15 levels (i.e., half-complete), Platinum is at 12. Haven't updated the demo yet with these additional levels, though; I assume at this point, it's probably best to simply complete the entire pack first, and then send around test versions of the full thing.

That said, of course the remaining levels on the two most difficult ranks are probably going to take a lot longer to make.

BEACH

This one definitely still has one shortcut that I don't know how to get rid of yet.


Sailing


CAVELEM


Go with the flow


CIRCUS


Theater


EGYPTIAN


Ramses, Pharaoh


In the name of Amun


HIGHLAND


Lemmings and mead

This one here is supposed to go on the Platinum rank (though as usual with complex levels, I assume there are still several backroutes in there ^^):


Devil's dance floor


POLAR


Valley of the damned

[Strato Incendus]

Question to @Will: With the last post in this thread having been one year ago, I guess there's a good chance that all of these levels would be compatible with SuperLemmix? Meaning, given the time at which the SuperLemmix fork was created, it should be possible to open them in the level editor and run them with the SuperLemmix engine.

Luckily, this pack only uses the L2 tilesets, not the original L1 tilesets. So the replacements of the water objects that Will mentioned probably shouldn't be necessary. The only L1 tileset that is featured at all is orig_pillar, and it only appears on some of the classic levels, until I started using L2_classic instead.

Of course, that doesn't mean this pack will become a SuperLemmix pack. Having the Grenader and Spearer at my proposal would of course be tempting — in turn, I'd have to check how many of these levels rely on the Stoner, and whether they would still work if replaced with the Freezer. Alternatively, the Stoner could be cut on some levels, since it's not an original Lemmings 2: The Tribes-Skill to begin with.

That said, when the Spearer and Grenader were removed / decided not to be added to a stable version of NeoLemmix, I modified the solutions of Hall-of-Fame levels that featured them, so that they would explicitly no longer need them. I don't know if I still have the original solutions as replays somewhere, if I could simply add these two skills back in.

Creating two versions (one for NeoLemmix and one for SuperLemmix) is likely not something I'm going to do — it already resulted in enough of a hassle with Lemmings World Tour, with maintaining the Old-Formats and New-Formats version in parallel.

In principle, it would of course be nice to have all music packs (World Tour, Open Air, Hall of Fame, Drugs & Rock 'n Roll) in the same Format (NeoLemmix, New Formats). This would be another argument against making Hall of Fame a SuperLemmix pack. Then again, this only works in part with Lemmings World Tour, because the Old-Formats version is the one with all the intended solutions, whereas some of the New-Formats versions had to be adapted, without Radiation and Slowfreeze.

[Strato Incendus]

The years keep flying by, and progress on this pack is slow. But every now and then, there's a little update to be shared.

Some of the level titles did change, after all. Also, upon discovering that I already had more than ten Sports levels, I moved the level "Take a bow" (which was a remake of "Take up archery", and really just used too many Builders) to a separate folder for a potential SuperLemmix pack. Already, I can tell that the level is a lot more interesting when using Spearers and Builders in combination.

Lemmings: Hall of Fame, meanwhile, will first and foremost still be for NeoLemmix. It's likely that there will be a SuperLemmix version at a later point.
However, with the exception of a few levels that were originally made for the Spearer and Grenader, I doubt many of the remaining ones will be modified, just to include them.
There will already be enough work in changing all the Stoners to Freezers again.

On to the new levels!

BEACH

Sunshine Superlem


Welcome to St. Tropez


Ai si eu te pego (Nossa)

OUTDOOR
I made all the bees move on this one; however, I've checked and compared them to Lemmings 2 again, and noticed that there, all the bees hover in place.
So I might remove the movement again. It tends to distract from trying to solve the level anyway.

Bzzz


Jungle drum

MEDIEVAL

Lemplars of steel

CLASSIC

Nessun dorma

HIGHLAND

Flower of Scotland

SPACE
For this one, I took some inspiration from a certain other level - except the skills are all NeoLemmix skills (i.e., none of the classic eight). That means a complete absence of downward destructive skills, which is fairly restrictive.

The last journey home

SHADOW

Howling at the moon


Moonlight shadow

SPORTS

Sweet Carolem

[Strato Incendus]

Only 20 more levels to go! Here's the first three of them.

BEACH

Despacito

OUTDOOR

This land is your land

EGYPTIAN

My Egyptian lover

The last one has quite a few Blockers, despite the requirement to save everyone. I've learned some things from NepsterLems in this regard; hopefully, that will serve to make these levels challenging enough for the last rank! ("This land is your land" is from the third rank, though.)

[Strato Incendus]

Here's the next batch of ten; only 7 more levels left to go!

OUTDOOR

These Lems are made for walking


Heads, shoulders, bees, and toads

MEDIEVAL

Avalon


Ai vis lo lop


The name of the rose

POLAR

Lem from the North Country


A winter's tale

CAVELEM

Sacrifice


Fade to grey


A face in the crowd

I find it somewhat hard to work with the irregular terrain shapes of the Cavelem tileset. Especially because most of the other L2 tilesets are so "blocky". The only thing that comes in perfect squares in Cavelem are the steel pieces, and for perfect rectangles, there only exist 1 or 2 pieces at max. Simultaneously, there are no huge clumps of terrain, like in other tilesets with lots of irregular shapes (e.g., orig_dirt). This makes a lot of the Cavelem levels somewhat "skeletal" in their appearance. Which I guess fits the stone-age theme, to some extent - but it also makes it tough to create pretty and mechanically interesting Cavelem levels.


Finally, I've also made two changes to existing levels. Both of them benefitted massively from having the Slider added:


Theater

This one used to require a Climber leaping off the wall on the right and transition into a Shimmier. Before that, he would obviously have to float down. I've shifted this trick to a later level, when the player is already familiar with the Slider, so that the player might actually end up missing the Slider at that point, if I don't provide it on that level.

"Theater" meanwhile seemed tailor-made to become the Slider-introduction level (it's on the second rank). I've added a few more chunks of terrain at the top, to enforce wall-jumping from the Slider state (since the lemming would bump his head against the ceiling if he tries to jump directly from the top of each block to the next climbable wall).




Can't hold us

This flow-control level is much more interesting with the Slider! Before that, it featured an excess amount of Jumpers (many of which were substitutes for the L2 Runner). Here, the Slider can actually save time, by turning corners earlier than the crowd does.

Also, I had to fill that tennis racket up with tennis balls, so that you can't merely fence or bash into it partially (=using one of the gaps to cancel the skill and thereby turn around the entire crowd). Now, it's one solid chunk of terrain, so any destructive skill you assign will pass all the way through it. I think this should fix some of the backroutes that the early testers had already found.



I've also been making progress on the music front: 7 out of 12 tracks are done, at least in their rough form.
I can still edit them for details and minor fixes while the pack undergoes testing. The ones that I still have to do are Classic, Shadow, Polar, Space, and Circus.

Classic merely requires me to combine the tracks 2 and 4 from the Lemmings World Tour rotation (the Pachelbel canon and the "Now use miners and climbers" tune), by putting 2 behind 4.
I still want to remix track 4 a little, though, before combining it with 2 for the Classic track. Many of the World Tour tracks have some unpleasant spikes in the upper mids, guitar fret noises, overly punchy kick drums, etc. I didn't have as much experience with mixing five years ago, compared to now, so I may also release an updated version of the World Tour tracks eventually.

The Shadow and Polar tracks are pretty straightforward (despite the 5/8 time on Shadow). The main challenge with several of the L2 tracks is the increased use of chromatic notes, compared to the original and ONML tunes. So I have to listen more closely to identify correctly what I need to play in the first place. The fun part, in exchange, is adding a little more atmosphere to them, with various soundscape pads in the background. So far, I've done that on Egyptian and Cavelem.

The most challenging ones are Space (The Blue Danube) and Circus (Entry of the Gladiators / Over the Waves).
For these two, I've downloaded free MIDI files for The Blue Danube and Entry of the Gladiators. So I'll pick matching software instruments for those, and then add guitars, drums, and bass "manually" on top of that, as usual.

Therefore, the Space and Circus tracks may end up sounding closer to the original classical music pieces. Much like, on the World Tour tracks, I also ended up playing the real Rondo Alla Turca on guitar, rather than the Lemmings track that combines it with some other melodies halfway through. I do want Circus to eventually transition into Over the Waves, though. And that would be challenging to do only by ear and recording on the fly, because of the shift in tempo that goes along with it. Such sudden tempo changes should be programmed into the recording software before recording, so that the metronome considers them.

The problem is that the Lemmings tracks (for original Lemmings, ONML, and The Tribes) don't seem to have been recorded to a metronome. Therefore, recording the drums by just playing along with the original tracks always results in a huge timing hassle afterwards.

[jkapp76]

I really like the use of all the Lemmings 2 styles everywhere. They look great!

I can't wait to play it. I've always been a fan of Strato-packs.

[Strato Incendus]

Well, if you really "can't wait", you're of course invited to participate in pre-release testing - if you don't mind finding backroutes .
If you'd rather enjoy a more patched version of the pack, you'll have to wait until pre-release testing is over.

Meanwhile, let's cut that number of remaining levels down to five:

EGYPTIAN

Valley of the Kings

SPACE

At the back of beyond

Junajo's Galaxy tileset (where the planets and nebulae are from) is really useful for adding some decoration. I've just discovered it also features further space-like traps (an alien, a ufo that can abduct lemmings etc.), and the terrain would also go along well with L2 Space. I didn't want to go overboard with that in a Tribes-themed pack, but I might get back to using this tileset more in Lemmings, Drugs, & Rock 'n Roll!

The limiting factor there is of course that the "Space" tileset in Lemmings 3D, the Alien tileset, is a lot darker, with more black, orange, and green - which is why so far, I've been using completely different tilesets than any of the space-themed ones to emulate the Alien tileset.

[Strato Incendus]

Only one more level to go! But it's a Cavelem level, so I can't be bothered with it tonight.
I'm glad I came up with the one I'm showing off here, since I expect it to be the hardest one of the Cavelem ones.

Spoiler

It's actually one of the last five in the pack.
And it's all thanks to me having randomly encountered a certain video by Swerdis today.
Except my level involves Zombies!

CAVELEM

The Unforgiven

BEACH

Coco Jambo

MEDIEVAL

Omnos


Dawn of victory

Regarding the music tracks, 10 out of 12 are finished (again, at least in a rough form - I'll probably edit them for details later on).
I only have Space and Circus left to do - which, as mentioned before, are the hardest ones to record.

Also, my recording software sometimes refuses to properly convert the files to MP3 while exporting, as of yesterday (the files end up being too short in duration, even though I've set the markers for beginning and ending correctly). I've had a similar experience with my video editing software on the same Mac recently. So far, a simple restart of the computer has always solved those problems, for the time being, at least. But I still don't know what causes them.

My only guess is that it might be after having recorded a bunch of stuff, so that the hard drive might be packed with temporary files that take up space, but which might get deleted when shutting down the computer.

[Strato Incendus]

...and with that, the final level has been completed!

CAVELEM

Push the sky away

So, who is up for some testing?

It's been a while since I uploaded the first demo of 65 levels. I'll remove that one from the starting post now, since the levels contained in it are long outdated (quite a few of them have of course also received backroute fixes.)

Given the long time gap, I'm not sure if those who were early testers of the demo version are still interested in testing the final version of the pack now.
Or if anyone else wants to join in the testing, who didn't have the opportunity the first time.

In short, anyone interested can sign up, be it here in this thread or via PM.

[kaywhyn]

Given the long time gap, I'm not sure if those who were early testers of the demo version are still interested in testing the final version of the pack now.

I'm still interested, so sure, I be down to pre-test the full completed pack!

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks a lot, kaywhyn! I wasn't sure if you were still taking a break from Lemmings to focus on some other games. I'll send you the pack via PM.

Anyone else interested?


PS: I've changed the title of the Space level "Blackened sun" to "Black hole sun". For one, I assume Soundgarden are a more famous band than Freedom Call; and two, actually having the word "black hole" in the title will make it a lot more transparent to the player why the level is designed the way it is.

[Floyd Brannon]

This pack looks super!

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks! I haven't received any feedback yet from kaywhyn, who is the only tester so far.
So if anyone else wants to test, just say so.

[Strato Incendus]

Just a little update: I've revised the first half of the pack (ranks 1 and 2), based on kaywhyn's feedback from testing, and sent him the new version.

After the second half has been vetted, too, I think the pack should be ready for release. But I can't put a date on that yet. Even if kaywhyn plays through the remaining levels quickly, I don't know how fast I'll be in fixing them.