[SUG][CONTENT] change default arrow colors of original sets

[Proxima]

Because high-res mode is another thing that, while visually nice, alters the rough and deliberatly "cheap"-looking aesthetics of the original game.

The developers of the Mac version, as well as everyone who grew up with that version, would disagree with you there.

[Strato Incendus]

I actually did grow up with the Mac version. But also with the DOS and the Atari version. I think by now I've gotten so used to the DOS aesthetics of NeoLemmix that I think I might miss them when they're gone.

Anyways, the point is that high-res mode is optional, fortunately - so why shouldn't outlines around one-way arrows be as well? And to be clear: Not for the level designer - they should only have one type of one-way arrows at their disposal, so that nobody can deliberately "fool" the player - but for the players themselves. So that each individual user can decide whether outlines are necessary for their subjective playing experience. Some people have better eyesight than others, after all.

[namida]

I think playing the original packs should still feel as authentic as possible in NeoLemmix. Couldn't outlines in general be made an option that every player can adjust for themselves under "preferences" in the main menu? Much like the high-quality mini map, or also high-res mode, I guess?

Because high-res mode is another thing that, while visually nice, alters the rough and deliberatly "cheap"-looking aesthetics of the original game.

High-res mode can make it harder to deduce physics just by looking (while testing it out, I've definitely found I have to activate clear physics mode a bit more often than usual), and is more CPU and memory intensive. High-quality minimap has no direct drawbacks, but it can be extremely CPU-intensive (it's not much worse than regular minimap for memory) and weaker PCs will struggle to keep up. Those two features need to be optional for those reasons.

On the other hand, this change to one-way arrows will have negligable, if any, performance impact; nor do they make the visuals harder to understand in any way (the opposite, in fact). The only disadvantage is that some people might prefer the older appearance - and based on the poll results, where we had only one vote for the status quo against several for adding the outlines, it doesn't sound like this is many people. The final nail in the coffin for me adding an option, is the fact that - as mentioned earlier in the topic - an "option" still exists anyway, in the form of that you can simply mod your copy of NeoLemmix by replacing the new outlined OWW graphics with the non-outlined ones from an older copy of the styles download - nothing's changing with regards to their physics, only their visuals, so this will work fine.

I'll note that NeoLemmix already isn't true to DOS in terms of one-way arrows. Most of the one-way arrows match the colors that DOS uses in the data files, but DOS doesn't actually use this color as-is when rendering "only on terrain" objects, so in practice they end up a different color. Even Lemmix does not accurately reproduce this effect (which is why NeoLemmix never did either). Even beyond that, some have also had manual color changes from what DOS's data specifies. Of course, NeoLemmix never claimed to be "accurate to DOS" in any way, just to have a "DOS-like feel", and even that has always come second to clarity / user-friendliness.

[IchoTolot]

I for my part would even say the outline version of the arrows looks way better than the old version.

I consider this as a straight upgrade and would also highly doubt any person would be totally turned off over slightly different OWWs.

[namida]

While it's not as clear-cut, it also looks like the dark cyan arrows for orig_fire are the preference too, so looks like those will be sticking. I'd say that more or less wraps up this matter, then?

[Proxima]

I would still suggest that Rock should use the same red colour as Snow.

[namida]

Alright, let's see what people think. Here's a preview. This uses exactly the same shade of red as Snow does.

Left side is low-res, right side is high-res.

[Dullstar]

I'm not sure I really like either option. How would blue or yellow look?

[Minim]

I think the red chosen is a bit too dark. A lighter red would've been a little bit better.
As for Dullstar's post, I believe blue will look better for rock. A Royal blue will really distinguish the tones between the rocks, gems and branches.

[Strato Incendus]

Here's the thing: The red looks great on the rocks or the emeralds, but it's harder to spot on the roots / branches than the white, of course.

Is it still possible to combine arrows of different colours in one and the same level, anyway? This formerly could be done by simply taking one-way arrows from a different tileset, because every tileset had separate ones. But now, they usually switch to whatever is the "theme" colour of the tileset, don't they? Meaning you can of course still use differently-shaped arrows by taking them from various tilesets, but whenever you use arrows from any tileset that refers to the default ones, they all switch to the same colour, don't they?

Wouldn't it be possible to "simply" select a colour for each individual one-way-arrow object in a level by specifying the colour in the text file? i.e. basically the same way it is done with the reversal of colours for athletes or zombies - or, to my knowledge, also with the recolouring of lemmings sprites in general, as of recently.

This would probably be a lot of work to program initially, but once implemented, it would allow to select perfectly visible colours for every one-way-arrow object in a level, that can be individually adjusted by whatever thet terrain in the background looks like.

[Dullstar]

I made a mockup of blue and yellow arrows by extracting colors from the fire proposals from earlier. I like the blue ones the best.

[namida]

On a personal level: I'm not at all a fan of those two new proposals - to me it's a close call between red and white, pretty much with white winning just on "if there's no huge advantage, keep it as is". But it's not a big enough deal to me to make this a "putting my foot down, what I say goes" situation, so...

On a developer level: Poll updated to include these two new proposals. Votes have been cleared, so please vote again if you prefer white or red. If there's a clear winner (and no solid reasoning-based argument against that winner) it'll happen; if there's a tie (or something like a one-vote difference) I'll put up another poll. We've got plenty of time until the next update, even if we package this into a regular styles update (which is 100% possible), so no rush.

[namida]

Is it still possible to combine arrows of different colours in one and the same level, anyway? This formerly could be done by simply taking one-way arrows from a different tileset, because every tileset had separate ones. But now, they usually switch to whatever is the "theme" colour of the tileset, don't they? Meaning you can of course still use differently-shaped arrows by taking them from various tilesets, but whenever you use arrows from any tileset that refers to the default ones, they all switch to the same colour, don't they?

This falls well into "not worth the effort" territory. First, the editor would need a color picker - maybe not too difficult, I assume this is a common enough need that there's something open-source out there, or something already provided by the .NET runtimes. The editor already recolors one-way-arrows on the fly, so that part isn't too much of a problem - just have to make sure each one's recoloring to a different color. However, NL does not. It recolors the arrow graphics during loading, and then uses the recolored graphic during gameplay, rather than recoloring on the fly. (The same is true for pickup skills, as well as for style-based (but not state-based, which IS on-the-fly) recoloring of lemmings.) And this is the really tedious part - this would basically be an entire rewrite of how recoloring works on NL's side, and on top of this it would have a performance impact (though probably not too severe - but especially with high-res mode, it's an "every bit counts" situation, as NL's rendering is CPU-based and already ends up quite CPU-intensive, especially on larger resolutions; ideally I'd like to do a rewrite in the future using MonoGame or something else that can do GPU-based rendering, but that's another huge task and I almost feel, if I was going to go to that extent, my effort would be better spent on something original).

And that's without getting into the question of abuse potential. Sure, it's currently possible with workarounds, but the ways it'd be achieved are generally obscure enough that anyone who can figure it out without asking (and thus drawing attention to what they want to do, at which point the reason it's a bad idea gets explained), would already be familiar enough with NL culture in general to know they shouldn't do it - or at least, shouldn't do it without a very good special-case reason.

Two possible alternate forms which mitigate, but don't entirely solve, the above issues (and these two are mutually incompatible with each other):
- No outright "pick an arbitrary color", just "it'll use the color of the style selected at the time the object was placed". This averts the need for a color picker in the editor, and is somewhat of an obstacle (though not a huge one) to abuse of the feature, but the biggest problem (rendering on the NL side) is still a thing.
- Instead of setting it per-object, set it per-level. NL's "recolor once during load" setup could still work with this, though some minor tweaks to how it works would be needed. In general, this would be much simpler to implement. However, abuse potential is still in (almost) full force with this approach.

At any rate, this is a different suggestion from tidying up the official ones in their default colors, so it should have a separate topic if you really think adding it is justified. As usual, you're welcome to create the topic (and I might change my mind if there's really strong support for it), but I don't expect this will actually happen.

[namida]

Looks like the preference is very strongly in favor of blue. Guess that's what we're going with.

Does anyone feel there's any further cases that need to be considered?

[Proxima]

I had another look at the sets mobius listed in the opening post. Fire and Rock have been dealt with, so that leaves Pillar, Brick and Bubble.

Pillar: I like these arrows as they are and I'm not wild about mobius's suggestion of blue (assuming he means a similar blue to the Marble arrows), but it could be worth making a screenshot to see what blue would actually look like.

Brick: The current beige looks fine on the red bricks, but weak on all the grey material. Mobius suggests yellow, which could work, if it's a bright yellow, not the same shade as the Dirt arrows.

Bubble: The current arrows are a little weak, but I can't say whether I would prefer mobius's suggestion of red without seeing a screenshot.