[DISC.][PLAYER] Appearance of neutral lemmings

[namida]

It just occurred to me that we've never actually discussed what neutral lemmings should look like. Current recoloring data has them drawing white / light-grey, actually looking pretty similar to how ghosts used to. But maybe something else is preferred - I notice IchoTolot thought yellow was a suitable color for the lemming count on the toolbar; this isn't a color I would've thought of, and I wonder if it might have come from an assumption the neutrals themself would be a similar color.

If anyone has any input here, fire away.

(Note: I won't delay the release candidate build for this. It's a purely visual detail, so it can be changed between RC and stable, or even in a styles update, if needed.)

[IchoTolot]

Maybe yellow shirt and brown/orange hair

Example pictures attached.

[Crane]

I'd go with a light grey suit (very slightly darker than their face) instead of blue.  That way they are clearly still living lemmings but the saturated grey gives off a neutral feel.  Blue hair would indicate that they have a permanent skill.

[Crane]

Picture examples.  The colour chosen is #909090, which is what I got when I selected the colour of their blue suit and turned the saturation all the way down to zero (so it's effectively the same brightness but with no colour).

The blue-haired lemming is a Climber.  Them having grey hair but a green suit might work as well.

(I only just realised afterwards that a neutral Builder would be impossible!)

[Strato Incendus]

Tough to say - I like boh suggestions made here! They just definitely should keep the coloured hair, to be clearly distinguishable from ghosts. Even though it doesn't seem like ghosts will return anytime soon (if ever), but the Shielder / Shover / Pusher skill suggested in a neighbouring thread, given that they would work pretty much exactly like ghosts' intimidation ability, might make their return more likely again if several people approve of such a skill.

[Proxima]

I would say that a skill occupying the same niche as ghosts makes their return markedly less likely

In any case, I strongly prefer the grey neutrals over the yellow ones. They look great

[Strato Incendus]

Yes - if the skill actually gets introduced in the first place . If we come to the conclusion that we already had this, so why not simply bring back ghosts rather than creating a new skill from scratch, that would make the introduction of a new skill less likely than the return of ghosts.

Although I can see a case being made for splitting up the traditional behaviour of ghosts into two aspects - the intimidation part on one hand, in form of the Shielder/Shover/Pusher, and the object ignoring on the other hand. A traditional ghost could then still be created whenever needed, by simply assigning a Pusher to an object-ignoring lemming, but the two aspects would no longer be automatically linked to each other.

In any case, let's keep the all-grey scheme reserved for such possible future uses, and go with grey shirts + green hair for neutral lemmings! Ichotolot's creations look nice, too, and I'd love to see them as separate regular sprites for certain styles. If yellow pants became the new standard for neutrals, my Egyptian sprites (green hair, yellow shirts, dark skin) would run into issues ...

[namida]

I've said on several occasions that ghosts will not be returning, so we can stop worrying about the "might it conflict with ghosts if they come back in the future?" argument. The only gameplay features from previous culls that have a chance of returning are antisplat pads (these will be returning in 12.7), triggered animations (currently no plans to restore it, but I'm not opposed to restoring it so if enough interest exists I can consider it), and wrap (no plans for this one either, but again, I'm open to it if enough potential for it can be shown).

Now, let's continue this discussion without giving any weight to hypothetical situations that will never happen.

[Strato Incendus]

Even though ghosts won't return, it's still confusing for older players. Kind of like some people wanted to re-use the animation objects of slowfreeze and radiation for e.g. fire objects. That's just weird for everyone who has seen these same sprites do something completely different.

I guess the general question is: Should neutral lemmings somehow go along with the regular sprites of the currently used style or not?

For example, green hair and grey shirts might be fine for most styles, but what if I use e.g. the Highland style? Regular sprites are red-haired with blue shirts now, so should the neutral lemmings be red-hair, grey shirts?

What about sprites where the shirt color changes for regular sprites? Are neutral Shadow lemmings going to have dark hair, grey shirts?

Finally, perhaps the most problematic question: What about the L2 Polar lemmings? Those have grey hair, i.e. when I make one of them an athlete, their shirts become grey. Consequently, they could be easily confusable with neutral lemmings if used in the same level.

[namida]

I guess the general question is: Should neutral lemmings somehow go along with the regular sprites of the currently used style or not?

For example, green hair and grey shirts might be fine for most styles, but what if I use e.g. the Highland style? Regular sprites are red-haired with blue shirts now, so should the neutral lemmings be red-hair, grey shirts?

What about sprites where the shirt color changes for regular sprites? Are neutral Shadow lemmings going to have dark hair, grey shirts?

Finally, perhaps the most problematic question: What about the L2 Polar lemmings? Those have grey hair, i.e. when I make one of them an athlete, their shirts become grey. Consequently, they could be easily confusable with neutral lemmings if used in the same level.

Some styles may indeed end up needing to slightly deviate from the normal. Alternatively, we could consider making an exception to "stick to the actual L2 colors" for those styles.

The two recoloring systems (that for recoloring lemmings from one style to another; and that for recoloring a lemming based on them being an athlete, or neutral, etc) are both completely capable of supporting either way forward here.

[ccexplore]

I'd like to see pictures that actually place proposals side-by-side with regular non-neutral lemmings (and maybe also zombies while we're at it), and at probably at the same level of magnification as Crane's picture.  Looking at Crane's picture I still feel like the neutrals need to look more different from non-neutrals.  I do generally like the idea of a grayer lemming over the yellow one proposed, but maybe it's just the brightness of the yellow that is affecting my judgment there.  In principle I should like the yellow ones more because they look much more distinguished from the regular lemmings.

As a point of reference, in Clones, which is the only Lemmings-like game off top of my head that has neutrals, the neutrals have a totally different color than the non-neutrals.  (To be more precise, for multiplayer purposes they support up to 8 colors, and in singleplayer levels you can select one color as controllable, and the rest will then all be neutrals shall you choose to have such entrances and/or pre-placed characters in the level.)  But of course it's much easier on that game because the character design basically consists of a single color unlike lemmings.  On the flip side, it's worth noting that in that game, for better or worse the color of the non-neutrals actually can vary from level to level (the level designer can basically choose which color out of 8 is the controllable one), though you can always tell based on the matching color in the skills buttons.

I imagine that for custom lemmings sprites, it will be necessary to provide them the ability to specify their own colors for neutrals and zombies, especially since many existing custom lemming sprites are apparently just re-colors.

[ccexplore]

Just to throw it out there even though it is probably too radical for some, and maybe too much implementation overhead as well:  we could consider additional means beyond color to distinguish neutrals from other lemmings types.  For example maybe they could even have slightly different sizes like height compared to regular lemmings.

[namida]

Yeah, that's either going to result in blurry or distorted graphics (depending on filter vs straight nearest-neighbour resize), or require an entirely additional set of sprites just for neutrals.

From the next NL update, any styles using custom lemming sprites that are just recolors, don't need to provide spritesheets, they can just put in a text file things like "LEMMING_HAIR xFF00FF" (to make the lemming hair death-magenta colored). Even the destination colors for neutral, zombie, etc recoloring can be done this way. Creators of fully custom spritesheets would need to instead provide a source/destination color pair, but this is already the case for other situational recolors like athletes, zombies, etc - neutral is just one more condition to provide such data for.

With regards to your comments about the yellow - I also agree that the brightness, not the color itself, is what's off-putting about that one; a darker yellow might work more nicely.

This might be a subject to continue discussing throughout the Release Candidate phase, because during this time users can freely experiment with modifying the recoloring data to actually see proposals in action, instead of having to mock-up in a graphics editor or just guess.

[namida]

With the release of V12.7.0-RC, has anyone experimented with changing the neutral colors to see what they do or don't like? (For reference: You want to modify "styles/default/lemmings/scheme.nxmi" using a text editor; changing the $NEUTRAL sections a bit further down - NOT the neutral-related lines near the top in the $SPRITESET_RECOLORING section. This will make sense once you look at the actual contents of the scheme.nxmi file.)

[Crane]

This is my modified scheme file for my colour suggestions.  I do wonder if their clothes are a bit too bright even though the contrast is the same as the blue, and neutral zombies look slightly weird, but neutral lemmings with permanent skills have blue hair as a nice touch.