Ideas for new sprites / "tribes" (either just recoloured OR completely reshaped)

[WillLem]

Thanks a lot, WillLem! I was wondering how I could specify the different shadings for high-res for my sprites as well, but I think this is probably a unique property of your Lemmina sprites? Or is there a way to do this for the default sprites as well, by simply specifying two consecutive lines per hair-, clothes-, and skin colour?

Because at least Armani's suggestion for the Asian sprites actually seems to have been set up that way (with two different shades of red for the clothes and two different shades for the skin).

Yes, that's basically it: note that the scheme.nxmi file only needs to be placed into the low-res versions' folder, and the hi-res version will follow suit. No pun intended.

The way I did it was by specifying the two shades as separate values in scheme.nxmi, thus:

$SPRITESET_RECOLORING
   LEMMING CLOTHES xHEXVALUE1 (lighter shade)
   LEMMING CLOTHES xHEXVALUE2 (darker shade)
   etc, doing the same for skin and hair

Then, in the $STATE_RECOLORING section, each value has it own dedicated set of instructions:

  $ATHLETE
    FROM xHEXVALUE1
    TO xHEXVALUE3
  $END

  $ATHLETE
    FROM xHEXVALUE2
    TO xHEXVALUE4
  $END

Where HEXVALUE 1 and 2 are the original chosen clothes colour, and 3 and 4 are the desired target colours for, in this example, the Athlete's clothes.

Hope this helps!

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks a lot, WillLem! I've noticed though that the Lara Croft style actually contains separate pngs of each sprite in its modified form (i.e. with teal shirts, like the Lara Croft lemmings are supposed to look anyway - not like purple-blue Lemminas that are merely being recoloured). Did you recolour these by hand? If so, what does the scheme.nxmi file actually do, aside from changing colours for athletes, zombies, and selected lemmings?

And isn't an overload of additional sprites (in terms of actual png images for each type of sprite) precisely what we wanted to avoid by having the recolouring feature?

Or can a scheme.nxmi file also apply to a set of sprites that is not contained within the style folder as "lemmings" and "lemmings_hr"? With theme.nxmi files, you can simply refer to the sprites at the top (LEMMINGS default, for example), without having to include the single png files again.

If not, I get how this method allows you to customise more about your sprites, i.e. two different shades for each part. But I think it might lead to a lot of redundancy in terms of pngs if we do this for every sprite we recolour, because then each of those sets would have to come with its own set of pngs again?

In the meantime, happy St. Patrick's Day! Here are the Irish lemming sprites!

[namida]

I just want to make it clear that any creations in this topic are ONLY going to be accepted into the NL styles download if they're being used by actual styles / packs, or involve an actual proper custom spriteset rather than just recoloring info for an existing one (and "it is just a recolor, but I made it as PNGs instead of using theme.nxtm" does not work as a loophole to sidestep this). They will not be added purely "because they exist" - enjoy experimenting for sure, and any actually-being-used content that comes out of it can definitely be included. But there's simply too much room for creating stuff here, for every variation to be included just for the sake of doing so.

[Strato Incendus]

No worries, namida; I'm pretty sure nobody in here expects any of these sprites to become standard inclusions. Anyone who uses them for their specific levels should obviously distribute the required sprites together with their pack. Although I believe that, in case a player forgets to install them, there will be a fallback to just default sprites instead?

Because I remember you set up this fallback in case a sprite for a particular skill (most recently, the Shimmier) is missing. If somebody downloads e.g. Lemminas and the required graphic sets, but without downloading the Lemminas sprites, then simply all the sprites would be missing, and consequently, the NeoLemmix player would fall back to default blue-green Lemming sprites, wouldn't it?

[namida]

If somebody downloads e.g. Lemminas and the required graphic sets, but without downloading the Lemminas sprites, then simply all the sprites would be missing, and consequently, the NeoLemmix player would fall back to default blue-green Lemming sprites, wouldn't it?

Theoretically yes, although in practice Lemminas only has one style, and the Lemmina sprites are part of that style, so this wouldn't actually happen. A more likely situation would be if a new skill was added in the future, and the Lemmina sprites didn't have a graphic for the new action. (I consider this "if" because I suspect it's very unlikely that WillLem would be slack on updating his sprites. It's probably more likely this would happen with the official Xmas sprites than the Lemmina ones.)

[WillLem]

Did you recolour these by hand? If so, what does the scheme.nxmi file actually do, aside from changing colours for athletes, zombies, and selected lemmings?

Yes; I generally prefer to do things like this manually so I know exactly what result I'm getting during the creation process.

And isn't an overload of additional sprites (in terms of actual png images for each type of sprite) precisely what we wanted to avoid by having the recolouring feature?

I guess so; but, beyond the Lemminas (and now the Lara Crofties!) I have no plans to create any further spritesets or recolourings: I'll leave that to you to have a play with!

Or can a scheme.nxmi file also apply to a set of sprites that is not contained within the style folder as "lemmings" and "lemmings_hr"? With theme.nxmi files, you can simply refer to the sprites at the top (LEMMINGS default, for example), without having to include the single png files again.

From what I can tell, the theme.nxmi is all that's needed for purely recolouring purposes: scheme.nxmi only needs to be played about with if you're creating new sprites.

In the meantime, happy St. Patrick's Day! Here are the Irish lemming sprites!

Looking good! Hopefully I can get these to work...

Side note: I can't get the Donald Trump and other sprites to work btw, in either resolution. I choose them as the theme but I'm only getting default colourings...

I just want to make it clear that any creations in this topic are ONLY going to be accepted into the NL styles download if they're being used by actual styles / packs

I'll be making willlem_laracroft into a full-fledged style pack in due course... no plans to make any others though, I think I have enough for now!

A more likely situation would be if a new skill was added in the future, and the Lemmina sprites didn't have a graphic for the new action. (I consider this "if" because I suspect it's very unlikely that WillLem would be slack on updating his sprites. It's probably more likely this would happen with the official Xmas sprites than the Lemmina ones.)

Thanks for the kind comment there, Namida! I will indeed keep my spritesets up to date, and I'll be more than happy to look after the Xmas ones as well.

[Strato Incendus]

Ah, okay. Well, thanks for making the effort to specify two colours each for the Lara Croft sprites - as well as for the manual recolouring - but so far, it doesn't seem necessary to do so: All of my "just-recoloured" sprites also turn to two different shades of their respective colour when I switch to High-Res mode.

Side note: I can't get the Donald Trump and other sprites to work btw, in either resolution. I choose them as the theme but I'm only getting default colourings...

Thanks for reporting the error; how exactly did you go about this? Did you import the entire folder into "styles", and then the theme inside that folder?

They all work perfectly fine for me, and since all of these theme files just refer to and then recolour the default Lemming sprites, for which everyone needs the pngs, I don't see which files I could possibly have on my PC that you don't have.

[WillLem]

All of my "just-recoloured" sprites also turn to two different shades of their respective colour when I switch to High-Res mode.

That'll be thanks to the $SHADES capability that Namida implemented for dual-colourings. It works a treat with certain colours, but I have found that I don't get quite the results I want with certain others. That's just me though: I go into perfectionist mode ad absurdum when it comes to colours/visuals; I would expect that the $SHADES function is more than enough for most sprite/theme design requirements.

Thanks for reporting the error; how exactly did you go about this? Did you import the entire folder into "styles", and then the theme inside that folder?

I just extracted strato_lem_trump to the styles folder, with all of its contents... and I do indeed have the default lems sprites where they should be.

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks for the explanation. Did any of the other people who downloaded the Trump sprites (as well as the others) experience these problems? So far it says each sprite type has been downloaded 4 times, so I assume by four different people.

[WillLem]

Quick question as well, regarding sprite recolourings:

Let's say you wanted to create a level pack from the orig and oh_no! tilesets, but with recoloured sprites...

Would you have to create a new style pack with just a theme.nxmi file specifying the recolourings, or could you include theme.nxmi in the root folder of the levelpack itself (thus avoiding having to create a separate style for a recolouring theme)?

[Strato Incendus]

I remember the Old-Formats pack toolkit had an option to select sprites on a per-pack basis vs. on a per-style-used-in-level basis. I always went with the latter one, but technically, it would have been possible to have your entire pack just feature default sprites or just x-mas sprites. The latter option was probably chosen by people who made distinctive custom Holiday packs back in the day?

But of course, in Old Formats, you could basically just choose between default and x-mas anyway; the only exception I know is GigaLem's Millas, and I think he just outright replaced the default sprites with his custom ones in the context of Old-Formats Millas.

In short: I don't know if per-pack choice of a fixed sprite type is even possible anymore in New Formats, because it seems like more flexibility was what people wanted more . What would of course work is simply setting the theme of each of those levels to "Lemminas", or whatever sprite type you want to use, no matter which graphic sets the individual levels are using. But of course, that would change the colour of Builder staircases, umbrellas, pickup skills etc. as well, rather than having those continue to go along with whatever theme would fit the graphic set of a level. And of course, it would be quite tedious to do manually for every single level.

But I guess namida can clarify this.

In the meantime, here's another popular character turned Lemming! With umbrellas, bridges, and Builder sacks made of web!

Note that there is no recolouring of Athletes compared to normal lemmings with these sprites! So this is another case of "aesthetics over strict mechanical fairness". But it simply would not look right if the lemmings sticking to a wall (=Climbers), of all skills possible, were the ones looking precisely NOT like Spider-Man!

Originally, I wanted to use the black symbiont outfit for the athletes. But that's hard to do with such low resolution, plus these sprites would only work with coloured backgrounds then.

And inverting the normal sprites to blue heads and red shirts would also be quite strange, because I'm not aware of any Spider-Man outfit (and there were many!) that looked even remotely close to such a colour scheme.

[Strato Incendus]

And here are two more: English and Arab! (Also, I'm using high-res mode this time...)

The Arab lemmings are my first attempt at recolouring the X-Mas sprites. I tried to create some Star Wars Jawas with it (with brown robes and black faces), only to find out you can't actually recolour the seam of the robes (it always remains white).

Notice how the regular Arab lemmings are in white (sheikhs), the neutral Arab lemmings are in black (women in Nikabs). Athletes still wear green, because... well, that's just the colour of Islam.

Yet, for some strange reason, the Digger still gets recoloured to standard x-mas red (see below, the picture with the pyramid)?

I can't see where to specify that, unfortunately... after all, it's not a permanent skill...

[WillLem]

I'll just bump the question so it doesn't get lost, I think we need to know this for sure really:

Let's say you wanted to create a level pack from the orig and oh_no! tilesets, but with recoloured sprites...

Would you have to create a new style pack with just a theme.nxmi file specifying the recolourings, or could you include theme.nxmi in the root folder of the levelpack itself (thus avoiding having to create a separate style for a recolouring theme)?

[namida]

I remember the Old-Formats pack toolkit had an option to select sprites on a per-pack basis vs. on a per-style-used-in-level basis. I always went with the latter one, but technically, it would have been possible to have your entire pack just feature default sprites or just x-mas sprites.

If I remember correctly, old-formats allowed a style to decide between normal or xmas sprites, and pack creators could customize each set however they liked. Theoretically, the support was there for more than two spritesets, but the lemming graphics had to specifically be built into each pack (they wouldn't be part of the style itself; the style would only specify which one to use).

Let's say you wanted to create a level pack from the orig and oh_no! tilesets, but with recoloured sprites...

Would you have to create a new style pack with just a theme.nxmi file specifying the recolourings, or could you include theme.nxmi in the root folder of the levelpack itself (thus avoiding having to create a separate style for a recolouring theme)?

Allowing the lemmings to be selected by the pack, apart from the question of "when does the style's setting override vs when does the pack's setting do so?", has all the same issues as selecting the lemming sprites seperately from the overall level's theme: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4698.0

However, this "same issues" applies in a positive sense too - if one was implemented, it would be trivial to also implement the other.

[WillLem]

Allowing the lemmings to be selected by the pack, apart from the question of "when does the style's setting override vs when does the pack's setting do so?", has all the same issues as selecting the lemming sprites seperately from the overall level's theme

I think I understand...

Does it work like this?:

---

1. LEVEL has Theme A, for which the Default lemmings sprites are recoloured to have red shirts.

2. Theme A is linked to Style A, and so the recolouring needs to be specified in Style A's folder in a file called theme.nxmi, which provides all of the instructions for Theme A.

3. PACK has multiple Themes, potentially, across several LEVELS. So, if a theme.nxmi file were to be placed in the PACK's folder, any given LEVEL would think: "hang on, am I using Theme A (for example), or the PACK's theme?"

4. Meanwhile, the Editor doesn't have a function to select a Theme based on a PACK that hasn't yet been created. So the Editor's position is: "Choose an existing theme, and that will be the one I'll hard-code to the LEVEL."

---

Between the above four truths, is this where the potential issue could arise?

If I understand correctly, I see why a levelpack couldn't have its own theme.nxmi file. But: would there be another way to implement sprite recolourings without having to create a separate style folder with a single theme.nxmi file in and nothing else?

Perhaps, there could be an option in the Editor to select "Levelpack Theme" under "Theme". This would then instruct the level to look in the levelpack's folder for theme.nxmi rather than a particular style. In all other cases, the theme is whatever else was selected.

But... and I feel like I'm chasing my tail here... if the levelpack hadn't yet been created, you'd be asking the Editor to specify a level theme that doesn't exist.