Plans for V12.10.0

[WillLem]

Another quick suggestion - how about "clickable" buttons for the skill panel?

So, each button would have a "clicked" version (it could be something as simple as a darker recolouring with shading on one side to give the impression of the adjacent button casting a slight shadow) which is displayed when the button is pressed.

As always, happy to help with graphics for this.

[namida]

Alright, so it looks like despite not directly aiming for it, a lot of what V12.10.X will be about comes back to the menu.

Let's take that and run with it. Anything already added to the original post can stay as a V12.10.X-target feature / fix, but beyond that, I'm going to declare that V12.10.X's major feature will now be menu overhauling. Discussion is still ongoing about the exact form this will take.

[Dullstar]

I'd mentioned this in the menu redesign thread a while ago, but it didn't get any helpful response, so I'll post it here as well:

One of my biggest complaints about the current design is the awful, difficult to read color palette inherited from the DOS version.

I've been experimenting a little with some recolors to make the existing menu layouts more readable, but it's a lot easier for me to do this when the color palette is limited than when there's a lot of colors present. I'd like to experiment with recoloring the background from the original game, but the one that ships with NeoLemmix has had a blur effect applied to it that makes it pretty hard to recolor (plus, I'll be honest, I hate this blur effect and think it's the worst possible way to upscale the background). I'd like to know if anyone has an editable version of the original, non-blurred background. It shows up in vanilla Lemmix, but since it's in one of those old DOS game non-standard binary blob formats, I can't get it out directly, which means the only way I could get it would be by taking screenshots from vanilla Lemmix or DOS Lemmings and trying to piece it together by combining multiple tiles of it until I have one that's completely unobstructed. This would be quite tedious, and it's not clear where the tile boundaries are, which means that it would be easy to accidentally introduce an offset as well as being difficult to tell how big a tile should be. If someone who's more knowledgeable about the original game's file formats could get me the unblurred background in any format that can be opened by Paint.NET or GIMP, I should be able to experiment with recoloring the background as well as the text.

[WillLem]

If someone who's more knowledgeable about the original game's file formats could get me the unblurred background in any format that can be opened by Paint.NET or GIMP, I should be able to experiment with recoloring the background as well as the text.

@namida - could you create one of your magic tools to extract the menu graphics from the Amiga menu via a savestate, in the same way that you can extract the in-game LVLs?

EDIT: here's a menu savestate just in case the answer is "yes!"

[namida]

No luck on that one. I don't have the faintest clue what I'm looking for in this case.

In the case of the level data, I knew from previous discussions that Amiga uses the same LVL format as DOS. I also figured, given the age of the game, that it probably stores the decompressed LVL data in memory verbatim, so I simply searched for something I knew would be in the LVL file (specifically, the level's title) to locate where in memory it was. Figuring out the rest from there was just a matter of knowing the LVL file format. In this case, I neither know the format of the graphics nor any "known data" that I can use to look for.

On the other hand, when I feel up to it I can very likely extract the DOS version's one from MAIN.DAT, as the format for that is well documented.