Lemmini

[ccexplore]

Now that I've looked at "We are now at LEMCON ONE", it appears that it's either a problem with the emulator, a problem with the disk dumper, a mistake on DMA's part, or a purposeful addition to the level (it looks somewhat like liquid is flowing out of pipes.)̆ The level appears the exact same way in every disk image I've checked... it always has the water over on the left.

Wow now I'm really intrigued.̆ So you are saying that on Lemmini/DOS Lemmings, you see the large stack of liquid, but there's none when playing the level in the Amiga emulator?

It could still be a rendering engine difference though, but I'd need to take a look at the extracted levels in DOS Lemmings to see.̆ Since it was mentioned that the acid is drawOnlyOverTerrain'd, if there are no terrain pixels where the acid stack is located, then in principle it could be correct that you won't see the acid at all.̆ DOS Lemming's rendering engine is somewhat different in this regard, as it doesn't quite check exactly for terrain pixels per se, but instead checks for pixels on the screen of a certain range of color (I think 8-15 if I recall correctly), and assume those are terrain pixels for the purpose of drawOverTerrain rendering.̆ Meaning if the acid objects overlap, you may see some of the overlapping pixels displayed, despite the flag.

We can check for the water's existence by attempting to reach it and see whether it affects any lemmings, although it's also possible that they may be "fake objects" like how in DOS Lemmings objects with index/z-order > 15 are fake and does not affect lemmings.̆ In any event, I definitely will look at this when I get home from work.

[Mindless]

Now that I've looked at "We are now at LEMCON ONE", it appears that it's either a problem with the emulator, a problem with the disk dumper, a mistake on DMA's part, or a purposeful addition to the level (it looks somewhat like liquid is flowing out of pipes.)  The level appears the exact same way in every disk image I've checked... it always has the water over on the left.

Wow now I'm really intrigued.  So you are saying that on Lemmini/DOS Lemmings, you see the large stack of liquid, but there's none when playing the level in the Amiga emulator?

On the Amiga emulator the water is there.  On Lemmini, when playing the Amiga levels, the water is there.  I've checked all the Amiga disk images to make sure it wasn't just a bad dump, but on every one, the water shows up.  This water is not in the DOS levels.

[ccexplore]

I'm finally home and so was able to check on my Amiga emulator, and now I know what you're talking about.  That is kinda neat.

I got confused because covox was calling it a glitch, so I kept thinking that it is showing up when playing the extracted Amiga level on DOS Lemmings or Lemmini, but that it doesn't show up on the Amiga emulator.

But looks like there's no glitch after all.  I haven't yet seen how DOS Lemmings (nor Lemmini) renders the extracted level, but I'm pretty sure it won't look correct--knowing how it renders, DOS Lemmings has either a bug or took a bit of shortcut in how it renders DrawOnlyOverTerrain'd objects, so the color will be wrong I think.

[covox]

Apologies for the confusion. I only assumed that it was a glitch because it seemed... well, horribly out of place in comparison with the DOS one. I didn't actually check the Amiga version, however The Lemmings Solution (which I always thought had shots of the Amiga version with the background changed) shows no liquid on the poles.

If this was intentional, I'm surprised they didn't at least flick the upsideDown modifyer to disguise all the bubbly bits.

[ccexplore]

If this was intentional, I'm surprised they didn't at least flick the upsideDown modifyer to disguise all the bubbly bits.

Well, if it's boiling acid and they are tubes, why wouldn't the bubbles be rising in the portion of acid that are in the "tubes"?

The bubbles I'd say actually makes the liquid inside the "tubes" look more like liquid rather than just a static, unanimated block of green.̆ I'll admit though that the bubbles are a bit big relative to the tube size, and since the stacking is so regular, the bubbles are spaced too evenly and thereby look a little artificial.

The whole thing does look kinda like the acid being partly sucked up the tubes via capillary action.̆ It's at least a good effort at a neat idea, even if it does end up looking slightly odd.

As for the Lemmings Solution screenshots, I believe people have said they come from the Windows version (I guess the low-res graphics if that's the case).

Anyway, for the benefit of those without an Amiga emulator, here's a screenshot of what we are talking about, using the WinUAE emulator on my computer:

[ccexplore]

I guess since Mike has started frequenting the forums again, maybe we can ask him whether the "acid in tubes" visual effect in Fun 20 is intended or not.

[covox]

I stand corrected. Of course, one could interpret it as the tubes ending at the middle actually depositing a stream of acid into the pond :p

Amiga lemmings seems to intentionally blit these in reverse (?) in order to hide the blue bit atop the acid, which looks pretty good (apart from the niggling wave at the top of the pipe).

[ccexplore]

I checked a few other versions.

The SNES version does not have that "acid in tubes" look on that level, even though in general the levels look similar to the Amiga version (or more accurately, like the Lemmings Solution screenshots).

The Genesis/Megadriver version of Lemcon is redesigned to take less space, so the entire part left of entrance is effectively removed and replaced with something simpler with no acid.

The Windows version, in general, apparently looks exactly like DOS Lemmings.

The Mac version is hi-res only, but to my surprise, it does have the same "acid in tubes" look:


(yes, they did botch it up a little, with the "wavy" parts in the stack still exposed)

So I'm not sure where exactly the screenshots for the Lemmings Solution came from.̆ I'd like to try out the Atari ST version but I'll have to download it from somewhere along with a suitable ST emulator. ̆It looks like the "acid in tubes" look is in a few selected versions but not many.

[covox]

Intriguing

In the end I just compromised and used the Lemmings Solution rendition in my patchfile. Hopefully it won't draw extensive criticism from trainspotters.

[ccexplore]

Ah I see, I forgot you're planning to make a clone of the game.

I for one have no problem at all with your choice of forgoing the Amiga look in that level.̆ The Amiga acid-in-tube is an interesting concept but I must say it is not totally successful to my eyes.

[wysiwyg]

Personally I'd quite like to see the amiga levels in Lemmini. I know the differences are purely aesthetic and have no affect on any solutions (as far as I know), but even just a row of lava is slightly more interesting than black space.

The game could still extract the levels that are identical to the amiga ones, and so the copyright method would still work.

I remember the effect in the tubes from Poles Apart from years ago playing it on the amiga and thinking it was a cool idea (even if it does look slightly dodgy), but there seems to be a problem loading the amiga level in Lemmini, as some of the water at the bottom doesn't appear  :huh:

Also because of the resized graphics, the water in Save Me doesn't quite reach the right hand side if loaded into Lemmini.

[ccexplore]

Well, now that Mindless made the Amiga levels available in LVL format, you can in principle get Amiga levels in Lemmini as follows:

1) make a copy of the WinLemm data
2) in the copy, replace all the WinLemm LVLs with Mindless's Amiga LVLs
3) force Lemmini to re-extract resources from the modified copy of WinLemm data

The only snag right now is that the Amiga LVLs are named differently than the WinLemm LVLs, so step 2 would be quite tedious to do manually.  Though I guess I can write a program to map them from one to the other.

Oh, and I forgot how to do step 3, but 0xdeadbeef should be able to help out there.

[EricLang]

Why not make a new levelpack for Lemmini, keeping the "old" one intact?
Lemmini is very flexible in this respect.
Lemmix will support this kind of "batch-conversions" in the future.
So another option now is the manual one:
Open each level in Lemmix and do a "Save As Lemmini".
After that you have to create one or two inifiles two let Lemmini know how two handle the order etc.

[0xdeadbeef]

If the differences between the Amiga version and Windows version are minor e.g. a few block added and/or drawing order changed in a few levels, I could also let my patching algorithm handle this. However my "real life" job cost me all the time and attention lately, so I didn't really follow the discussion.
If the changes are bigger, I support the idea of creating a level pack.

[wysiwyg]

Well I've checked a few of the levels and there doesn't seem to be any differences in the drawing orders. There were a few less Terrain pieces in Poles Apart in the amiga version which I think were from the 'island' on the right and are probably covered in water

The only other differences so far are the extra objects forming rows of water across the bottom of some of the levels, and the 'acid in the tubes' effect in Poles Apart (which doesn't seem to work properly in Lemmini).

I'll check some more if I get time.