I’m not dead, and neither is the project!
After a month off to deal with life in Meat-Space, I finally found a “round toit” and resumed work on Lemmings.
A brief update of where things are currently at:
- I’ve ripped out everything, and started fresh
- Lots of focus on structures and proper organisation of data
- Some important decisions have been made
I’ve established some definitive sizes for various bits of data (e.g. the raw and compressed terrain data) and cracked some other structures of the original game (such as ODDTABLE.DAT)
Some important decisions include:
- There’s no possible way to include everything on a single disk, so I’ve given up trying
- I hope to fit the entire ‘fun’ level series onto the first disk, but…
- … I’m not going to do so before moving on!
Basically, I’m going to pick some levels and use those both for coding and for demonstration purposes.
Levels are being chosen based upon their contents, rather than their ‘fun-factor’ – it’s more important that I get to test all of the terrain sets, all of the objects / traps and all of the lemmings abilities – eventually. For now, I’m narrowing the focus to getting some core code working, such as object rendering, basic lemmings, and functional entrances/exits.
I’ve chosen the following to start with, based around the “Dirt” terrain set
1. Just Dig (Fun, Level 1)
- It’s traditional, in that every person who’s ever played Lemmings has completed this level
- It’s simple – an entrance object, an exit object, and a single animated non-interactive object
- Only one skill is needed to complete it, which reduces my coding time
- It’ll let me test the one-way arrows
- Lots of water will help test the speed of non-interactive animated object rendering
- Has non-interactive animated objects being rendered both in front and behind terrain
- Good for testing ‘steel areas’, which protect terrain from being bashed, mined, bombed or dug
