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Jul - The Cutting Room Floor - Lemmings Paintball (PC) New poll - New thread - New reply
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devin

Yoshi
i'm mima irl
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Posted on 08-16-11 10:01:52 AM Link | Quote
"This game exists?" -most people

Lemmings Paintball has a bunch of stuff related to a built-in level editor in LEMBALL.EXE. Whether or not it's still accessible is unknown.











Text strings of interest: 
level\testlvl.lvl

*************

GAME CLOSED DOWN

****************

/NOMUSIC

/NOEFFECTS

/SNDDEBUG

/STATDEBUG

/MEMDEBUG

/NOANIM

/NOZOOM

/TESTALLLEVELS

/EDIT@

/EDIT@

/EDIT@

/EDIT@

/PLAY@

/PLAY@

/PLAY@

/PLAY@

/GRAPHICS

John Ketley is a Weatherman, and so is Michael Fish

Master v1.3

You Stupid, Stupid Man !

OK Smartarse,

How the hell do you expect me to load a level

when you can't even type the name

 in correctly !

 Quit out and try again...

nSkill=

 nLevel=

 Name=


The various debug switches are probably for diagnosing various kinds of runtime errors if/when they occur, based on other text in the EXE. I doubt they do anything really interesting.

The /EDIT@ and /PLAY@ strings are probably related to the level editor, but running the game with those switches doesn't have any obvious effects. The '@' may be a placeholder for some kind of parameter or something.

The /TESTALLLEVELS switch makes the game flip through all the levels at breakneck speed while constantly spewing DLL errors. Not all that useful.

Other crap:

Unused placeholder "about" dialogue


The entire contents of LEMBALL.HLP (the actual help file has a different name)


There may be more interesting stuff stashed in the file PBAIMOG.VSR, which contains pretty much everything that isn't an AVI or MIDI file. It uses an obscure proprietary archive format which I know nothing about.

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paulguy

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Posted on 08-16-11 07:39:24 PM Link | Quote
Paulguy's Post configuration
Have you tried looking at the file in a hexeditor? If it's not too big and copyright issues aren't a big deal, maybe you could post the file? Not sure how that stuff works.

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devin

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Posted on 08-17-11 02:07:54 AM (last edited by devin at 08-17-11 02:19 AM) Link | Quote
I looked at the resource file a bit last night (that is to say, I ran it through strings -n8, but just enough to determine its contents, I didn't make any attempt to figure out the details of the format yet.

I can upload the data file if the game falls within the "Older than the N64/Playstation" rule, but being a PC game from 1996 it may be a bit of a grey area. In any case it's not really that hard to find on abandonware sites.

Edit: I'm having a look at the data file right now. It's just little-endian IFF, but I'm still working on the individual chunk formats.

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Xkeeper

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Posted on 08-17-11 07:35:44 AM Link | Quote
Originally posted by devin
I can upload the data file if the game falls within the "Older than the N64/Playstation" rule, but being a PC game from 1996 it may be a bit of a grey area. In any case it's not really that hard to find on abandonware sites.

I slipped a Get Out of Rule Abiding Free card under your desk yesterday. Now's a good time to use it!
devin

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Posted on 08-17-11 07:53:29 AM (last edited by devin at 08-17-11 04:56 AM) Link | Quote


Here's the game. Here is everything I figured out after about half an hour of looking at the data file. It's not finished but it covers most of the directory chunk format, at least. I don't know if pulling apart the data file will end up yielding any wiki-worthy material, but it's worth trying I guess.

(Spoiler alert: 9913454278 is a good password. The "tutorial" levels are boring)

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devin

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Posted on 08-25-11 07:50:16 AM (last edited by Super Salami Man at 08-25-11 05:40 AM) Link | Quote


Getting closer...

lemball.exe /edit@filenamehere.abc
lemball.exe /play@filenamehere.abc

Edit 2: Here's a copy of the first level which I ripped out with a hex editor (and slightly modified the level's name for testing purposes.) Running it with "/play@test.lvl" allows you to play the level endlessly (completing the level takes you to the same level instead of another one of the built-in levels.)

Unfortunately, here's what happens when attempting to edit it:
Release Version Assertion Failure
Reason: EnoughMemory
In File: VSMEM.CPPAt Line No.: 1677

I'm kind of hoping that this has something to do with the fact that I'm running the game on Vista (even though it's in Win95 compatibility mode.) That assertion failure is probably the only thing stopping me from being able to use the editor.

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Ninji

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Why did my user title say I'm a toaster anyway
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Posted on 08-26-11 12:04:47 AM Link | Quote
Details. Enjoy them.


Parameters for Engine
/paranoid, /showunloading, /showloading, /gc:NUMBER: Unused
/nosmallmemory: Supposed to do something, but unusable?
/memorysize:NUMBER: Supposed to set the memory size (to number * 512kb), but it's hardcoded to 0x300000
/surfaces:NUMBER: Supposed to set the number of surfaces (whatever they are), but it's hardcoded to 80
/debugfile: Supposed to write debug output to debug.out, but crashes the game after a bit
/nodebug: Shows a log window with debug output
/nowait: Quits the game immediately (instead of keeping the log window around) if something goes wrong. No effect without /nodebug?
/wing, /cds, /gdk, /full: Related to graphics rendering?

Parameters for Game
/nomusic, /noeffects, /snddebug, /statdebug, /memdebug, /noanim, /nozoom, /320, /testalllevels, /graphics: not studied
/? and ? (checked for, but specifically do nothing)
/EDIT@name, /PLAY@name: described above by devin

Level Editor
Probably dummied out. Throws an "out of memory" error by default: the game doesn't allocate enough memory.

You have to change the hardcoded memory size: little-endian 32-bit int at offset 0x5584 in the EXE. Starts out as 00300000, I changed it to 00600000 and the editor boots up fine.

However... it does nothing other than zoom out the game screen.

Also, devin mentioned a bunch of dialog boxes. I'm pretty sure there's no code for them: the only dialog-related function lemball imports is DialogBoxParamA, and its only call is for the about box.

Oh well.

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TheKins
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Posted on 09-10-11 05:46:27 AM Link | Quote
Have you considered looking at Lemmings For Windows 95? It was also done by Visual Sciences, so it might also have fun debug stuff left in.

If you don't have it, I still have the original disc.
devin

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Posted on 09-10-11 01:28:46 PM Link | Quote
I have it (it was actually a bonus on my Lemmings Paintball disc), but I haven't really looked for anything interesting in it yet

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Jul - The Cutting Room Floor - Lemmings Paintball (PC) New poll - New thread - New reply


Rusted Logic

Acmlmboard - commit 47be4dc [2021-08-23]
©2000-2022 Acmlm, Xkeeper, Kaito Sinclaire, et al.

31 database queries, 4 query cache hits.
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