afer almost a year of being dead-in-the-water; we recently put a bunch of effort in place to turn this into a real title after the talks with SCEE ended up going no-where. we teamed up with an excellent artist guy and audio/sound effects dude to refresh the Lemmings concept with a 2011 update - in a pre-historic setting!

 
 
in-game screenies - completely new but totally familiar?

It already is starting to get a lot of rave-reviews from users - but we are not yet finished! Loads more levels to be added to the game and of course a bunch of improvements to make Caveman the game year for 2011 (a modest goal - we know)!

we have received a lot of attention and support from many users and websites over the world around bringing Lemmings into the radar for iPhone and Palm Pre - even with the cease & desist, it has not put a damper on our enthusiasm for this title.

in the event we have no success talking with SCEE (Sony Entertainment) we will rework all the artwork, audio, music and levels to create a brand new title based on the engine - which we wrote from scratch without on our own based on observation in 2001.

we did start an independent version a while ago got side tracked with other tasks.

level 1 - new artwork redesign (late 2009)

as much as we would love to have this title reach everyone, we have unfortunately been contacted and instructed by Sony's intellectual property and legal department to remove our Lemmings conversion from our websites and distribution channels.

SCEE - Sony Entertainment Cease & Desist Letter

while are did this as a tribute to the game - we can only hope that Sony actually does a conversion for platforms like iPhone and Palm Pre in the near future. we will open communication with Sony to explore the rights for these platforms!

stay tuned!

while many of you anxiously wait for this - here is a video of it in action on an iphone.

after a mere 36 hours (beat that!) - the news you have been waiting for! we are complete!

submission for iOS (iphone/ipod touch/ipad) is complete

submission for web os (palm pre) is complete

it is now up to the various "superior" approval boards to handle the rest!

we have successfully ported over 10 year old Palm OS source code that we had lying around to these new platforms - however, more importantly it was done solely with the efforts of Aaron Ardiri, the chief guy behind Mobile 1UP. if you have enjoyed this live-blog and want to support us - you can paypal us a donation to:

we have reached our milestone for this effort and downloads are available!

we did a lot of play testing and cosmetic improvements this morning and we are very happy with the result - it has been an amazing journey over the last few days to make this happen, we even surprised ourselves! it has been a long time since we coded this way!

it is key to point this is a "homebrew" version - not the official, so we added this:

just to be 100% clear that this isn't an official version

yes - exactly 32 hours into the process we have a beta for play review.

the end is so close?

we will give it some internal play testing to see if everything is fine and there are some minor changes/tweaks to make but otherwise we'll be ready for submit for review on all the various usual distribution places for both iPhone/iPod Touch and the Palm Pre.

after taking a small break for dinner (have to eat guys!) - new update

a summary screen showing your progress or failure on a level

the user interface is pretty much now complete, this is a fully playable game now with only a few small changes to make before it can be considered for submission/publishing. this will definitely kill a lot of time for people - we are already play testing internally.

it is always the user interface that takes so long - but here is an update!

you can preview levels before playing them

we of course cannot post all 120 level previews but this is going so well - the preview is exactly 50% of the underlying level bitmap and the configuration matches what was in the original game. select the level to start or go back to the difficultly selection for more!

after a little distraction with fixing the audio - we are now working on new screen designs.

we mentioned earlier that the music and audio samples were 8khz - this means 8000 cycles per second. cd quality is commonly refereed to as 44khz (44100 cycles per second) - what does this mean to lemmings? well, the big term used in the development world is latency.

latency defines how long it takes to respond - in the demo it takes a while to play a sound when an action is performed. going from 8khz to 22khz means the response is 2.75x faster.

/**
 ** source piece to convert 8khz to 22khz on the fly (2.75x scaler)
 **/

// 8khz
//   _MemMove(sound -> pcm, data, size);

// 22khz (converted from 8khz)
     src = data;
     dst = sound -> pcm;

     idx = 0;
     for (i=0; i<cnt; i++)
     {
       idx += 93; if (idx > 256) { idx -= 256; src++; }
       *dst++ = *src;
     } 

this is some magic code we wrote a few years ago - basically we need to stretch the 8khz audio buffer over to a 22khz one. this is done by writing the same value until 2.75 cycles passes. a perfect way to do this fast? 93/256 is 2.75 - we use an internal counter to check when this period passes, the result is perfect.

we have successfully ported all the code we need from the Palm OS version over to our new development environment, so any new features now are focusing on the new user interface and playability on the new devices.

"just dig" ala lemmings font

in less than 24 HOURS of effort we have a fully playable version!

screen grabs of the first level in each difficulty!

you can now play the first levels of fun, tricky, taxing and mayhem on your desktop!

we are looking at how to best handle the user controls and of course the selection of levels to play - but all the core parts are there (gameplay) including that retro music and cool sound effects. check out the different difficulties for the various music!

well - even if we are doing this live, this just proves we are human!

grr - notice how the id's for the resources change between lines?

it is one thing to see the little green dude walking over the screen but what about partying to those awesome tunes the original game had!? surely you remember those classics (some listed below) and the cute "lets-go" and "oh-no" sounds when the lemmings pop when nuked.

• can can
• she'll be coming 'round the mountain
• ten green bottles

to gloat in the retro goodness; we'll even keep the original 8khz audio format - it also allows us to keep a smaller binary. our development environment has support for playing music and mixing samples on the fly, using the classic PCM (pulse code modulation) format - where we actually mix the audio wave on the fly.

the PCM representation of the "pop" sound at 8khz

we use a tool called audacity to convert audio files into raw PCM audio format for mixing - while we could go with existing music (mp3, ogg) and audio (wav) formats; to avoid any computational overhead and to have full control we mix everything ourselves.

want to know about the history of the game - check out Mike Dailly's (creator) writeup:

working on this effort "solo" surely takes it out of you - almost 16 hours today.

it has been an extremely long day and lots of progress has been made with the port, the majority of work now is around interaction design and looking at a new user interface for the game selection. music and sound effects are also the final piece of the puzzle.

we have been receiving a lot of cool emails and messages from people!

we are definitely past the half way point in this port - not bad for a day!

we started on this 24 hours ago - where are we exactly?

we just got the automatic release of lemmings working so now we can see lots and lots of lemmings on the levels - we can also nuke them (gonna have to make returning to menu another key). all in all - the progress has been great.

we should have a playable "demo" in a few hours without any problem.

we figured we would give it a spin on the palm pre - amazing!

yes, it looks lovely in real life as well!

not even 24 hours in (including some sleep) and we have our first walking lemming!

the first walking lemming - following the terrain as expected

this definitely calls for a new mac osx binary to download and play around - you cannot control the lemmings yet, but you can switch the levels and see the little bugger fall to their death or walk back and forth forever waiting for you to control them.

got a slight distrction - will go to lunch after this entry :)

how the mask relates to the foreground bitmap

the lemmings engine uses a pixel perfect collision detection system and this is done via the use of a mask - an example is shown above, to highlight the different types of "ground" that can exist within the game. if the mask has white - the player can freely move around, different colors of gray/black however mean something completely different.

diggable areas are marked as black rgb(0,0,0) and non-diggable areas as dark grey rgb(128,128,128) - these do not get removed by explosions or digging. there is however, a special type marked in light grey rgb(204,204,204) allows for directional digging only, where the lemming must be facing a specific direction to dig.

wow - it is amazing how coding styles change in 10 years!

some of the core logic behind some of the lemming movements

a very productive morning - the core "movement" engine of the lemmings is around 1,000 lines of code. after putting a few stubs in place and cleaning it up a little - it compiles (yay). the code isn't as pretty as we would have hoped but it does not stop the porting process.

been doing a lot of things the last two hours, getting all the sprites into the right formats and cut and pasting some code from the Palm OS version and making it all work. progress takes time; but we are moving along!

a new version (mac osx only sorry) is now available showing the basic loading of level configurations and some elementary animtions (clock, fires) in addition to be able to pause it.

you want to see something real right?

a walking lemming sprite and the resulting animation

there are a lot of individual sprites within the lemmings game - in fact, each individual sprite is 16x16 pixels in size. the final sprite bitmap with all the individual frames is 128x848 - that is approximately 424 individual frames! they must have gone cross-eyed.

earlier on we showed how the original Palm OS lemmings game had the level configuration defined - works well for PRC files but a little more of a hassle for the modern platforms. it is much nicer to define a single configuration file for each level.

a new version of the level configuration information

maybe we should have started earlier today - but it was lovely weather here in stockholm.

(... at least i'll try to get some sleep ...)

we figured we'll do one better. doing a timeless classic that everyone wants and most importantly, since this live blog is the effort of an individual and not a team - with much less resources! blogging and coding at the same time makes the process a little longer - but, it will be worth all the effort in the end!

ok - we know it is not a full game yet, but it has only been a few hours. for those who are lucky enough to have a Mac OSX machine - here is a binary for you to download! we would also give you iphone and palm pre binaries - but do not blame us :)

we apologize for not building a windows binary yet - that requires windows to be started (eek)

it should start up easy enough and show a sexy boot screen that fades out to black and then gives you the option of choosing a game pack (FUN, TRICKY, TAXING, MAYHEM). it will by default load the first level - you can then use:

[-]  - go to previous level
[+]  - go to next level
nuke - return to pack selection

we just got word that the mobile gadgeteer at zdnet has picked up the live-blogging - perfect timing for us to send a proof of concept to them which we are in the process of making available to everyone else to download.

now we have all the foundations in place - it is all about getting down to the nitty gritty and actually showing something on screen. the level bitmaps are 640x128 - so to make them of any use on the iphone and palm pre, we'll need to do some special pixel handling.

low level programming - creating the screen bitmap on the fly

looks complicated? nah - its simple pointers and C :)

what gets displayed to the user - perfect!

since the dimensions of the display are 480x320 - we only really want to draw a small region 240x128 blown up here, our next step is to introduce a variable to allow the display to move left/right to show the complete area of the level.

boy are we glad we've done this before :)

we develop in our own cross-platform development environment that builds native binaries for each platform - our code is written purely in C so we do not violate any of the distribution developer agreements (ie: Apple - section 3.3.1) - we build everything using platform tools.

we have our first binaries! the show the boot and home screen right now (but, do have all the resources) - this is typically where the fun stuff begins because we have finished with the project setup. the good thing is that everything we work on from now on is for all platforms.

the original artwork as a 256 color gif image - however for it to be of any use for us moving forward, we need to convert it into something more useful that we can rely on.

$ convert.sh


#!/bin/sh 

for i in `ls *.gif | sort`
do
  j=`echo $i | sed 's/gif/bmp/g'`
  convert $i -type truecolor $j
  echo "convert $i to $j"
done

the above shell script uses the excellent open-source and free imagemagick toolset to convert the bitmaps into raw 24 bit BMP files which consist of RGB values that we can optimize and convert to what we need within resources. each bitmap now is 245,814 bytes in size - 640x128 @ 24bit + 54 bytes header.

since we are designing this with cross-platform in mind - we are not going to store them in some "platform specific" format, we actually will deal with all the compression and handling on our own. as resources, the following setup will be used:

FUN:    base id = 0x2000
TRICKY: base id = 0x3000
TAXING: base id = 0x4000
MAYHEM: base id = 0x5000

the mask: 0x0ff0 will determine the level number itself
the mask: 0x000f will determine the bitmap, mask and level configuration

it is always good to allow yourself the ability to define a pattern that you can identify for extracting information out of resources. you will find this is a common technique used by developers everywhere - maybe we have been doing this too long *g*

with all the compression in place - the level bitmaps + masks on their own come to 1,472,475 bytes in size. not bad, effectively 12,270 bytes per level. we are using a mixture of compression algorithms, custom built over the years - good for us, bad for hackers.

by now; you've checked out the original levels on ardiri.com and the first part before we really start anything is to know howe we'll deal with the level definition/resources.

the basic artwork - minus any animations and overlays

the mask bitmap - used for determining where lemmings can do stuff

each level has a background bitmap and a mask - defined as 640x128 pixels in size. the background bitmap is used to give the look and feel and the mask is used for logical purposes; effectively defining where lemmings can walk, dig and perform their actions.

in addition; each level has a configuration:

in these we get an idea of where the entry/exit positions are and also the configuration for how many of each type of lemming exist - since we have done all the hard work back in 2001, we really dont want to mess with this again.

now the task is to convert it into resources we can use. the original format was 4bpp (4 bits per pixel), with a palette which seems a bit of a hassle to deal with since we wont be using that screen format for the game itself.

while we dig up all the original artwork for the game - why not take a minute to check out what we are basing this whole effort on - check out the original game!

we will be including 120 levels in the game - just like the original, they have been modified slightly due to restrictions on the platform back then, we will work with this version!

wow - it has been a long time since we have looked at this source code, in fact, we originally did our port for Palm OS back in 2001 - but it went through a few iterations.

the original code was designed to run with a very small dynamic heap; so we had a lot of cheats for dealing with colors and memory allocation, in fact, the original version was actualy 16 grayscale with hacks to make it colorful.

we have posted news items in the biggest forums for iPhone and Palm Pre related development - lets get some traction on some visitors viewing this stuff happen..

now it is time to get down to the business side of things, as one would say in the game