Rocks'n'Diamonds

In The Exception Two level 64 (levels/Emerald Mine Club/emc_exception_2/64). I reach a place where I need a rock to drop through a quicksand to crack a nut. The only available rock is in a blocked quicksand above a magic wall which is already running (and infinite). emc_exception_2-64.png If this le...

R'n'D writes .rocksndiamonds/cache/artworkinfo.cache on every single startup! Even if there are no changes at all (which is usually the case).

This probably isn't great for performance; moreso, flash devices don't like extra write burden.

It is not that urgent! :)

I just went to pull that and ... did you forget to push to repo? I've got that origin/HEAD is at 5eec6f3

emc_exception_2/34 is solved! (now stuck on 45... I can get all the emeralds and within breathing distance of the exit, but that damn balloon... and no, can't get out / back to where I came from, then trek all the way across the level to go outside and wrap around to those other exits... a single dy...

There remains one tiny problem, which doesn't really need fixing, but could be: When in single-step mode, if you step past the left/right end of the screen (thus wrapping), the display remains focused on the place you wrapped from. It corrects on the next input key, even if it's just a quick press o...

Well, I'll be grabbing and building that my-logical-tomorrow :)

Sounds good!

When I `strace` startup of R'n'D, it opens thousands of files even when its cache/artworkinfo.cache is completely up to date. For instance it opens 878 levelinfo.conf files (in the process calling 1368 stat(), 878 access(), 878 open() calls). With everything cached in memory (2nd consecutive run), i...

Comparing those two files now, they're clearly different. I must have had some error on my command line. But comparing them with imagemagick `compare` produces a result that looks the same as last time -- and I thought I had command-line-edited my way from one operation to the other. So who knows. I...

I'm dubious, but there is at least a great deal of weight on the 'off-by-one' side and unlikely to be a whole lot on the other. (Ah, and I see emeraldx11 doesn't have its own level editor, so that helps quite a bit...)

Levelset 'The Exception Two', level 35 (file: levels/Emerald Mine Club/emc_exception_2/35 ). I reach the exit still needing one emerald. I've been over the whole thing in slow motion multiple times, can't find anywhere I'm missing anything -- except one thing around coordinates [40,20] in the level....

So now I go comparing... most of the image files in gfx_amiga_mine_01.{ecs,aga}/graphics are identical! Only emc_players.pcx and emc_objects.pcx differ; and both have the same resolution, and appear visually indistinguishable to me when I flash them back and forth onscreen. The AGA 'objects' file ha...

Even though I was an Amiga user back in the day(*), whenever I see that choice of 'ECS vs AGA' I am uncertain which is expected to be 'better'. Searching the internet for information about the chipsets, I see both supported a wide variety of resolutions and color schemes, so in fact knowing which ch...

(An aside, not strictly related but very much in the same conceptual neighborhood: while on the main menu on desktop, I am frequently re-surprised to note that typing 'q' does not invoke the 'quit' option!)

As I was googling last night for "emerald mine" "wrap", one of the main things I ran into was the 2010 flamewar between you & Dave (t=1976), in which he constantly insisted that his engine's EMC emulation was perfect while all of your work was trash. wheeee. (It is also obvio...