Rocks'n'Diamonds

Hi.

I'm sorry if this has come up before, but I wondered if you'd considdered adding variable game speed to R&D. Having now tried. Having now tried a couple of games of this type (thanks to Martijn's site), it does seem that R&d plays rather quickly, particularly in situations like outrunning chains of bomb explosions or running down benieth a falling rock, in fact, I usually save before attempting something like that (because quite often it results in Rockford getting a very bad headache!).

I freely admit, I'm not the fastest [player in the world (I make frequent use of the option to play without a timer), and not having played games of this type before R&d I might not have quite as well developed Bd reflexes as many people here, however a speed control would serve to reduce a litle of my frustration.

Also, it might serve as a difficulty setting for R&d without altering the game too much, and thus might appeal to gamers of differing abilities.

It could either be set in the settings menue, or controled via buttons or shortcut keys in game (- and = or the pg up and down keys on the number pad for example).

If there is some technical reason why doing this would either not be possible or would involve huge amounts of alteration in the program, fair enough.

If I recall correctly, it was possible using some keys when the game was compiled in debug mode. Someone else please provide the details.

With all pre-releases (last pre-release = 3.2.3-0) you can toggle frame-step-mode by pressing the '0' key on the keyboard.

There's no other speed modes avalible though, there were 10 modes (0-9) avalible in earlier pre-releases (around 3.1.0 or so), but they've been deleted.

And there's no speed modes avalible in the public releases (announced at the main page of artsoft.org/rocksndiamonds) since it can be considered cheating.

So I recommend that you keep doing as you're doing now, using the load and save functions, and you can also use the Space key on your keyboard (or press the Pause button on the tape recorder) to pause the game when you need to do so.

A setup option (and in-game control) to adjust the game speed is, although it can be seen as cheating, a good idea that I already wanted to implement much earlier. (The debug speed controls were just meant for, well, debugging.)

For the cheating issue, it could be solved by lowering the score when lowering the speed of the game or something like that. It could also be recorded in the tape...

After all, real cheating is hard to prevent in an open source game... :-/

Well, I can certainly see the point of the cheating question, sinse moves like grabbing a falling gem out of midair might be made far too easy on lower game speeds. Afterall, nobody ever said that R&d was an easy game and it is certainly a good thing wen you've finally managed to complete a level through a large amount of practice, rather than through easy game options. The save option is always there when needed.

The reduction in score might be a good way of limiting the use of speed options, also, (though I'm not certain how complicated it might be to program), you might considder allowing the authors of level packs the option to disable use of speed control in their levels (it might be fine in a tutorial level set, but not level sets created to be specifically challenging).

Dark wrote:[...] you might considder allowing the authors of level packs the option to disable use of speed control in their levels (it might be fine in a tutorial level set, but not level sets created to be specifically challenging).

Hopefully this option could be overridden if it is put in, the way "Handicap" can be overridden.

...but then, I'm not sure how much I'm for a speed option in the first place...
It might be handy in the level editor to test levels, though.