How's it going?
Moderators: Flumminator, Zomis
How's it going?
Hey! It's been quite calm around here lately, and though I bet summer laziness got something to do with it, I can also bet most of you are up to something... so, what is your current work-in-progress in RnD field? Especially you, Holger, what are you currently working on?
After I was far too busy at work for the last couple of weeks, I'm now happy to have again more time for continuing development on R'n'D. To be more precise, I'm just about reaching a new milestone in the R'n'D development: The implementation of a 99% compatible Emerald Mine game engine!
This is not an extension or an advanced version of the current R'n'D game engine, but a completely different, independent implementation. This means that you have full compatibility with all existing R'n'D levels from version 3.1.0 and before, but have an additional game engine available that feels and looks exactly like the good old Emerald Mine, plays all old Emerald Mine levels exactly as on the Amiga, and also plays all these thousands of Emerald Mine Club levels just like the original game engine from the Emerald Mine Club did!
For the normal user who just wants to play some classic levels, this is all completely transparent -- you don't have to select the correct game engine to get best "user experience" when playing. Just select the level set and level and start playing just like you did before. All "classic" level sets are now stored in their native format, so there's no level conversion anymore that brought some incompatibilities or unknown elements. When loading such a "native" Emerald Mine level set, the brand new native Emerald Mine game engine is now automatically selected and ready to play those levels. And when creating new levels (or modifying existing levels), you can now simply choose which engine to use in the level editor, which lets you create new levels that play and feel exactly like the classic Emerald Mine from 1987!
At the moment, not all additional elements from the Emerald Mine Club levels are supported by the "main" R'n'D game engine (like the diagonally moving "android" or the element generating "ball"), but these "new" elements (which were previoulsly replaced by "?"s by the R'n'D engine) are of course fully functioning in the new EM engine. The other way round, custom elements will probably never be supported by the new EM engine, but you still have the existing R'n'D engine around for using them.
Other "native" game engines will follow, namely the native Boulder Dash engine and the native Supaplex game engine. But I will first concentrate on fully integrating the new EM engine.
The main part that's still missing and that I'm currently working on is support for custom graphics to use by the new EM engine. At the moment, the engine always uses the "classic" graphics that were used by the Emerald Mine Club disks. Unfortunately (as expected), it uses a completely different format for the graphics (for example, for moving elements it always uses two tile graphics for each movement step, for the two playfield tiles the element is moving from and to), so there's still some work to do to let you use Juergen Bonhagen's great replacement graphics also for the new EM engine, for example (or to define your own custom graphics to use by the new engine). Besides that, the integration of the new engine has already reached a good point now. :-)
Together with the new native EM (or EMC) game engine, there will be a re-release of all available Emerald Mine Club disk levels which I'm also working on at the moment. So if you have already played all 10318 levels from the 113 level sets of the "Emerald Mine Club" level set archive (which you can download from the "Levels & Artwork" section of the R'n'D site), there will be additional fun with the new archive, which will contain something around 20739 levels in 253 level sets (but that's only a snapshot of my current work on the archive, which might still contain some duplicated level sets, or some missing sets; but you get the idea ;-) ).
So, this new set should bring you through the winter (if I manage to release it before spring, that is)... ;-)
For a little summary, here's again my roadmap with the upcoming development milestones:
- version 3.2.0: new native Emerald Mine (Club) game engine
- version 3.3.0: new native Boulder Dash game engine
- version 3.4.0: new native Supaplex game engine
Besides that, I'm also interested on what others are working at the moment. Maybe some new levels, some new custom graphics, or some new solution tapes for existing levels? Let me know, if you like. :-)
This is not an extension or an advanced version of the current R'n'D game engine, but a completely different, independent implementation. This means that you have full compatibility with all existing R'n'D levels from version 3.1.0 and before, but have an additional game engine available that feels and looks exactly like the good old Emerald Mine, plays all old Emerald Mine levels exactly as on the Amiga, and also plays all these thousands of Emerald Mine Club levels just like the original game engine from the Emerald Mine Club did!
For the normal user who just wants to play some classic levels, this is all completely transparent -- you don't have to select the correct game engine to get best "user experience" when playing. Just select the level set and level and start playing just like you did before. All "classic" level sets are now stored in their native format, so there's no level conversion anymore that brought some incompatibilities or unknown elements. When loading such a "native" Emerald Mine level set, the brand new native Emerald Mine game engine is now automatically selected and ready to play those levels. And when creating new levels (or modifying existing levels), you can now simply choose which engine to use in the level editor, which lets you create new levels that play and feel exactly like the classic Emerald Mine from 1987!
At the moment, not all additional elements from the Emerald Mine Club levels are supported by the "main" R'n'D game engine (like the diagonally moving "android" or the element generating "ball"), but these "new" elements (which were previoulsly replaced by "?"s by the R'n'D engine) are of course fully functioning in the new EM engine. The other way round, custom elements will probably never be supported by the new EM engine, but you still have the existing R'n'D engine around for using them.
Other "native" game engines will follow, namely the native Boulder Dash engine and the native Supaplex game engine. But I will first concentrate on fully integrating the new EM engine.
The main part that's still missing and that I'm currently working on is support for custom graphics to use by the new EM engine. At the moment, the engine always uses the "classic" graphics that were used by the Emerald Mine Club disks. Unfortunately (as expected), it uses a completely different format for the graphics (for example, for moving elements it always uses two tile graphics for each movement step, for the two playfield tiles the element is moving from and to), so there's still some work to do to let you use Juergen Bonhagen's great replacement graphics also for the new EM engine, for example (or to define your own custom graphics to use by the new engine). Besides that, the integration of the new engine has already reached a good point now. :-)
Together with the new native EM (or EMC) game engine, there will be a re-release of all available Emerald Mine Club disk levels which I'm also working on at the moment. So if you have already played all 10318 levels from the 113 level sets of the "Emerald Mine Club" level set archive (which you can download from the "Levels & Artwork" section of the R'n'D site), there will be additional fun with the new archive, which will contain something around 20739 levels in 253 level sets (but that's only a snapshot of my current work on the archive, which might still contain some duplicated level sets, or some missing sets; but you get the idea ;-) ).
So, this new set should bring you through the winter (if I manage to release it before spring, that is)... ;-)
For a little summary, here's again my roadmap with the upcoming development milestones:
- version 3.2.0: new native Emerald Mine (Club) game engine
- version 3.3.0: new native Boulder Dash game engine
- version 3.4.0: new native Supaplex game engine
Besides that, I'm also interested on what others are working at the moment. Maybe some new levels, some new custom graphics, or some new solution tapes for existing levels? Let me know, if you like. :-)
Re: How's it going?
oh yes, I've been lazy ever since I come home from France last time...bojster wrote:Hey! It's been quite calm around here lately, and though I bet summer laziness got something to do with it, I can also bet most of you are up to something... so, what is your current work-in-progress in RnD field? Especially you, Holger, what are you currently working on?
(there I have my favorite tree of lazyness). But oh well, in RND-world, here's what's up:I have been working on the files archive a bit lately, fixed many bugs which appeared when trying to implement something new (Thanks to Yoshi348 for reporting 50% of them - while I saw the other 50% myself).
I will try to fix a notification system for the archive, so those users who want can recive statistics in their e-mails about new downloads and new votes on their own files and also new levels from anyone, and also a lot of statistic junk
Sometime during this week, I worked a bit with the new Minesweeper level I've been planning for a long time. It will contain a lot of options like Hex/normal, with-flags/no-flags/set-flags, size_x, size_y, mines_count.
However, I encountered some weird behaviour (not sure if it's a bug or not yet) so I haven't worked on it since then (I started playing good old Settlers 2 instead
)During the time when I worked on Minesweeper I came up with an idea for number teleportation so I built a little quick machine of it (which you can see in the Game, Level and Graphic designers section), I hope it will be useful in future CE development
Other news is that I have re-installed my Windows system this week (which of course deleted my GRUB-bootloader so I don't have access to Linux unless I find my boot floppy).
I have also discovered a program named Lazarus, which is an opensource Pascal language compiler (Like Delphi and Kylix). This might result in RND for Linux in the future (I still haven't tested Lazarus in Linux though
)That's it from me, now I'll reinstall mIRC and see if I can join Flummi and bojster in the #rnd channel on IRCnet. Cya
Wow, so much good news :-)
I must admint that I, as a self-proclaimed tape recorder ;-), have neglected my duties lately, but that was mainly because I got annoyed with constantly encountering unsolvable levels (mainly in EMC levelsets), so... as soon as the new EM engine is implemented, I'll be more than happy to test it hard (provided I have some time) :-) But, of course, most eagerly I'm awaiting the fully compatible Supaplex angine, which will allow all the dirty tricks needed to solve these crazy contribution levels from the old archives ;-)
Keep me informed, please :-)
I must admint that I, as a self-proclaimed tape recorder ;-), have neglected my duties lately, but that was mainly because I got annoyed with constantly encountering unsolvable levels (mainly in EMC levelsets), so... as soon as the new EM engine is implemented, I'll be more than happy to test it hard (provided I have some time) :-) But, of course, most eagerly I'm awaiting the fully compatible Supaplex angine, which will allow all the dirty tricks needed to solve these crazy contribution levels from the old archives ;-)
Keep me informed, please :-)
and how about the DX-boulderdash levels? Are they playable with the boulderdash engine?
Visit my Boulder Dash website at:
http://www.bd-fans.com
Watch my avatar! That orange little thing is Murphy, the Supaplex star!
http://www.bd-fans.com
Watch my avatar! That orange little thing is Murphy, the Supaplex star!
Some news about the new RND Minesweeper (now called "Minesweeper Advanced")...
configuring sizex,sizey and the amount of mines is now possible. I'm not sure but I think there's always 1 mine too much that is placed. I'll investigate this more though. However, there are no range-checkings made, so you can enter some numbers, start the initialization and then never get the game started, this is most likely because the minescount is too big.
Hex and normal (octal) mode is now possible.
Approx 70 CEs
What's next is the following:
- Flagsmode (multiplayer where the object is to find the mines first)
- marking known-mines with flags
- Calculating decent score (currently I have no idea how to use the factors I have)
configuring sizex,sizey and the amount of mines is now possible. I'm not sure but I think there's always 1 mine too much that is placed. I'll investigate this more though. However, there are no range-checkings made, so you can enter some numbers, start the initialization and then never get the game started, this is most likely because the minescount is too big.
Hex and normal (octal) mode is now possible.
Approx 70 CEs
What's next is the following:
- Flagsmode (multiplayer where the object is to find the mines first)
- marking known-mines with flags
- Calculating decent score (currently I have no idea how to use the factors I have)
Hexal and octal minesweeper... This is all way cool! I never thought of such things to be possible when I added custom elements to Rocks'n'Diamonds, although they were quite generic after adding that "change when" conditions. I'm always surprised again even after seeing a lot of examples of tricky CE levels... :-)