Rocks'n'Diamonds

The library of levels can be huge

Imagine a way to "bookmark" the levels and store them in a Favorites menú for easy access in the future

A way for scoring or tagging the levels and levelsets would be another idea to sort them in the huge library

Such a tagging system for levels and level sets would indeed be great, and it would indeed be very useful.

In fact, I have something like that already in mind, not for the very near future, but also not as a purely theoretical project for the very far future.

The main issue is that such a tagging/voting system would, in my opinion, make most sense when storing the tagging/voting results not only locally for yourself, but at a central location / central server. That way, you would be able to see which levels and level sets are tagged as being worth playing by other people, making it easier to find the really good levels and sets from the large amount of levels and sets available for R'n'D (especially the ones from the EMC level collection).

This all would make most sense with a central level set archive server, so entering the "levelset" sub-menu would list all local and remote level sets, automatically downloading those sets which are not yet available locally. Adding a level and set tagging to such a level server would then be just a logical extension.

Same repository should contain other people's solutions (tapes), uploaded on an opt-in basis...

I'm particularly interested in solutions to levels I've determined to be impossible (but contained in levelsets whose splash screens earnestly claim they're Now 100% Fixed And Really You Can Solve All Of These)...

Each level could have multiple uploaded solutions with 'author', time stamp, rating by other players, comment area etc. Perhaps some sort of automatic ratings / quality measures as well (duration of solution, analysis of whether it was done in single-step or 'live', score(fwiw), that sort of thing).

Comment area & ratings should be available at the level of:

- levelset archive (e.g.: Emerald Mine Club top-level)
- family of levelsets (e.g.: Down Under Mines)
- levelset (Down Under Mines 02)
- level (Down Under Mines 02/23)
- solution tape

(On one level this is utterly absurd, talking about potentially millions of 'comment areas' of which at most dozens would actually be used; but really, objects potentially worthy of discussion ought to have attached discussion areas...)

Of course strong anti-spam / anti-use-as-a-conduit-for-unrelated-data measures would be needed (sigh).

...

Fortunately the total data size of such an effort is actually minuscule. A copy of every tape of every level ever played on the game, by every player, would probably fit on a currently purchasable USB memory stick (might need to be compressed...) Likewise, the server load would be barely detectable. The whole thing could run on a free VM instance on AWS or the like.