Rocks'n'Diamonds

Hi everyone, downloaded RnD a while ago, finished the tutorials and the Boulderdash levelset, now stuck on EM level 73, there is no green key, and not enough emeralds, the yamyams don't give you anything. Help.

Welcome to the community!

On that level, you need to kill all three yamyams, and then the last one will give a green key (and some emeralds).
If you wish, you can go into the editor, select the yamyam, press the "?" button and go over to the config tab to see the "inner workings" of how the yamyam is set up.

Did that, still no key/emeralds.

Oh, I think I know what's happening; you need to kill them with the rocks. The bombs will just eliminate them, contents and everything.

Thanks, now I got past that level, the next ones were easy, but how do you do 83, the editor won't let me change the engine to EM, and after I tested it with the engine, the dynamites adn yamyams showed up as ?s.

You need two players for levels 82-101, but I think they're all solvable otherwise, without switching engines. The question marks appear because the RnD dynamite and YamYam (random start direction) are incompatible with the EM engine.

The rocks/bombs column is the problem, it works in EM but not RnD.

Definitely sounds like a compatibility issue then; the reason for this is that these levels were imported directly from Emerald Mine without editing. Although nearly all of the original EM levels work fine in the native Rocks 'n' Diamonds engine, a few issues like that always seem to pop up.
Your best bet may be to just skip that level and move on.
Or, you could download the entire EMC collection here http://www.artsoft.org/rocksndiamonds/levels.html (assuming you have space), where all the levels are set to play in the EM engine. You may come across the occasional unsolvable level in some of the more far-fetched sets, but with 50,000 levels at your disposal, I'm sure that won't be a damper on the fun.

RTADash wrote:Although nearly all of the original EM levels work fine in the native Rocks 'n' Diamonds engine, a few issues like that always seem to pop up.

heh blah blah wasnt designed to play blah blah

So the EM engine was made only for the EMC levelset, and the original EM levelset wasn't fixed to include EM elements only? OK, one more question, can you get past that "this level is read-only" message?

> So the EM engine was made only for the EMC levelset,

Yes, that's right (well, if you replace "only" with "mainly").

> and the original EM levelset wasn't fixed to include EM elements only?

Well, no -- the EM level set in the "classic original games" section is a very early/old result of a conversion of that original Emerald Mine level set to the R'n'D level format to play it in R'n'D. As R'n'D originally wasn't designed as an exact Emerald Mine clone, not all original EM elements were directly matched by a R'n'D "EM style" element before the introduction of the native EM game engine. (See the slightly different yamyam elements RTADash mentioned, for example.)

So what is currently missing (a task for myself) is just changing this classic level set from my old conversion to the original level files, which will then let R'n'D use the native EM engine to play this set (which then should also make that level 83 solvable).

As RTADash mentioned, a simple solution is to just play the level set "Emerald Mine (Kingsoft)" in the EMC collection, which is the exact same set, but defined to use the native EM engine.

> can you get past that "this level is read-only" message?

Yes! Please have a look at the corresponding entry in the R'n'D FAQ for a detailed description how to do this:

http://www.artsoft.org/rocksndiamonds/m ... ocId360699

Holger wrote:> So the EM engine was made only for the EMC levelset,

Yes, that's right (well, if you replace "only" with "mainly").

nope, thats wrong. i wrote it long before the "EMC levelset" existed.

> > > So the EM engine was made only for the EMC levelset,
> > Yes, that's right (well, if you replace "only" with "mainly").
> nope, thats wrong. i wrote it long before the "EMC levelset" existed.

Clarification: "the EM engine" in the context of R'n'D of course does not mean "the game Emerald Mine for X11", but "the native Emerald Mine engine in Rocks'n'Diamonds". It was indeed added to R'n'D to be able to play the EMC level set.