Rocks'n'Diamonds 4.4.0.0 released!

[Holger]

Finally! 40 years after the first release of The Game That Started It All, nearly 30 years after the first release of my own little clone of this game, around 20 years after I first planned to add native BD support to it, 10 years after something like a vague announcement in the Boulder Dash forum, and after more than one year of hard work, it is finally done: Rocks’n’Diamonds has a new native game engine that is compatible with levels for the classic game Boulder Dash!

The new game engine is based on the famous BD clone GDash by Czirkos Zoltan, which most probably has the best freely available BD compatible game engine.

This game engine will make it possible to play all those thousands of BD games created since the Atari and C64 era, up to the present day! The new game release comes with a large collection of BD level sets, available from the Levels & Artwork page.

Besides the new BD game engine, there are some other new features:

• added support for opening level set zip files in Android version
• added support for updating level sets installed by drag’n’drop
• added support for level specific colors by using specially crafted images
• added support for level specific information text messages from main menu
• added support for optional level info (“story”) before starting the game

Now available from the download page!

And I wish you all happy christmas holidays!

[jm28121977]

Merry Christmas to you too!

[TheOnyxGuy]

Merry Xmas indeed!
Just curious:

• added support for level specific colors by using specially crafted images
• added support for level specific information text messages from main menu

Is the first one exclusive for BD engine?
And the second one, I assume, is a level description of some sort? Is it going to be in a vanilla game or is it mostly for the custom levelsets?

[amirnatsheh7]

merry christmas

[Holger]

Merry Xmas indeed!
Just curious:

• added support for level specific colors by using specially crafted images
• added support for level specific information text messages from main menu

Is the first one exclusive for BD engine?
And the second one, I assume, is a level description of some sort? Is it going to be in a vanilla game or is it mostly for the custom levelsets?

The newly added support for level specific colors indeed work for all game engines!

I will soon provide a demo graphics set that will be based on the classic graphics set, but with level specific colors, that can be used with all levels that use the classic graphics!

The second mentioned feature also works for all levels and level sets! Just add text files to your level set folder at the following locations:

Add a level specific info file:

- docs/levels/001.txt

Add a level set specific info file (this one already existed in earlier versions):

- docs/levelset/levelset_1.txt

Add a level specific story to be displayed when starting a game:

- docs/stories/001.txt

The last one is especially useful for non-R'n'D game engines that do not have text envelopes.

Inside these text files, you can use different fonts and colors, just like the "README" file in Niko Böhm's Tutorial.

And a new feature is that you do not need multiple files for multiple screen pages anymore, but larger texts can be scrolled to view the whole file.

Hope that this is useful! Many of the new native BD level sets make use of this, and I think all other engines should also be able to use this in R'n'D.