Diamond Caves level collection 1.0.0 released!

[Holger]

Rocks’n’Diamonds was partially able to read and play level files of this classic game since about 20 years, but there never was an “official” level collection – until now!

This is a collection of classic level groups from the Amiga game Diamond Caves, created by Peter Elzner in 1995 as a clone of the Amiga game Emerald Mine.


The level sets contain the game’s original Amiga graphics, and you can select between the original graphics set using 16 colors and the enhanced graphics set using 32 colors. Regarding sounds, you can select between the classic Amiga 500 style, low-pass filtered sounds, or the more clear Amiga 1200 style sounds. Most level sets also include additional level set descriptions. The user interface for this level collection was designed to resemble the Workbench 2.0 of the Amiga, with the main menu screen modeled closely after the original game’s start screen, with a few enhancements.

This level collection features 12 level groups that were exclusively available for Diamond Caves, and 26 level groups converted from the Emerald Mine Club collection to be played with Diamond Caves. Most level sets are designed to support either one or two players.

Make sure to use the latest version of Rocks’n’Diamonds to play it!

The new level package is available at the Levels & Artwork page!!

[filbo]

The DL page says the .zip is 9 MB, actually 11 or 12, looks like copied from the BD section :)

`xz -9e` gets it down to 72% (8.5M); `lrzip -zL9` 56% (6.5M); `zpaq -m5` 49% (5.7M) -- though I doubt you'd want to distribute in the latter two rather more obscure formats...

[Holger]

The DL page says the .zip is 9 MB, actually 11 or 12, looks like copied from the BD section

Yes, that's exactly what I did, and forgot to adjust the package file size -- fixed now!

Thanks for letting me know.

`xz -9e` gets it down to 72% (8.5M); `lrzip -zL9` 56% (6.5M); `zpaq -m5` 49% (5.7M) -- though I doubt you'd want to distribute in the latter two rather more obscure formats...

I used to create an alternative package in 7zip format for large packages in the past (still using this for the EMC and SP sets), but with today's bandwidths, I think it's not worth the trouble anymore -- with today's operating systems all being able to open, read and extract classic zip files, this is the most user-friendly choice anyway.

P.S.: And not to forget that R'n'D can natively extract zip files put into the R'n'D window via drag'n'drop (or into the levels directory via a file browser), so using zip files is the best choice here, too.