Current state of text based levelformats

[Steffest]

hi RAP

Indeed, getting a common file format is not that simple as it may sound
with little effort you get a format that is perfect for 90% of the cases and then all the subtle differences come creeping in adding complexity over complexity over complexity.
and the last 2% is almost impossible to achieve, resulting in a format that is not 100% right for everyone and possibly too complex for 90% of the cases.

It's like Cirix said: sometimes you just get tired of it and you move on the other projects

on the other hand, a game like boulderdash is game that gets into your head and never leaves. I still play it and still use it once in a while as developer.
like on http://inca.stef.be/ - an emerald mines engine in flash which also uses the BDCFF format.

I still plan on converting all the caves on http://www.emeraldmines.net/ to this format and have some webbased engine there able to play all the levels (with a webbased level editor like http://inca.stef.be/editor.asp )
so, for me the BDCFF is "good enough" as it can hold 99% of all the emerald mines levels.

I'm all into webdevelopment now so everything I do will be for the web, no more desktop programming for me.

thanks for shaking the tree again, RAP!
I'm going to read the rest of the forums now to see what I've been missing

[RAP]

Awww -- but it sounds like all of you guys had "fun". XD

Indeed, Boulder Dash (and other clones as well) are very fun games. And that game? I actually liked that game, but I didn't tried to play it due to a broken keyboard until just right now. Running under the emerald mine engine? Nifty, but it seems that it's starting to kick some of the Rocks'n'Diamonds' butt from having CEs in hava coding. XP Still though...

Really. An online game that lets you play all those Emerald Mine Club levels. x3 I might try it if there's the menu screen with notes on it from RnD. And an online editor for EMC and EMC6? I'm sold. I can try testing out some of the levels on the go incase there's no Rocks'n'Diamonds.

Yeah, levels. I'm actually trying to create my own levelset -- with the original Emerald Mine elements combined with EMC elements and functions. It's only single-player, and I'm dropping ideas in my notebook, since it feels slow, but provides more creativity than most of the levels from EMC with the exceptions of certain mines that actually inspired me (and bad ones) to try creating my levelset. Maybe over 200 will do. XD (Or 500 to beat the most levels created within a levelset, or 750 for Super Mine)

It's very nice to see you do something different, and to see your face in your videos. x3 Shaking the tree? I wanted to make the forum come alive again after months of being cut out!

[dave]

like on http://inca.stef.be/ - an emerald mines engine in flash which also uses the BDCFF format.

I still plan on converting all the caves on http://www.emeraldmines.net/ to this format

for old caves, this is not a good idea, which i found out first hand, when i tried to convert old caves into a similar structure for my player. since it loses information, any improvements to the engine are lost and caves become unplayable.
it is much better to leave them bit-for-bit identical, even down to the encrypted ones.
it is not a great deal of extra coding effort to load them from the binary format as i have already written it! i did do one change which was to /bin/cat the caves together and zip the single file. this has so many advantages over thousands of tiny files, and it is fully reversible (simply unzip and chop back into small files).

for new caves, however, it is a very good idea to use a new, flexible structure. since you develop the editor in step with the file format, it keeps things simple and safe. and with some care you could develop a forward-compatible format, able to handle new objects if you decide to extend things (instead of how the EMC did new additions but had to introduce a new file format).

and have some webbased engine there able to play all the levels (with a webbased level editor like http://inca.stef.be/editor.asp )
so, for me the BDCFF is "good enough" as it can hold 99% of all the emerald mines levels.

[HerzAusGold]

Where is the site http://www.emeraldmines.net/BDCFF/ ?

The old site exists http://www.stef.be/projects/boulderflash/bdcff/ but dont cover any changes we made

[RAP]

It's still there...it's been just weirdly inconsistent on when it'll show up whenever I checked that section of the website recently a couple of times. The only sub-section that seems to be definitely down is the Properties tab. You should ping Steffest about it.

Here are the links that are accessible:
http://www.emeraldmines.net/BDCFF/defau ... =structure
http://www.emeraldmines.net/BDCFF/defau ... n=mapcodes
http://www.emeraldmines.net/BDCFF/defau ... on=subsets

[ellipirelli]

Hello, HerzAusGold,

here is one of the missing links: https://web.archive.org/web/20161208013 ... n=mapcodes