Rocks'n'Diamonds

My best compliments to Holger for this release!

Instant reloading is a very nice and useful feature.

I was about to start my second poll to ask the opinion of the community about allowing the snapshots to be saved to disk, but I have changed my mind. The current feature is really a big save of time: reloading the tape in the old, slow mode once per level is really worth the advantages of in-memory snapshot.

By the way, in the announcement you didn't mention the -5 secs. snapshot. Did you include it in this release, Holger?

Well, just finished the download, I'll discover it by myself

> By the way, in the announcement you didn't mention the -5 secs.
> snapshot. Did you include it in this release, Holger?

Sorry, no, not yet in 3.2.2.

I still think about integrating it as seamless as possible (no new "special shortcuts" etc.), and on the other side wanted to release 3.2.2 as soon as possible (for you all still playing Zelda :-) ), so there are only very few new things compared to 3.2.1.

But I think this addition should follow soon... :)

No new shortcuts?



You could make it so that if one switches from fast playback to "pause before end", it automatically stops the playback and loads the -5 secs snapshot.

Yep, that's something I thought about... :)

Thank you very much for quick tapes feature! I have a question, however. How do I load the tape in old, slow mode? It's the only way to pause at certain moment, and it's useful sometimes. Is the old-style tape saved along with the quick snapshot when I press F1?

I have a problem with the new RnD v3.2.2: yesterday I played Zelda and the instant saving worked well. But now I want to load it again to continue playing and it loads the game in the old slow way! Any idea what can be the reason for this?

I think I can answer to this question... the snapshot is just an add-on to the traditional tape. To reload in the old way you just have to stop recording and press "play" on the tape interface.

Since only one snapshot is kept in memory, you could also load another level, quick-save there and then go back to the level you want to reload in the old way: in this case you can use also the quick-load key.

@Martijn: The snapshot is being deleted when you close RnD, but is restored the first time that you reload a tape in the old-fashioned mode. So you have to reload slowly only the first time, then the instant-reloading will start working again.

Yep, exactly right.

A little remark:
> To reload in the old way you just have to stop recording and press "play"
> on the tape interface.

If you press the "warp forward" button (the changed "eject" button) when replaying the tape the way Francesco described, you also get the same speed. The only difference then is that the tape just stops and don't automatically changes to "record" mode at the end, but as this isn't what you intend in this case anyway, it shouldn't be a problem here.

But is there no way to make the loading always fast then? I can imagine that this looks quite buggy for a new RnD player...

> But is there no way to make the loading always fast then?

No, unfortunately not, as the game engine must always replay the whole tape to reach the last state to continue from. The only solution would be to always save engine snapshots together with the tapes for the moment where the tape was saved, but these snapshots are several megabytes large each...

> I can imagine that this looks quite buggy for a new RnD player...

Yes, this is true. But I think they are too useful to deactivate them by default and then only enable them by a setup switch.

Maybe this should be explained in the upcoming manual...

Ok, thanks for all the explanations, so I was right to think that the snapshot is just an addition. I was thinking about loading the tape simply with the 'play' button, but I forgot that I can append to it by recording (and so I was afraid that loading this ways would be pretty pointless).

But now that we got it all sorted, I have a suggestion. Maybe F2 could load the snapshot, but e.g. Shift+F2 would always do it the old way, whether the snapshot it there or not?

What?
One more new Version?
First 3.2.0, 3.2.1 and now 3.2.2???
Wow, what are the new features?

Holger wrote:
...but these snapshots are several megabytes large each...

So write it to a .Zip or .7z.

Or, record:
1. full level
2. all the ce values, scores, status, and such...
3. gems amount, dynamite, and such...
i think it can't take MORE than 5mb.
when (7)zipped it can't take MORE than 3mb.