Rocks'n'Diamonds

reposting from the 4.4.0.0 pre-release 4 thread for better visibility:

ncrecc wrote: ↑Tue Dec 03, 2024 7:13 pm this would break away from GDash, but it would be cool if eventually we could customize what elements can emerge from ghost explosions (like what happened with the gray ball in Mirror Magic). here's a mockup based on the default elements ghost explosions produce:

ghost_custom.png (16.81 KiB) Viewed 39614 times

(the "choice type" options are the same as for the gray ball in MM)

I probably shouldn't hijack this post, but I too have been thinking about amendments/extensions to the BDX engine, and one thing which really stands out to me is, if elements from other engines - RND, MM - that are placed into a level set to the BDX engine, could be parsed by the BDX engine during game play, to have the graphics that they usually have, when played with the RND engine.

All these elements are treated as unknown elements, displaying a ?, and I think this element behaves like wall - it doesn't move, you can't dig it, monsters can't pass through it, I think you can blow it up though. That would be fine.

In the long term / perfect world some of the BDX elements would be brought across with their functionality, more or less, into RND levels, so that you could place ghosts into a RND level, say. You could do this either way, but I suppose BDX engine will forever be 'pinned' to how things are in GDash whereas the RND engine has already become a kind of meta-engine with capacity to run elements from other engines (well, only EM and Supaplex), so it would hopefully be able to absorb some of the elements from BDX. But not things like the level wraparound in BDX, I understand that would be a bridge too far and would change all these existing levels [unless it was only enabled with a switch which defaults to 'off' unless specifically set].

One last comment - I love the new BDX engine, but to me it doesn't resemble the original Boulderdash any more than does the RND engine, which I never though resembled it very much. eg, try playing the first bonus level - the fireflies behave nothing like they did in the original Boulderdash. I understand that this engine is actually trying to emulate GDash, which I also love. So, how about renaming it to the GDash engine? That way we could still hope to oneday end up with another engine, which can actually emulate the first bonus level in the original Boulderdash, as well as all the other levels in at least the first four Boulderdashes, so we could play the 'space' levels in Boulderdash III, and the levels that were bundled with the make-your-own-levels designer in Boulderdash IV...

Cheers, and apologies if any of this seems disrepectful, after all Holger puts in 1000s of hours of his own time into this, I am always hoping that some other great coders will start contributing sourcecode additions and enhancements to this project, but sadly that won't be me, who cannot code in anything except for Microsoft VBA and Excel formulas

John

BrownSky wrote: ↑Thu Jul 31, 2025 6:47 am In the long term / perfect world some of the BDX elements would be brought across with their functionality, more or less, into RND levels, so that you could place ghosts into a RND level, say.

see holger's response in may 2024 to this same question. his stance is "BDX elements in the RnD engine are not planned, but they may be added if they can't be recreated with CEs". personally i would like to see it happen anyway, because i'm not very good at making CEs and i don't know what's actually possible with CEs alone

(though i recognize some elements would take a lot of bug-testing, e.g. the gravity switches, to the point where adding them just for the people who want to make RnD levels with BDX elements might not be worth it)

One last comment - I love the new BDX engine, but to me it doesn't resemble the original Boulderdash any more than does the RND engine, which I never though resembled it very much. eg, try playing the first bonus level - the fireflies behave nothing like they did in the original Boulderdash.

if you're on the latest version of RnD, the "Boulder Dash" option in "Classic Games" now consists of two options, one subtitled "R'n'D engine" and one subtitled "native engine"; the latter uses the GDash engine and should be very close if not the same to how the original Boulder Dash behaves. note that RnD's implementation of GDash has a "smooth element movement" setting enabled by default (which you can disable in the "game engines" submenu of setup); however this is purely visual, and under the hood everything still behaves as though elements instantly hop from one tile to the next.

That way we could still hope to oneday end up with another engine, which can actually emulate the first bonus level in the original Boulderdash, as well as all the other levels in at least the first four Boulderdashes, so we could play the 'space' levels in Boulderdash III, and the levels that were bundled with the make-your-own-levels designer in Boulderdash IV...

indeed that would be great... and we already can: under RnD's Levels & Artwork page is "The new Boulder Dash level collection" (direct link to latest version) which contains, among many fanmade cavesets, all of the original BD games. you're looking for Boulder Dash->First Star Software->Boulder Dash 3 and Boulder Dash->First Star Software->Boulder Dash Construction Kit. if you want the levels to all look exactly as they originally appeared (and for Boulder Dash 3 to be space-themed) then get the GDash levels for R'n'D package (direct link to latest version), which is the same but comes with custom graphics