Rocks'n'Diamonds

Heya folks,

I played Denmine 02 a while back on 2023 October as I was trying to beat a bunch of levelsets in a batch before sending them off to the Emerald Mine Club level completion topic, and this is one of them, but stopped at level 24, because it required 250 gems from the bugs, but the only way to get them are from the amoeba tiles located at the left and right side, just single tiles when starting the level, but countless times it just seems so slow for them to grow. Maybe I was just playing an older version of Rocks'n'Diamonds, since the version I played the most was on 4.1.0.0, and then upgraded to version 4.1.3.3, hoping something gets fixed on the Emerald Mine engine.

Heck, moments earlier, I even just played the level and left it running, wondering the growth differences, and provided a tape: Is the amoeba growth speed wrong? I could just try digging extensively and making sure to maximize the amoeba growth, but as you can see, even not moving, the left side of the amoeba didn't grew a lot, while the right side if watching the tape did grew a ton.

It's unlikely I'll somehow have footage found from YouTube on someone playing this particular level, as the only way I can think this can be checked is having to play this levelset from an Amiga, real or emulated.

Is the amoeba growth speed wrong?

Unfortunately, yes.

The amoeba growth speed should be about twice as fast as it was in R'n'D so far, to match the original Emerald Mine engine.

The current growth speed was taken from an early version of the code of Emerald Mine for X11, which has fixed it since then, but this fix did not find its way into R'n'D so far. But even the fixed growth speed was not correct for very slow amoeba growth rates, rendering a number of EMC levels still unsolvable.

A few weeks ago, I finally corrected the amoeba growth speed in R'n'D's native EM engine (including very slow amoeba growth rates), by doing a lot of tests with various original EM games on an Amiga and their R'n'D counterparts side by side, and it should finally work fine for all EM games now.

All existing solution tapes for the EMC collection will keep working with this change.

This new code is not released yet, but will be part of the next R'n'D release (which will hopefully not take too long anymore).

Hmm, I ponder if I have to do a rerecording of the levels I played before on some of the further tweaks such as randomized object pushing, and more consistent explosions when it comes to chain reactions from bugs. I know the tapes are already recorded and the newer versions of Rock'sn'Diamond simply act those older tapes as if they're playing in an older version of the game instead of the current version, but I imagine some levels might play differently know that with the updated Emerald Mine engine being more accurate, especially the object pushing aspect. This may extend to the way amoeba speed is dealt with too.