2016-12-23
After three long years (and right in time for Christmas), there’s finally a new major release version of
Rocks’n’Diamonds available with a lot of new features and changes!
The most important improvement is support for SDL 2.0, which adds better
fullscreen support, window scaling and finally support for Android and iOS.
(SDL 1.2 is still supported, but does not contain these features, of course.)
Besides SDL 2.0 support, there are many other new features, especially a lot
of additional possibilities for creating custom artwork for new level sets and
games:
- different game window sizes
- different sizes and locations of playfield, game panel and tape area
- all image, sound and music formats supported by SDL_image and SDL_mixer
- larger tile sizes for game elements graphics, like 64x64
- custom default configuration settings to create your own games
- extended menu and toon animations with various new possibilities
Now available for download!
And not to forget: Merry Christmas to all fans of Rocks’n’Diamonds! :-)
2016-12-10
To make tracking bugs and feature requests easier, I’ve set up a bug tracker
to support myself with the development of Rocks’n’Diamonds.
Here it is: The Rocks’n’Diamonds Bug Tracker
It is not intended to replace, but to complement the existing
bug reports section in the
web forum, as the forum is probably still the easiest way for most people to
report and discuss issues with R’n’D. But over the years I realized that I
always lost track of bugs that were disappearing with uncertain status in the
long list of posts of the forum’s bug reports section.
As the bug tracker software (Bugzilla)
practically does not have any kind of countermeasures against spam bots
(probably due to its age – it’s nearly as old as R’n’D itself), I have
decided to create new accounts on demand and limit them to already existing
forum users, so please just ask by forum mail if you’re interested.
Occasional bug reporters are still encouraged to continue using the forum’s
bug reports section for reporting bugs in R’n’D, and I will create a
corresponding bug report entry for it in the bug tracker, if needed.
2016-12-09
To make it easier to browse the R’n’D news posts of the last 18 years,
there is now a news archive page
available which contains links to all posts on one page for quick access.
You can always find it at the bottom of each news page.
2016-11-17
As already mentioned yesterday, the Rocks’n’Diamonds web forum
also needed an update to play well with modern devices. I’ve upgraded to the
latest stable release of the forum software, and it should now look and work
fine also with tablets and smartphones.
2016-11-16
As this web site was created in the last century
(in November 1998, to be precise), it’s probably time
for a little redesign after those ~18 years, especially as the old version
did not work well on tablets and smartphones. So after some fiddling around
with current HTML and CSS (the old site was built with historic HTML 3.2,
which was already a bit outdated at the time of the site’s creation), this
redesign should work reasonably well with most systems and devices around
in 2016 (just as Rocks’n’Diamonds itself has always tried to support most
systems and devices in the past decades).
I’ve used Jekyll to rebuild the site, which was
quite some fun after all. (The old site used a similar approach I wrote in
Perl, which had less features, but was a lot faster than this Ruby stuff.)
That said, the next redesign of this site, keeping my time schedule, should
then be around November 2034. ;-)
The next candidate that should be updated to support responsive web design
is the Rocks’n’Diamonds web forum now, I suppose…