2006-06-05
Ever tried to create such fantastic level sets
for Rocks’n’Diamonds with new graphics and sounds by yourself, but always had
trouble and problems editing all those configuration files to define artwork
with a text editor? Here’s the solution (for Windows users):
ConfEdit by Alan Bond!
ConfEdit is the ultimate swiss army knife for all things related
to creating and modifying Rocks’n’Diamonds’ level sets, artwork files and
configuration files, but without most of the trouble you may have had with
the “traditional” method of using a text editor like “Emacs” or “Notepad”!
It’s the secret weapon that was used behind the scenes for the creation
of famous level sets like Snake Bite – now
everybody can use this powerful tool for his or her own level set
creations!
You can find screenshots and a detailed description of all
features of ConfEdit (including advanced features like an internal
BASIC language for automating complex tasks) on the newly added
Tools & Utilities section! For all questions
regarding ConfEdit, directly contact Alan Bond using his mail address
from that page, or start a thread in the help section of the
web forum.
Download ConfEdit 1.0.0
directly
or from the Tools & Utilities
section!
Important update: If you encounter ConfEdit crashing on your
machine (especially if you do not use an English version of Windows), please
read the special instructions at the end of the
Tools & Utilities section!
2006-03-05
Yesterday, Martijn Mooij has officially launched a new web site for
all fans of Boulder Dash and its various clones:
Martijn’s Boulder Dash Fan Site
This site features a great variety of all stuff that fans of
Boulder Dash, Emerald Mine or Supaplex
(or Rocks’n’Diamonds :-) ) could be interested in:
Information about the history of Boulder Dash and Emerald Mine,
a large list of clones (both free and commercial ones, for various
platforms and operating systems), extra pages with more details on
popular clones like RoX, and lots of extra fan stuff like
game music (original and remixes), box cover scans, sounds and graphics.
Of course, you will also find a lot of things for Rocks’n’Diamonds:
A great number of level sets (including levels originally released at
Zomis’ R’n’D Files Archive
that were repackaged by Martijn for easy use in R’n’D), graphics, sounds
and music, and tools and utilities around Rocks’n’Diamonds by Alan Bond
and Simon Forsberg.
I can highly recommend browsing around at this new site – if you like
Rocks’n’Diamonds, you will discover a lot of exciting and entertaining
new things there! So, check it out:
www.bd-fans.com
2006-03-01
Although Rocks’n’Diamonds can play Sokoban style levels, there was
only the classic Sokoban level set available in the “Classic Original Games”
section.
Thanks to the work of Dorothee Ebner, there is now a new level
collection available for Rocks’n’Diamonds that contains only Sokoban style
levels! She converted the following original Sokoban level sets to
Rocks’n’Diamonds, resulting in 764 levels in 7 different level sets:
- Mas Sasquatch (50 levels)
- Microban (155 levels)
- Sasquatch (50 levels)
- Sasquatch III (50 levels)
- Sasquatch IV (50 levels)
- Sokomania in the Spaceship 1 (55 levels)
- Sokomania in the Spaceship 2 (354 levels)
The “Sasquatch” and “Microban” level sets were originally
created by David W. Skinner, while the two “Sokomania in the
Spaceship” sets were originally created by various authors.
This new level collection package is available now at the
“Levels & Artwork” section!
Important note:
Level packages are now available in two archive formats:
-
The popular and well-supported zip format is supported
out of the box by most operating systems, like Windows XP.
Although popular and widespread, this archive format is technically
outdated, because it does only provide poor compression ratio, so the
resulting archive files are larger than needed and take longer to
download over a slow network connection.
zip archives can be extracted by virtually every archiving and
compression tool, like WinZip.
-
The relatively new and less known 7z archive format offers much
better compression, resulting in significantly smaller archive files
which download much faster than their zip equivalent.
For example, the above Sokoban zip archive version is around
300 KBytes, while the alternative 7z archive version is just
around 50 KBytes!
7z archives can be extracted by the 7-Zip file archiver,
which is available as free software from
www.7-zip.org for both Windows
and Unix and which is able to pack and unpack a whole lot of further
popular archive formats.
Conclusion:
Use the 7z archive format whenever possible to increase download speed!
2006-02-28
The new “Contributions” level package with all remaining sets for
the year 2005 and the first levels of 2006 is now available!
Special thanks to Martijn Mooij for fixing some level sets of
Rado Negundo!
The following players contributed additional level sets in 2005:
- Bertrand Grondin (14 levels)
- Martijn Mooij (67 levels in 2 sets with custom artwork)
The following player contributed the first level set in 2006:
- Sascha Mücke (8 levels with custom elements)
This great new package is available now at the
“Levels & Artwork” section!
2006-01-11
This version is an important bugfix release, as it removes a major bug
in version 3.1.1 which prevents private levels from being edited with the
level editor. Everybody who wants to create his or her own levels is
strongly encouraged to update to version 3.1.2.
(Besides that, version 3.1.2 is identical to the previous version 3.1.1.)
Get the new version from the
Download section!