]> Niko Böhm The Rocks'n'Diamonds Community 2004 Niko Böhm the Rocks'n'Diamonds Community $Id: rnd-doc.xml,v 1.11 2004/04/08 22:22:28 niko Exp niko $ Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation Rocks'n'Diamonds is puzzle game in the spirit of Boulderdash. In fact you can play nearly all of the original Boulderdash-Caves with it, as well as Emerald Mine, Supaplex and Sokoban levels. Rocks'n'Diamonds does not exactly behave like these, but this will improve in future and most levels are already solveable by now. See http://www.artsoft.org/rocksndiamonds/ and http://www.artsoft.org/rocksndiamonds/doc/CHANGES for details. Use a program with support for zip archives (for example Winzip) to unzip the game archive to any directory and from there enter the directory and start rocksndiamonds.exe. Untar the tarball, e.g. with tar xvzf rocksndiamonds-3.0.8.tar.gz. To start the game, enter the created directory and type ./rocksndiamonds Activate the .dmg (disk image) file by double-clicking it and drag the included folder "Rocks'n'Diamonds" to wherever you like to have it on your hard disk. That's it! Untar the tarball, enter the directory and have a look in the README-file. To navigate through the menues, you may either use your mouse, or the keyboard. Keyboard naviagtion is done via the up-, down-cursor-keys and select items with the return-key. You'll find that much more comfortable when playing, because you save a lot of time searching your mouse. To start the game, simply select "Start Game" in the main-menu (surprise!). In the main-window the selected cave will appear with the player in the center (if possible). You can control your player with the cursor-keys per default. Your player has the ability to take the contents of an adjacent field (called snapping or grabbing) if you hold the left shift-key while pressing in a direction. If you have collected any dynamite, you can place it again with the right shift keys. These keys are only the default-bindings, you may change these to whichever you like in the Setup-Menu. The status-window to the right will tell you some facts. The topmost panel tells you the number of the current level, or cave, you are playing, directly above the number of Emeralds you need to collect before the exit opens. Below this there's the dynamite-counter above a field labels "Keys". In some levels you may encounter doors that can be opened only after you've collected a key of a certain color (possible are: red, yellow, green and blue). The "Keys"-display helps you to keep track of which colors you already have. Below this are the counters for score and time. The first is quite obviuos. The purpose of the time-counter depends on the level you are playing. If it has a time-limit, the counter will count and down you'll die when it reaches 0. Otherwise it will count up. When you first start Rocks'n'Diamonds you will start with the Tutorial-Levelset that conists of about 10 tutorial levels to introduce you to the basic game principles. After playing the tutorials, you may try the other levelsets. If you select "Levels" in the main-menu, you can choose alternate levelsets. Change your players name (the one that will be entered into the highscore-tables) By selecting "Level" you enter the levelset-selector. If you press the left/right-keys you change the level currently selected for play. Here you can see the top-players for the current level. Enters the Level Creator. See . The Info Screen contains short information for most game elements on several pages. Select this item to start a game. Setting Possible Values Description Team-Mode on/off on: Multiplayer, off: Singleplayer Handicap on/off When on, you cannot play any higher level than the last finished one. Timelimit on/off When on, the player dies when the time is up. Auto-Record on/off Turn this to on, when you want every game you play recorded. Here you can select the groups of items you want to see in the level-creator. Those groups are: Boulderdash Emerald Mine More Sokoban Supaplex Diamond Caves DX-Boulderdash Characters Custom Elements (1-128) More Custom Elements (129-256) Headlines User Defined Setting Possible Values Description Fullscreen on/off Toggles fullscreen and windowed mode Scroll Delay on/off ? Soft Scroll on/off on: 50 fps (?) off: ??? Quick Doors on/off ??? Toons on/off ... Setting Possible Values Description Simple Sound on/off ... Sound Loop on/off ... Game Music on/off ... Rocks'n'Diamonds allows you to use your own (or other peoples) graphics, sound effects or music instead of the default one when playing. On the upper half of this config-screen you can choose which graphics, sounds and music you want to have. The "Classic Graphics" ("Classic Sounds", "Classic Music" respectively) is the default. Select these points to get a menu of items to choose of (may vary depending on your installation). Any levelsets that bring their own artwork however will per default be displayed in that one. In the lower half of the screen you can override that behaviour. But to be honest: if a levelset has own custom artworks, the half of the fun will get lost if you chose another one. This menu is for configuring the control for the up to four players that can play on a single computer. Here you can select the keys you want to have as shortcut for load, save and pause. Returns to the main-menu with the new settings, but without saving them to disk, i.e. they will get lost when you quit the game. Returns to the main-menu with the new settings and saves them to disk. Select this item to quit the game. here be muuuuuch information :-) Levels in Rocks'n'Diamonds are organized in levelsets. You can find these in two places on your harddisk. The first one is the folder where Rocks'n'Diamonds is installed. The other on is your personal Rocks'n'Diamonds-Folder, which is My Documents\Rocksndiamonds for Windows systems and ~/.rocksndiamonds for Unix-like systems. In each of those there is a subfolder levels in which the levelsets are stored. Each levelset may contain up to 1000 levels. Additionally there may be own graphics, sounds and music. See for more information about those. Each levelset-directory contains a file named levelinfo.conf which holds all necessary informations about the levelset. It is an ordinary text-file that can be edited with your favorite text-editor. Here is for example the levelinfo.conf file for my own tutorial levels: file_identifier: ROCKSNDIAMONDS_LEVELINFO_FILE_VERSION_3.0 name: Tutorial NB author: Niko Boehm levels: 40 first_level: 1 sort_priority: 90 level_group: false readonly: true Now follows a short overview of all possible options. A short tabular synopsis can be found in . Option Description file_identifier This option must be present and should be ROCKSNDIAMONDS_LEVELINFO_FILE_VERSION_X.Y where X.Y is the version of &rnd; you are using. name This is the name of the levelset. If this is missing the name of the directory in which it is located will be used. name_sorting (I honestly have no idea what this good for) author Who is the Author of this levelset. imported_from From which game (if any) were these levels imported. levels This is the number of levels in this levelset. first_level Which number has the first level of this levelset. Mostly 0 or 1. sort_priority The sort-priority affects 2 things. First: where in the list of levelsets will this set be found (smaller numbers stand higher). Second: As what kind of levelseries this will be classified. Detailed Informations can be found in latest_engine If set to true &rnd; uses always the latest game engine, regardless of the level version. Usually this is not what you want, since it may break tapes. level_group If set to true, this directory will not be searched for levels, but further subdirectories containing levelsets. readonly Defines if these levels are allowed to be changes in the level creator or not. graphics_set Name of the graphics set to be used for this levelset sounds_set Name of the sound set to be used for this levelset music_set Name of the music set to be used for this levelset filename (I honestly have no idea what this good for) filetype (I honestly have no idea what this good for) handicap Set to false to always disable handicap for this levelset. Options Type Default file_identifier string (see description) name string ANONYMOUS name_sorting string author string ANONYMOUS imported_from string levels number 0 first_level number 0 sort_priority number 999 latest_engine true/false false level_group true/false false readonly true/false true graphics_set string sounds_set string music_set string filename string filetype string handicap true/false true Range Color Description 010-099 blue Tutorial Levels 100-199 red Classic Levels 200-299 green Contributed Levels 300-399 red Private Levels 400-499 green Boulder Dash Levels 500-599 yellow Emerald Mine Levels 600-699 green Supaplex Levels 700-799 yellow DX-Boulderdash Levels here be muuuuuch information :-) here be some information here be some information here be some information Here is the command-line help of rocksndiamonds: niko@avalon ~ $ rocksndiamonds --help Usage: rocksndiamonds [OPTION]... [HOSTNAME [PORT]] Options: -d, --display HOSTNAME[:SCREEN] specify X server display -b, --basepath DIRECTORY alternative base DIRECTORY -l, --level DIRECTORY alternative level DIRECTORY -g, --graphics DIRECTORY alternative graphics DIRECTORY -s, --sounds DIRECTORY alternative sounds DIRECTORY -m, --music DIRECTORY alternative music DIRECTORY -n, --network network multiplayer game --serveronly only start network server -v, --verbose verbose mode --debug display debugging information -e, --execute COMMAND execute batch COMMAND: Valid commands for '--execute' option: "print graphicsinfo.conf" print default graphics config "print soundsinfo.conf" print default sounds config "print musicinfo.conf" print default music config "print editorsetup.conf" print default editor config "print helpanim.conf" print default helpanim config "print helptext.conf" print default helptext config "dump level FILE" dump level data from FILE "dump tape FILE" dump tape data from FILE "autoplay LEVELDIR" play level tapes for LEVELDIR Please note that the --display-option is only working (and useful) on Unix-like systems.