Rocks'n'Diamonds Documentation

Niko Böhm

The Rocks'n'Diamonds Community

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


Table of Contents
1. About
About
History
2. Installation
Installing on Windows
Installing on Linux
Installing on MacOS-X
Compiling from Source
3. Basic Gameplay
Navigation
Playing the game
Choosing a Levelset
4. The Menu-Structure
Name
Level
Hall Of Fame
Level Creator
Info Screen
Start Game
Setup
Game Settings
Editor Settings
Graphics
Sound & Music
Custom Artwork
Input Devices
Key Shortcuts
Exit
Save and Exit
Quit
5. The Level Creator
ToDo
6. Managing Levelsets
Basics
The levelinfo.conf file
7. Custom Elements
ToDo
8. Custom Artwork
Custom Graphics
Custom Sound Effects
Custom Music
9. Miscellaneous
Command Line Parameters
List of Tables
4-1. Game Settings and their meanings
4-2. Graphics Settings
4-3. Sound and Music Settings
6-1. options for levelinfo.conf
6-2. levelinfo priorities
List of Examples
6-1. example levelinfo.conf file

Chapter 1. About

About

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.


Chapter 2. Installation

Installing on Windows

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.


Installing on Linux

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


Installing on MacOS-X

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!


Compiling from Source

Untar the tarball, enter the directory and have a look in the README-file.


Chapter 3. Basic Gameplay

Navigation

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.


Playing the game

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.


Choosing a Levelset

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.


Chapter 4. The Menu-Structure

Name

Change your players name (the one that will be entered into the highscore-tables)


Level

By selecting "Level" you enter the levelset-selector. If you press the left/right-keys you change the level currently selected for play.


Hall Of Fame

Here you can see the top-players for the current level.


Level Creator

Enters the Level Creator. See Chapter 5.


Info Screen

The Info Screen contains short information for most game elements on several pages.


Start Game

Select this item to start a game.


Setup

Game Settings

Table 4-1. Game Settings and their meanings

SettingPossible ValuesDescription
Team-Modeon/offon: Multiplayer, off: Singleplayer
Handicapon/offWhen on, you cannot play any higher level than the last finished one.
Timelimiton/offWhen on, the player dies when the time is up.
Auto-Recordon/offTurn this to on, when you want every game you play recorded.


Editor Settings

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


Graphics

Table 4-2. Graphics Settings

SettingPossible ValuesDescription
Fullscreenon/offToggles fullscreen and windowed mode
Scroll Delayon/off?
Soft Scrollon/offon: 50 fps (?) off: ???
Quick Doorson/off???
Toonson/off...


Sound & Music

Table 4-3. Sound and Music Settings

SettingPossible ValuesDescription
Simple Soundon/off...
Sound Loopon/off...
Game Musicon/off...


Custom Artwork

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.


Input Devices

This menu is for configuring the control for the up to four players that can play on a single computer.


Key Shortcuts

Here you can select the keys you want to have as shortcut for load, save and pause.


Exit

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.


Save and Exit

Returns to the main-menu with the new settings and saves them to disk.


Quit

Select this item to quit the game.


Chapter 5. The Level Creator

ToDo

here be muuuuuch information :-)


Chapter 6. Managing Levelsets

Basics

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 Chapter 8 for more information about those.


The levelinfo.conf file

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:

Example 6-1. example levelinfo.conf file

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 Table 6-1.

Option: file_identifier

Description: This option must be present and should be ROCKSNDIAMONDS_LEVELINFO_FILE_VERSION_X.Y where X.Y is the version of Rocks'n'Diamonds you are using.

Option: name

Description: This is the name of the levelset. If this is missing the name of the directory in which it is located will be used.

Option: name_sorting

Description: (I honestly have no idea what this good for)

Option: author

Description: Who is the Author of this levelset.

Option: imported_from

Description: From which game (if any) were these levels imported.

Option: levels

Description: This is the number of levels in this levelset.

Option: first_level

Description: Which number has the first level of this levelset. Mostly 0 or 1.

Option: sort_priority

Description: 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 Table 6-2

Option: latest_engine

Description: If set to "true" Rocks'n'Diamonds uses always the latest game engine, regardless of the level version. Usually this is not what you want, since it may break tapes.

Option: level_group

Description: If set to "true", this directory will not be searched for levels, but further subdirectories containing levelsets.

Option: readonly

Description: Defines if these levels are allowed to be changes in the level creator or not.

Option: graphics_set

Description: Name of the graphics set to be used for this levelset

Option: sounds_set

Description: Name of the sound set to be used for this levelset

Option: music_set

Description: Name of the music set to be used for this levelset

Option: filename

Description: (I honestly have no idea what this good for)

Option: filetype

Description: (I honestly have no idea what this good for)

Option: handicap

Description: Set to "false" to always disable handicap for this levelset.

Table 6-1. options for levelinfo.conf

OptionsTypeDefault
file_identifierstring(see description)
namestringANONYMOUS
name_sortingstring 
authorstringANONYMOUS
imported_fromstring 
levelsnumber0
first_levelnumber0
sort_prioritynumber999
latest_enginetrue/falsefalse
level_grouptrue/falsefalse
readonlytrue/falsetrue
graphics_setstring 
sounds_setstring 
music_setstring 
filenamestring 
filetypestring 
handicaptrue/falsetrue

Table 6-2. levelinfo priorities

RangeColorDescription
010-099blueTutorial Levels
100-199redClassic Levels
200-299greenContributed Levels
300-399redPrivate Levels
400-499greenBoulder Dash Levels
500-599yellowEmerald Mine Levels
600-699greenSupaplex Levels
700-799yellowDX-Boulderdash Levels

Chapter 7. Custom Elements

ToDo

here be muuuuuch information :-)


Chapter 8. Custom Artwork

Custom Graphics

here be some information


Custom Sound Effects

here be some information


Custom Music

here be some information


Chapter 9. Miscellaneous

Command Line Parameters

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.