Copyright © 2004 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
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
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
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.
By selecting "Level" you enter the levelset-selector. If you press the left/right-keys you change the level currently selected for play.
Table 4-1. Game Settings and their meanings
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 |
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.
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.
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
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 |
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 LEVELDIRPlease note that the --display-option is only working (and useful) on Unix-like systems.