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outdated, because it does only provide poor compression ratio, so the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!
2006-01-04
Due to a server problem,
www.artsoft.org (including the
web forum)
was not available for about 10 hours last night.
The problem was fixed today late in the morning.
(“night” and “morning” as in “Central European Time”. ;-) )
Everything’s now fine again. As far as I can see, there was no loss of data.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
2005-12-24
As one of the absolute highlights of this year’s level contributions to R’n’D
(and on time for Christmas :-) ), Jürgen Bonhagen has just finished
his new level package!
It contains as many as six great level sets, some of them brand-new:
- JUE 1 Edition (40 levels)
- Bug Machine (one-level set)
- Game Inside (one-level set)
- R&D West (10 NEW levels)
- R&D Puzznic (30 NEW levels)
- Puzzle Mix (60 NEW levels)
Puzzle Mix, the biggest set of Jürgen’s new package, contains the
following three sub-sets: “Boulder Dash Only” with 30 classic,
Boulder Dash style levels, “Boulder Dash Soko” with 10 levels
combining features known from Boulder Dash and Sokoban, and finally
“BD - JUE”, which contains 20 levels featuring various CE (custom
element) techniques to introduce new game concepts like elevators.
R&D Puzznic offers 30 new (CE based) levels that use the game
concept of the game “Puzznic”: Elements of the same kind disappear if they
touch each other. The obvious target is to clear away all Puzznic elements.
Once you got the idea, you will quickly be addicted to this simplistic and
beautiful puzzle game!
R&D West was once planned as part of a larger project by Alan Bond
and Jürgen Bonhagen that never came to life. Nevertheless, the 10 levels of
this great set with lots of custom elements and custom artwork are playable
very well! The hero appears with a time machine in the Wild West, has to fight
against evil cowboys and has to collect gold nuggets to solve the level.
Even without any player action, there is a lot of action like battles between
the cowboys and the indians (but it seems that also the cowboys among
themselves have a lot of fun killing each other ;-) ).
Although this set has been developed in summer 2004, it contains many
things that never happened before in R’n’D level design! The graphics of the
hero, the indians and the cowboys are based on beautiful 3D models, which were
designed, animated and rendered by Alan Bond.
A full description of all level sets, a lot of screenshots and of course
the download itself are available now from
Jürgen’s R’n’D site!
(Also available from the
“Levels & Artwork” section.)
And not to forget: Merry Christmas to all fans of Rocks’n’Diamonds! :-)