Rocks'n'Diamonds - Niko Böhm's Levelset in 16:24 (TAS)

FOR A TEXT OVERVIEW OF THE LEVELS IN THIS VIDEO, VISIT http://soniccenter.org/sm/files/rnd_tas.txt FIRST in case you don't understand what's happening at any point.

Rocks'n'Diamonds is a free game engine that's capable of playing levels from Boulder Dash and various clones thereof. If you're not familiar with that, perhaps you might understand it (roughly) as "Chip's Challenge with gravity." You can go to http://artsoft.org to give it a try--unless, that is, you already have the game, you like it, and you searched for videos and stumbled across this one! In that case, good for you.

By default, the game runs for the first time with a set of 40 levels courtesy of Niko Böhm. Böhm describes his level set as "intended to be a tutorial" but with some levels that are admittedly too hard to belong in a proper one. Of course they won't be too hard for me in this demonstration video, not least because the video is comprised of TAS runs, designed to be as extravagant and fast as the game allows.

As far as games that facilitate their own TASes, Rocks'n'Diamonds is pretty high up on the list. The game tracks its runs with tape files, which just give a summary of the starting random seed and a list of which keys are pressed when. Additionally, you can play back portions of a tape and record anew from where you left off, you can pause in-progress recordings, and (of course) you can go into 1-Step mode to construct your runs one step at a time, or even one frame at a time. There's still a good deal of interface improvements I can think of that'd make the game more attractive to TAS, but this isn't bad for out of the box.

As I mentioned before, there are 40 levels, which I complete here in combined game times totaling 16 minutes 24 seconds...actually it's more like 16:50 factoring in the lost subseconds that aren't displayed on any timing mechanism and that I can't find in the tape's binary data. Below is a list of each level in the set, with the time (in case YT botches the encode to the point of making the blue clock at bottom right unintelligible) and an "interest rating" from 0 to 5 that tells you what I think of that level's run. I'm not saying you'll agree with all the ratings, but it's as good a starting point as any you'll get before you've watched the video.

(I would have included my comments to go with each stage rather than just the interest index, but that'd go far beyond the allowed length for a video description, so you'll have to go back up to the top and click the link I gave there if you want the extended version.)

1. EMERALDS & DIAMONDS - 0:07 (0)
2. ROCKS AND WALLS AND NUTS - 0:12 (1)
3. MAGIC WALLS - 0:05 (2)
4. BOMBS AND DYNAMITE - 0:23 (4)
5. AMOEBA - 0:28 (2)
6. STARSHIPS - 0:15 (1)
7. BUGS - 0:15 (2)
8. YAM YAMS - 0:21 (3)
9. ROBOTS - 0:07 (1)
10. INVISIBILITY - 0:17 (1)
11. KEYS AND DOORS - 0:17 (1)
12. SNAP IT! - 0:20 (0)
13. KEYS AND DOORS 2 - 0:15 (0)
14. LIFE AND BIOMAZE - 0:13 (0)
15. PAC MEN - 0:22 (3)
16. THE DARK SIDE OF THE YAM YAM - 0:17 (5)
17. LET THERE BE LIGHT - 0:33 (2)
18. GROWING WALLS - 0:21 (0)
19. DYNABOMBS - 0:20 (5)
20. BUTTERFLY AND FIREFLY - 0:12 (2)
21. DO THE MOLE - 0:54 (2)
22. I LOVE PENGUINS - 0:17 (2)
23. PIGS - 0:05 (3)
24. FIRE! - 0:24 (4)
25. BALOONS [sic] - 0:26 (2)
26. SATELITES [sic] - 0:09 (1)
27. THE SPEED PILL - 0:13 (4)
28. SOKOBAN - 3:26 (0) (played in fast forward)
29. SUPAPLEX I - 0:27 (2)
30. SUPAPLEX II - 0:14 (1)
31. SUPAPLEX III - 0:33 (1)
32. SUPAPLEX IV - 0:15 (2)
33. CONVEYOR BELTS - 0:25 (2)
34. SWITCH & TIME GATES - 0:44 (1)
35. BE CAREFUL - 0:14 (2)
36. IF THERE WERE MORE TIME... - 0:13 (2)
37. SHIELDED - 0:28 (1)
38. IT'S SPRING TIME - 0:26 (2)
39. TUBES - 0:30 (0)
40. GRAVITY - 0:21 (3)

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• rocks
• diamonds
• rnd
• boulder
• dash
• emerald
• mine
• sokoban
• supaplex
• chips
• challenge
• tas
• speedrun

[fuzzywzhe]

The problem with this game is that so many of the levels just totally suck. They are boring and repetitive.

[SadisticMystic]

Hey, at least I didn't try to TAS all of Supaplex.

[fuzzywzhe]

@SadisticMystic "Hey, at least I didn't try to TAS all of Supaplex."

That statement makes absolutely no sense to me.

[SadisticMystic]

Have you ever _played_ Supaplex (whether through RnD or through other means)?

[fuzzywzhe]

@SadisticMystic "Have you ever _played_ Supaplex (whether through RnD or through other means)?"

Nope. The are about 1000 different levels in the package I got. I fooled around until I realized that all of them were just intensely boring, then I removed the installation.

And the dynamite 2 second delay to drop it? That's just annoying.

TAS must be Tape Assisted ...something. Whatever. I'm just saying it takes more than a graphics engine to make a good game. Most levels totally 100% suck.

[SadisticMystic]

TAS stands for tool-assisted speedrun, referring to the precision tools the program has for making tapes (and some tools that the program doesn't even have).

In terms of levels that don't suck, I've also tackled all of Snake Bite (under 57 minutes) and BD2K3 (under 85 minutes). Heck, I've improved the levelset from this video by over a minute since I recorded it. However, I can't capture RnD right now without incurring an unacceptable amount of lag, and development is all but dead.

[eg0u5078]

You really like collecting emeralds in games don't you?

[leehsin001]

in level 8

[leehsin001]

the enemies look like the annoying orange

[Ahreta]

The dyna bomb level (19) was awesome.

[RobloxStudios1200]

Minecraft Boulder Dash Edition?