Lego Rock Raiders Game

[Lair of Rockwhales]

Oh yeah, so the Rock Raiders PC game. Did anyone here play it? It's really one of Lego's more interesting games.I just wish Data Design Interactive hadn't made it, as they are, well... Rock Raiders is known as DDI's only good game. Like how Run the Gauntlet has a glitch preventing you from normally seeing the "good" ending. But oh well.Just watch out for random swarms of Rock Monsters.Really, it's quite fun to mess around with. As well as terrifying.(whoops, wrong category, can this be moved)

Edited February 4, 2012 by Lair of Rockwhales

[GSR]

A personal favorite of mine, though I never was able to beat it. I actually managed to track down my copy not too long ago and get it working on my laptop; I ought to give it another whirl.I think my biggest gripe was no saving during missions, since they could take close to an hour for larger levels.

[Lair of Rockwhales]

You should, it's worth it. Although the last mission is embarassingly dull: I talked to the level designer once, he said he made it easy because originally it was both too strenuous on processors and too hard for kids. Of course, now that both have aged, I spam it to be as hard as I want, as you can see in one of the above links.

I think my biggest gripe was no saving during missions, since they could take close to an hour for larger levels.

Well, it would be very hard to do this. The save file would be very large. Just pause the game and come back later is all I can say to that. Edited February 4, 2012 by Lair of Rockwhales

[GSR]

Well, that depends on the data structures they used to hold the game's state; if I'm not mistaken the levels were tile-based (though the game did a decent job of masking it), which would make things rather easier to manage. There's also the matter of writing code to import the state of a mission from a file and applying it to the game world, which could have been too time-consuming for them if their code was never designed with such a possibility in mind.

Edited February 4, 2012 by GSR

[Black Six]

Moving to Digital Discussion...

[Lair of Rockwhales]

Thank you, Black Six.

Well, that depends on the data structures they used to hold the game's state; if I'm not mistaken the levels were tile-based (though the game did a decent job of masking it), which would make things rather easier to manage. There's also the matter of writing code to import the state of a mission from a file and applying it to the game world, which could have been too time-consuming for them if their code was never designed with such a possibility in mind.

The game is tile-based, which makes maps easy. However, if you saved a level, it would have to write off the location and angle of objects, what level and upgrades they are at (which you can't even program into maps, the only way anything is pre-upgraded is through the mission objective file), and if you saved while strip-mining, that's a ton of crystals and ore to code its locations. DDI was rushed enough, which is why it's so buggy, so such a thing was never planned with this engine, and would have taken a lot of work (even though it's tile-based, the layout of the stuff in the maps is more complex than it looks).Of course, every level can be beaten in under twenty minutes, but honestly who doesn't want to explore and build?

[Meiko]

I played it a little bit. It was pretty fun actually, but I think I got stuck somewhere early. It was when I was really young, so I probably didn't understand much of it. :PI still have it, and would continue to play it again if I really wanted too.