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IceBreaker themes are simple to create. They're are definined in text files
with the extension .ibt (that's _I_ce_B_reaker _T_heme) in the IceBreaker
data directory. The filename is the name of the theme itself, which must be
seven characters or less -- not because of the DOS 8.3 limit but because
more than seven requires the options menubox to be really big and ugly and
we don't want that.
The file consists mostly of color definitions, and also gives the location
of the two sound files and the one sprite bitmap. Color definitions begin
with a keyword ("Background", "NormalText", etc.) and then give decimal
values from 0-255 for red, green, and blue, respectively.
The sound and image defintions are just the keyword followed by a filename.
More info on file formats in a bit.
The keywords aren't case sensitive, and you can use any amount of whitespace
you want. If you leave out a particular keyword, IceBreaker will use the
default but spit out a complaint on stderr -- so don't do that. (There's
currently one exception -- SpriteMirrorBitmap, which I'll get to in a bit.)
The default theme is "linux", and the file linux.ibt looks approximately
like this:
Background 0 64 128
NormalText 255 255 255
BoardFillMin 224 224 224
BoardFillMax 255 255 255
Gridline 192 192 192
GridHighlight 192 192 192
Line1 0 0 0
Line2 192 0 64
MenuHighlight 255 255 255
GameoverText 192 0 64
ScorescrollText 0 0 0
BonusscrollText 192 0 64
TextentryBox 0 0 0
TextentryText 255 255 255
CopyrightText 192 192 192
SpriteTransparent 255 0 0
SpriteBitmap penguin.bmp
SoundOuch ouch.wav
SoundCrash crash.wav
The names should mostly be self-explanatory. If something is unclear, let me
know, and I'll either change the name in a future version or write better
documentation here. A few things bear mentioning:
BoardFillMin and BoardFillMax define the colors of the game play area. The
values will be randomly selected from the range given, but there's a twist
-- if two (or three) of the red, green, or blue values have identical Min
*and* identical Max values, those two will be "locked" together. This way,
you can produce grey or monotone backgrounds instead of having every theme
look like the mutant love child of Rainbow Brite and the Swamp Thing.
SpriteTransparent is the color value which will be treated as clear when
drawing the bitmap. In the above example, the penguin.bmp has a bright red
background, and since SpriteTransparent is set to the matching value, the
background isn't shown.
The bitmap file should be a 24-bit MS-Windows-style .bmp format. I know that
this is Lame(tm) but the SDL library which IceBreaker uses understands this
format natively, and so using it allows us to avoid having a whole extra
library just to load some really tiny bitmaps. They should be 14x14, by the
way. If you want, you can make them as small as 12x12, but that's basically
treated as the top-left of 14x14, and support for that may vanish in a
future version. (If you want smaller, just mask out most of the image.)
Don't underestimate how hard it is to make a sprite image look good at such
a tiny size. Making a theme which represents something in real life rather
than being abstract or iconic is a challenge. A future version of IceBreaker
may allow you to include background and playing board graphics instead of
just colors -- but don't hold your breath for that.
In addition to SpriteBitmap, you may also set SpriteMirrorBitmap. If this
tag exists, the given image will be used when the sprite is moving to the
right, and the main SpriteBitmap when it's moving to the left. If you leave
out this tag, there will be no warning -- the main bitmap will be used for
both. In fact, leaving it out is the best thing to do if you don't want your
image to flip, because it saves, like, 500 bytes of RAM over defining the
same image twice. And we all know how important those few bytes of RAM are
these days, right?
The sound files are 8 bit mono PCM at 22050. They should also be really
short -- under a second. This'll mean the total size will be easily less
than 30k -- if it's not, something's not right.
If you do produce a good theme, let me know -- send it to
<mattdm@mattdm.org>, and I'll consider including it with the main
distribution. All themes must be licensed under the GPL.
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