ThemeTris
v1.1

created by FishBros (2001)
Coding : Massimiliano Pesce (Italy)
Graphics : Alessandro Pesce (Italy)
Testing : Dario Pesce (Italy)
Help with joystick: Caz Jones (North Wales)
ThemeTris is completely free, you can redistribute it unless you modify something of the original package.
Version 1.1 (09/01/2001) - Added joystick support. Added highscores table.
Version 1.0 (08/28/2001) - Blocks now rotate in both directions. Controls are now configurable editing themetris.cfg.
Version 0.99 (08/26/2001) - First release.
ThemeTris is a desktop Tetris clone for BeOS (R5). It was developed using BeIDE (Metrowerks)
and BeOS GUI functions. It uses very low system resources but it needs a desktop with 16bit depth
or more. It's a standard Tetris with some innovations:
- Blocks scroll at one pixel at time in both directions. This means there are no more unusual movements.
- It's based on themes. Each theme has its own music, set of leves, sounds, graphics and hiscore. Anyone can add a new one.
- Music's speed changes.
There are two kinds of game: Standard and Endless.
In standard mode, you play all levels of the selected theme. At each level speed and/or the number of lines to do can increase.
In endless mode there are no levels: you play until you lose. Blocks fall down at increasing speed and all you need to do is to erase lines.
--- CONTROLS ---
A : Rotates left
S : Rotates right
LEFT, RIGHT : Move block.
DOWN : Move block to the bottom fast
ESC : Stops current game.
Controls are configurable editing themetris.cfg.
To use joystiick enable it from menu Options.
--- THEMES ---
ThemeTris comes with two themes: Classic and Gokou.
Classic theme is based on the original Tetris (coin-op version) and it is
the game's default theme.
Gokou theme is based on a famous character...
It's possible to change theme, using the menu, only when the game is stopped.
--- CREATING A NEW THEME ---
A theme is composed by many files:
- skin.png : This is the image containing all the graphics needed by a theme.
- config.txt : In this file are defined some item's coordinates, points assignment, levels definition.
- music.mid : Music during the game.
- collision.wav : Used when a block (or curtain) collides with walls or other blocks.
- rotate.wav : Used when block rotate.
- linecomplete.wav : Used when there are completed lines.
- linedelete.wav : Used when completed lines are erased.
- youwin.wav : Sound for the winner.
- youlose.wav : Sound for the loser.
- dropcurtain.wav : Sound for level end curtain.
- hiscore0 : Highscores for standard mode (to erase highscores delete this file).
- hiscore1 : Highscores for endless mode (to erase highscores delete this file).
To create a new theme follow these steps:
- Create a subdirectory in directory themes, it's name will be theme's name. If you stop now, your theme will be identical
to Classic theme. This happens because every file not found in your directory is taken from classic theme.
- Insert in your directory all files you have changed. If (for example) you want to use
standard sounds, simply do not put sound files in your directory.
Things you should remember:
- Do NOT modify Classic theme: other themes use it.
- All files names MUST be lower-case.
- Every time you modify or add a file in your directory you need to restart ThemeTris, in order to apply changes.
- Skin.png is a PNG image with a transparent color. On Win95/98 you can create a transparent PNG with a program like
Paint Shop Pro 7.0, instead on BeOS (we are sorry!) we don't know a program can help you.
It's very important to make transparent the background color, otherwise blocks and numbers won't have a mask.
- Simple instructions on how to modify levels are included in file config.txt. There you can "paint" levels. To start,
the easiest way is to copy it from Classic theme.
--- KNOWN PROBLEMS ---
This game was tested on some computers (Pentium 150Mhz, K6-2 350Mhz, Celeron2 713Mhz) and it ran well.
These little problems aren't solved yet:
- Some midi files sound strange during the game. We don't know why, but probably it's a problem with their instruments.
- The configuration parser (the routine that reads config.txt) don't catch all errors, so please pay attention when editing that file.
For any problem, bug or hint please contact us.