Slime Volley

Hello!

My research for themes for the next version of Slime Volley has been successful!
Not a lot of people participated, but they provided several themes.
Leovilok, who did the first participation, the pacman theme, did 3 more themes!
The tux theme, the underwater theme, and the botlab theme.
I let you discover these 4 themes:




Aymeric did 2 themes, a Lime Volley theme, and a Mondrian one. He also did an insect theme that I was not able to test yet.



That's all for now, I just wanted to show these great themes, at least to be sure no one does a theme on the same idea that an existing one, and to show there is some progress.
We're not that far of a release in theory, I can' t assure if it will come any time soon…

Hello!

The next version of Slime Volley is shaping up in the subversion repository, and as explained in the last blog post, it rethinks themes as a whole : slime skins, level background and sounds, and menu theme.
And as explained, challenges will unlock themes.
I think you know where I'm getting at… I need you to make Slime Volley themes
It would be really great if we could have an unlockable theme for each challenge. I'm not sure yet how many challenges the game will have, but it might be a lot, as it's quite easy to invent new ones. (It won't be as easy to try and sort them depending on difficulty, maybe there'll be a time we'll need testers)
So, if you feel like it, please try and make a theme for Slime Volley!

Here is the list of files a theme for Slime Volley next version should contain:

Code: Select all

   level folder:
      background.png contains the background for the match
      ball.png is the sprite for the ball
      arrow.png is the one for the arrow when the ball is above the screen
      police.ttf is the font to be used
      theme.txt is a text file that contains informations about the theme:
         the text color to be used for game (as R G B format, for instance "0x00 0x00 0x00")
         the text size to use for fps and score
         the text size to use for score dialog
   slimes folder:
      contains AIs and players skins. It must contains 4 AI skins and at least 1 player skin (up to 3).
      Files are named:
      From slimeAI0L.png to slimeAI3L.png and from slimeAI0R.png to slimeAI3R.png for AI skins
      From slime0L.png to slime2L.png and from slime0R.png to slime2R.png for player skins
      eye.png is the eye to use.

Of course you don't have to provide everything, I'll just copy default files for the missing file if you don't provide them (for instance I'm expecting most themes to use the default font)
The most important thing is to do a level background and the AI and player skin that goes with it.
Additionally you can provide a menu theme, which is basically a menu.png file and a font to use. (along with the font size and color that should be used). But I'm not sure menu themes are that usefull.
If you're lacking inspiration, here's a list of themes I'd like to see in Slime Volley:

• Underwater theme
• Sand desert theme
• Beach theme
• Forest theme
• Factory theme
• End of the world theme (big storm and volcano in the background)
• Robot theme
• Building site theme
• …

This picture will help you for the level background making:


To submit your themes, you can use the Slime Volley forum I just re-opened for subscribing (I hope it still works), or you can just mail me at mcmic@tuxfamily.org (You can also visit http://mcmic.haxx.es and use the button on the bottom right to chat with me if I'm there)

Hi,

long time no see!
You may have guest it but the idea of rewriting Slime Volley in C++ an release a great shiny version 3 was never even begun. It was a lot of work and we were kind of lazy getting to it.

But some weeks ago I played Slime Volley and thought "hey, this game was great, it's so sad we never added all we wanted to put in it". So I started to code again.
I've done some of the things I wanted to add to the game. I integrated yagraph pretty AI skins (1 for each AI level).
I separated level themes, menu themes and slime themes. Now each team has a slime theme, which is a set of skins that are coherent. When a player press down, the whole team changes theme.
What's the point? Well, this new theme organisation is here to welcome the brand new challenge menu!
So now you'll need to beat some challenges in order to unlock the themes!
Take a look at this challenge menu:

In black you have the challenge I've never played, in red the lost ones and in green the won ones, with by highscore for each of them.
I still need to chose which challenges I put in the game and try and order them by difficulty.
I also reorganized menus a bit: number of balls and speed mode are now set in the game menu which is a lot more logical


So, what now?
Well, I'll try and find some help to improve the collision system, maybe a bit the AI about multi-ball, and hopefully to get some new themes that you'll have to unlock
Let's play!

After a lot of works on licenses, copyright, the replacement of sounds that were not under the proper license, Slime Volley finally made it to Debian!
The package is in unstable, and it'll go in testing under 10 days unless something goes wrong.
I think that also mean it will be in the next Ubuntu version, but I'm not sure how that works.

We also release the 2.4.2 version of Slime volley
There is only a few modifications but we wanted to release what we've done as we won't develop this version anymore (unless majors bugs are found).
We intent to do Slime Volley 3.0 in C++ using the box2d engine, but we don't have enough free time to start this now. (I'm busy with other projects : Lugaru, StripEd and OpenStreetGame (comming soon) and VinDuv is busy with work and studies.)

So here is the light changelog for this version :

• Difficulty level are now available for AIs (4 levels, the hardest is the one from 2.4.1)
• Bugfix on the arrow that show the ball when it's out of view
• Bugfix of a crash at the end when sound is on
• The network sound handling has been improved
• Desactivation of window animation under Mac OS X
• New sounds (for license reasons)
• Check of all copyrights and licenses, some corrections

This release adresses some bugs encountered with the previous 2.4 version :

• The "invisible Slimes" bug was fixed.
• The AI has been enhanced in both single and multiplayer modes.
• The "Game" menu reacts more logically when you change player settings.

Another enhancements : The icon was changed to fit better the default "Modern" game look, and the Windows version now stores the game settings in the user's directory (so different users can have different settings).

The next version should bring more important changes.