[tetrinext] themes and appearances

[Jared Johnson <solomon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

there is the obvious stuff.  it would be nice to allow skinning of the whole
darn thing, so people could get it to emulate GTK and so forth.  also setting 
your
own background and your opponents', your own blocks and your opponents', are
both given.  i just have a few suggestions above and beyond this stuff.

how about adding a different background and block definition for your teammates
-- or giving your teammates that same background and block definition as you
have.  obviously this would make things easier to figure out quickly, which is
very important to people =)

how about letting themes define entire pieces instead of just the square blocks
that make them up.  It would be nice to make certain pieces -- or all of the
pieces -- solid instead of having them made up of fragments.  It should of 
course
be up to the user or theme author which way to do it.

how about having multiple appearances (block and background wise) for different
"levels" (like in NES tetris, Quadra, etc.).  In fact, if levels were
manipulated more than they were in the original implimentation of TetriNET 
(where your
level didn't make a big difference till you played for a really really long 
time)
and there was a flash of light and a sound or whatever when you changed levels,
it could make things a bit more exciting.  I know that playing Quadra and other
such games, jumping to a level made me sort of tense =).  If sound were in midi,
it would be fun to speed it up with every level introduced.  Speaking of which,
who would like to make us a midi of the scores from the original NES tetris
game? =)

something i would really like to see is the ability to define a different theme
for different types of gameplay.  There is a good argument that a theme that is
very good for classic play in TetriNET isn't that good for pure play.  It would
be nice to allow a user or theme author to have the appearance changed when
they changed to different types of play.

I don't know how one goes about making the theming standard "flexible" but it
looks like this is what is needed ;)

-- 
Jared Johnson
solomon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Reappraisal, n.:
        An abrupt change of mind after being found out.

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