# &app; Manual V&manrevision;

## Introduction

Glines, is the Gnome port of the once popular Windows game called Color Lines The game's objective is to align as often as possible five balls or more of the same color causing them to disappear, play as long as possible, and be #1 in the High Scores.

To run Glines, select Glines from the Games submenu of the Main Menu, or type `glines` on the command line.

Glines is included in the `GNOME-games` package, which is part of the GNOME desktop environment. This document describes version &version; of Glines.

## Playing Glines

Glines is easy to play. At startup, you find yourself with five balls randomly positioned on the board. Each turn, you are allowed to move one ball. You can move it up or down, left or right, or any combination of the previously mentioned directions, any number of squares. After your move, the computer drops three balls, again at random positions. You can preview the color of the balls to be dropped in the upper right corner of the application's window. If you manage to align five balls of the same color, they disappear and you are given an extra move before more balls drop.

### Basic usage

Starting Glines presents you with the game board, which is nine squares on a side. A new game starts as you launch the application. What it looks like is shown in mainwindow-fig.

#### Glines Main Window

Glines Main Window

Glines Main Window

As the game progresses, the board gets more and more crowded (unless you are really good...) and making balls disappear gets harder and harder… The game is over, when the board is full.

#### Game Over!

Game Over!

Game Over!

### Basic Rules

A game of Glines begins with five balls of random colors on the board.

To make a move, click on one of the balls. A ball is activated when it starts rotating (or doing something else depending on the theme, but let us not anticipate…). You can then select its destination by clicking an empty square. If the path to the destination is clear, the activated ball rolls there. If the destination square is occupied by another ball, no ball will be moved and the selection will be transferred to the latter ball. If the path is not clear (your ball cannot jump over already laid down balls!) the application prints a warning in the status bar (bottom of the window) and the original ball remains active.

As balls disappear, you get points, your score is shown in the upper right corner of the application window. The points you score depends on the number of balls you managed to align (see glines-table1).

### Scoring in Glines

Number of balls | Score given
5 | 10
6 | 12
7 | 18
8 | 28
9 | 42
10 | 82
11 | 108
12 | 138
13 | 172
14 | 210

### Menus

The menu bar, located at the top of the game board, contains the following menus:

Game

- This menu contains three items:

  - Ctrl-N New Gameclear the board and start a new game. The current game is abandoned.

  - Scores...show the high score table.

  - Ctrl-Q Exitabandon the current game and close the program.

Settings

- The Settings menu contains only one item:

  - Preferences which brings up the preferences dialog box.

Help

- This menu contains:

  - F1 Contents— shows this manual.

  - About— shows basic information about Glines, such as the author's name and the application version number.

### How to set preferences

You can configure Glines by clicking on Preferences in the applications Settings menu. The following dialogbox will show up:

Preferences

Preferences

You can select different ball styles and background colors in the Themes section. If you find it difficult distinguishing the colours, try the shapes theme.

You can speed up the movement of the balls by checking the Use fast moves box in the General preferences section.

Any changes you make are instantly applied. Furthermore your preferences are remembered for the next time you run Glines.

## How to create new themes

Each theme consists of a single PNG image file. This image consists of an array of seven rows, corresponding to the different ball colors, and four columns each of which is a frame in the animation of the ball. The actual size of the image is irrelevant, it will be rescaled, but the sub-images must form a four by seven grid to get the correct effect. When using SVG remember that the image size is the page size, if your grid does not fill the page try shrinking the page size. Use an existing theme as a guide.

## Known Bugs and Limitations

This application has no known bugs.

## Authors

Glines was written by Róbert Szókovács (szo@appaloosacorp.hu) and Szabolcs Bán (shooby@gnome.hu). Please send all comments, suggestions, and bug reports to the GNOME bug tracking database. (Instructions for submitting bug reports can be found on-line.) You can also use the Bug Report Tool (`bug-buddy`) for submitting bug reports.

This manual was written by Emese Kovács (emese@gnome.hu). Please send all comments and suggestions regarding this manual to the GNOME Documentation Project by sending an email to docs@gnome.org. You can also add your comments online by using the GNOME Documentation Status Table.

## License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is included as an appendix to the GNOME Users Guide. You may also obtain a copy of the GNU General Public License from the Free Software Foundation by visiting their Web site or by writing to

        Free Software Foundation, Inc.
        59 Temple Place - Suite 330
        Boston, MA 02111-1307
        USA