Unleash your computer graphics talent

If you are a student looking for a small project for your Computer Graphics course, or just someone with an artistic bent looking for new venues to unleash your creative talent, I suggest you try creating new themes for Pasang Emas. The level of challenge is somewhere between designing static icons and short animations.

Pasang Emas comes with a theme named Wooden that you can use as a guide. Simply select this theme and click its path link (highlighted in the figure below). This will let you browse the directory that defines this theme.

The creative part of a theme goes into these five graphics files:

• board.png / board.svg
• red.png / red.svg
• blue.png / blue.svg
• black.png / black.svg
• white.png / white.svg

For example, red.png of Wooden looks like this:

to define a 20-frame animation sequence.

You can also specify the following optional text files:

• theme.prop
• a license file

The file "theme.prop" defines several optional parameters and allows theme artists to give themselves credit and specify a license for the use of their creation. The license can be elaborated in a separate file, if necessary.

The file "theme.prop" in Wooden contains further documentation to guide theme artists.

If you have any cool theme to share, you may announce it in the comment section of this blog entry. If I like your theme, and the license permits it, I may feature it in Pasang Emas project page.

Air muleh: a traditional border decoration

Several Pasang Emas themes feature a Brunei traditional decoration called air muleh. It is a frieze pattern (group 2) formed using a sinusoidal backbone with tendrils curving back.

Here is an example:

Here is another example from the non-free version of Pasang Emas:

This version of air muleh adorns the mihrab and minbar of the mosque of Universiti Brunei Darussalam. It is also widely used to decorate university publications such as ceremony programme booklets.

It features simpur (or simpor) leaves and flowers, a kind of wild tree found in the jungle of Brunei. The leaves of the simpur tree are used to wrap food such as tapai (that's green packaging for you, no plastic waste). The simpur flower, though not prominent in this air muleh, is the national flower of Brunei.

Simpur is not the only plant used as a theme for air muleh. The logo of Brunei History Centre uses an air muleh border that prominently features keramunting flowers. Keramunting is a kind of wild berry, with red yummy flesh.

15 March 2018: Edited to fix broken link to Brunei History Centre.

It runs on Mac

The development version of Pasang Emas has been successfully compiled on Mac, thanks to MacPort. However "Help" didn't work because of an "Operation not supported" error. I have to install something to make "Help" operational. But, even without this feature, the game is fully playable.

Here is the obligatory screen shot:

Other non-essential features that failed to work:

• localization: the translation files could not be located;
• hyperlink: no file browser was registered to handle links to directories.