Notices

Welcome back! Hope the skiing was good and you still have two working legs and no crutches.

The sheep missed you. You can hear them baaing!

Hello,

I'm happy to say that in a few minutes sheep 0.0.2-3 will appear in extras-devel.

The whole thing is basically rewritten from scratch, although the basic mechanics remained the same.The most notable changes are:

• Qt 4.6
• OpenGL backend (performance boost)
• Phonon sounds playbeck
• Proper collisions detection and acceptable (although not perfect) collisions handling
• Twitter 'show off' feature

The controls is the same as in previous versions. Upon application startup, the accelerometer is calibrated and then the dog is moved by tilting the phone. When screen is touched, a juicy grass attracting sheep is created, it fades out after a moment.
In order to open the closed pens, you need to place at least one sheep on the blue square. This is the basic and initial support for logics elements, that is the direction I would like the game to go.
There are three icons at the top, play/pause, sound on/off and exit. To toggle them, you just move them to the bottom part of the screen (deactivate) or to the top part (activate). I find it nicer to do than just tapping
You need to herd three sheep, one per each fence to win. When you do, you can provide your twitter username and password and click ok, which will update your status to something like 'I just scored 774 points in #Sheep' (the points are 1000 minus your time). The username and password are not saved or sent anywhere (everyone is welcomed to check this in the source code), which also means that you need to provide it every time you want to update your status. The twitter part uses twitcurl library and is there mostly because I wanted to learn this anyway

The icons are the ones provided in this thread by @mivoligo. The sounds are from @stobbsc from this thread, the background meadow sounds are from freesounds.org, which is OK for the non-commercial use.

Now problems:

• collision handling could still be better
• sometimes game does not detect sheep in the fence correctly so you need to move the sheep a bit to close the fence
• I rarely get segmentation faults (the game closes), I'm investigating this
• the graphics at this moment are 'work in progress', they will be changed in the next release
• when typing password and username for twitter, the firs letter is automatically capitalized. I don't know how to turn it off at the moment, I've asked for some help about this here

I have also noticed that when you run the game first time (?) it may look as it failed (the window apparently closes). The game will start, just give it a second.
The package is quite large atm, dues to sound files. I will take a while to compress them a little bit more.

Plans for the future: get rid of those bugs stated above and any others you can discover, add support for levels logic and make at least 3 levels, polish some rough edges. Then I guess the game will be ready for extra-testing. Will it ever make any further depends on this wonderful community

Baaaaah!

[edit] Sorry for this longish post, and a game screenshot:


[edit2] Almost forgot about the most important thing: Please, any feedback is appreciated

Looks wonderful!!! I shall rush to d/l it... though do I need anything first for Qt4.6? I thought PR1.1 was still on Qt4.5? Or does the game come with all it needs?

(Great forward planning btw, 4.6 will mean any accelerometer device from the range, inc symbian eventually!)

@RevdKathy, thanks for reminding me.
Qt 4.6 requires packages from libqt4-maemo5 series. I have put the dependencies there, I'm not 100% sure if everything is there though (I need to buy second n900 to test such things). So if you have any problems installing or running the game, please let me know.

I have chosen Qt 4.6 because it has some nice graphic features and I felt like trying it (yes, sheep is my testing ground

Ok, is it all arrived?

I'll go get it now.

this awesome. just played my first game and tweeted 890
thanks for using my sounds made me laugh this morning.
ok so feedback time:
-Could we make the password text * or something so when people around me they don't see.
-Would it be possible to change the tweet tag to some unquie like maybe #maemosheep
-The buttons at the top left seem to move when i press them? Is this how it's supposed to work?

otherwise all is good so far. will play and test more later. also i love the little dog

@stobbsc, thanks.

About the password: I'll make when I figure out how to fix first letter capitalization (either the nice way or I'll hack it). Right now it would be too confusing. I think I will also add a feature to save the credentials.

Yes, I didn't know what name we will decide upon, so I just put there anything

'There are three icons at the top, play/pause, sound on/off and exit. To toggle them, you just move them to the bottom part of the screen (deactivate) or to the top part (activate). I find it nicer to do than just tapping '

From what I've seen on Youtube, Qt 4.6 is well worth the effort - it seems to produce some serious 3d graphic effects and be a good upgrade. Besides, this game is going to be so popular it will be demanded on all platforms. People would refuse to upgrade to maemo6 if they couldn't have sheep.

Is't in extrasp-devel yet - nothing other than 'sheep-drawing'. I'll keep checking!

Edit: first stupidity - it's in upgrades, not the untried list.

thanks for up. cool idea for toggling the buttons nice little touch i like it

Looks great. Though, I think using twitter as a highscore is kinda unnecessary for the final product. Seems to just waste storage...having a normal high-score system seems more ideal. Nevertheless, I look forward for more updates =D