Playing Online
First of all
The very first thing you should do is READ THE RULES!!!
How to play online
Playing online works exactly like playing offline, except that you can see other players, up- or download levels and replays, and see various stats while playing. In order to use the online features, there are a lot of new keys for you to configure.
The default keys are:
- F1 = Show/hide other players
- F2 = Observe next player
- F3 = Observe previous player
- F4 = Download current battle level
- F5 = Show/Hide players online list
- F6 = Show/Hide battle standings/results
- F7 = Show all finished times since key was pressed
- F8 = Clear finished times list
- F9 = Write a chat line - The layout is US, get used to it
- F10 = Hide yourself - Won't work in a lev which is being battled
- F11 = Upload / Download winning replay of battle
- F12 = Reconnect to the server
Additional commands which don't have default mapping are:
- Show/hide chat
- Show/hide battle status line
- Show/hide battle leader in battle status line
When you first time enter the game, there might be a battle running. Simply download the level, go to the external levels through the menu and find the level, that is being played.
As mentioned, you can chat with the F9 key (default). You may also send private message by pressing "observe next/previous player" while having chat activated. Do not spam in private, you'll get ignored.
How to make your own shirt (BMP)
If you acquired Belma from zworqy's elma site, you should have a BMP.zip among the other files. This is the shirt collection of most of the users in Belma. Extract it in the bmp folder and you will recognize other players better. Since it is not updated regularly, you must manually download the latest ones.
The following is a walkthrough for beginners on how to make a shirt picture, if you know what you are doing you can of course do it any way you want.
- Open Microsoft Paint
- Open a BMP
- Either: Load an existing working BMP (right colors in the game, ex: milagros.bmp)
- Or: Create a new one with the dimensions 149 x 101 pixels
- Rotate 90° anti-clockwise, if you want it to be easier to see what the shirt will look like in the game
- Make the background
- Note that all pixels with the same color as the top left corner pixel will be transparent
- It may be any shape, no need to use the usual shape of the shirt
- Put something unique on it: letter, image, logo, etc
- Customize
- It is useful to use advanced programs like Adobe Photoshop for better results
- You can also use special fonts on pages like dafont.com
- Rotate 90° clockwise if you rotated it before
- Correct your BMP
- If you created or edited your shirt with another program, you might have wrong palette. Then, follow these steps:
- Copy your BMP
- Open working BMP
- Paste there
- There are mainly two different LGRs used as the default one (the original default.lgr and highq.lgr) and it's a good idea to have a look at the shirt with both LGRs as they have a different color palette.
- Save as type "256 Color Bitmap (*.bmp,*.dib)"
- Use the exact name as on Elma Online (case sensitive, no accents or special symbols)
- Publish on Upload Page
- Advertise to everybody on Elma Online, on forums, #ballelma (mIRC) and anywhere else you want
- Shirts are not yet uploaded and distributed automatically in the game. If you edit one and nobody has this version, it will not be seen by other players.