Splashy was designed to replace Bootsplash. Unlike Bootsplash, it runs completely in userspace and therefore doesn't require any patches to the OS kernel. It is hosted by the Alioth project, and there are deb packages of it.
Splashy supports many advanced features such as TrueType2 fonts, animation, alpha channel transparency and full Linux Standards Base support. Splashy uses XML in its configuration files.