Toolkit marketshare

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Zenith Nadir
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Post by Zenith Nadir »

this thread is making me think i should probably update z-files, seems there's a lot of kits i didn't know about.......

my favourite copyright thing in toolkits was always "IF YOU USE THE IMPROMPTU QUIZ IN YOUR GAME WE WILL MAKE YOU PAY" in the akware kit, i made fun of it in chickenwire
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Post by Dr. Dos »

So can Sweeney win a lawsuit against me and flimsy for Own and Flimsy's Town?

Did we violate the DMCA when we unlocked games?
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Post by Quantum P. »

On one hand, it could be argued that those games added substantial new content -- i.e., they transformed the original into something new, instead of just being plain derivative works. I'm not sure exactly where that falls, because fair use is so fuzzy.

As for unlocking games, that's circumventing an anti-editing mechanism, not circumventing an anti-copying mechanism (which is what the DMCA forbids).



Now for statistics-like stuff. Sorry for being several days late with this!

This is kind of like what Dr. Dos proposed with averaging out the tiles in all the toolkits, except the tiles aren't in their original locations. Behold, the most common toolkit stuff!

Image Image

This board is composed of the 1499 most popular tiles in all the toolkits. More popular toolkits have more influence. It doesn't matter how many times a tile occurs on a board -- each tile is counted once per board. Non-STK stuff has been filtered out.

It's a bit difficult to see what everything is, so I also made a false-color version of the board. I won't go over all the details, but in general, blue things are terrains/items and red things are creatures. Cyan and purple are the same as blue and red, except blinking.

The top third of the board consists of the most popular stuff: colored walls (lighter blue), colored fakes (darker blue), and a few objects, items, and passages. The really popular stuff is in the first few rows, and is contained in about two-thirds of all toolkits. Fragments of skin/flesh blends can be seen in the second row, and some common floors are in the first row. The most popular tile is the light gray solid, which is in 98.82% of all toolkits (runner up is 68.22%). Take a look at STK and guess why.

The middle third of the board contains stuff that's found in roughly 25% to 15% of toolkits. This includes line walls, creatures, and objects of all background colors (which you don't actually need -- you can stack an object on top of a fake in the editor, and the object takes the fake's background color). There's also some miscellaneous stuff, like forests, ricochets, boulders, and special text characters.

The bottom third contains stuff that's found in roughly 15% to 8% of toolkits. A lot of it is blinking floors and walls (all that cyan stuff), as well as blinking objects (purple). All those blue smileys are dummies: smiley faces that don't take up stats, so they're useful for making large crowds of people. Also present are more passages (as with objects, you actually only need a few colors of passages and some fakes). Lots of miscellaneous stuff, like colored duplicators.

There are colored empties scattered around the board, but they're oddball colors. My guess is that these were accidentally created; toolkit authors move colorful stuff around, and empties will hold the color of whatever used to be in their place.

Image Image

This board contains the most common STK tiles used in non-toolkit boards. This time, I counted not the number of boards that contained each tile, but the number of copies of each tile. My reasoning behind this: If a toolkit has multiple copies of X, it is functionally the same as a toolkit with only one copy of X. But if a playable board has multiple copies of X, it is using all those copies for some purpose.

One of the big differences I see is that there are no clearly-defined transitions from the more common to the less common. When people add stuff to a toolkit, they usually take an all-or-nothing approach: if you're going to add line walls, you might as well provide every single color they come in. As a result, most of the line walls/objects/dummies have the same popularity, and so they form bands of tiles on the board. But when people make games, they don't use every single color in their toolkit, and they use different tiles with different frequencies. This causes the tiles to be more spread out in terms of popularity (and thus in terms of position on the board).

We can still see some basic trends, though. The colored walls and floors still get a ton of use, as do the basic colors of objects and line walls. Blinking stuff is less common, though there are a few blinking tiles that are used frequently. The top couple of blinking tiles might be more realistic replacements for ZZT's blinking-light-blue-on-gray water. The most popular stuff still includes those basic floors, and you can still see fragments of a flesh blend in the third row.

The toolkits seem to provide more colors of dummies than are actually used. There are a few really common colors (white-on-blue, a few basic colors on black backgrounds), but the rest of the dummies don't get as much use. The same thing is true with line walls, but to a lesser extent. If you were making a toolkit and didn't have much space, it seems it would be pragmatic to only include common colors and use the remaining space for something that would get more use.

There are empties scattered across the board, but they seem to have saner colors than the common empties on toolkit boards. The most common empties have basic colors, like dark-gray-on-black, light-gray-on-black, dark-blue-on-black, etc. Though some of these empties were likely created by accident (as with toolkits), I suspect a fair number were intentionally being used.

There are a few strange things, such as a brown-on-blue message timer. I suspect that this is the result of a few corrupted boards/worlds, which probably appeared to my tile-counting program as being filled with all sorts of crazy stuff like this.
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Post by RobertP »

Quantum P, this thread is a gem. You make this site more academic and psychedelic at the same time. Thank you for your work in the field of toolkits.
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Post by Quantum P. »

Zenith Nadir wrote:this thread is making me think i should probably update z-files, seems there's a lot of kits i didn't know about.......
If you're still thinking about this and want to have a look at the toolkits I've found, let me know and maybe I'll send you a few worlds of toolkits. You may not have missed much -- Z-Files seems like a compilation of the latest versions of all the decent toolkits, not a collection of every single variant of every toolkit ever.
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Post by Commodore »

i was going to say something to that effect, but thought it might be a source of derision.

although this is more about history and less about the inner workings of the game.
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Post by Zenith Nadir »

Quantum P. wrote:
Zenith Nadir wrote:this thread is making me think i should probably update z-files, seems there's a lot of kits i didn't know about.......
If you're still thinking about this and want to have a look at the toolkits I've found, let me know and maybe I'll send you a few worlds of toolkits. You may not have missed much -- Z-Files seems like a compilation of the latest versions of all the decent toolkits, not a collection of every single variant of every toolkit ever.
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this is true

at the very least, i didn't know about that mystical winds toolkit. if you could do that thing though, i wouldn't mind it!
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Post by Quantum P. »

I was originally planning to clean this up a bit (remove duplicates, etc), but I realized that the easiest way to do this would be to rewrite my toolkit-counting program, and that sounded like work. So I'm just posting raw data.

download a .zip of toolkits (899 KB)

The included world files were generated by my toolkit-counting program, and the code responsible for that was just a quick hack. As a result, they are very peculiar world files, and they may crash ZZT/your favorite external editor. KevEdit crashes if I press B to get the board list, but using Page Up/Page Down works well for browsing toolkits.

The actual board data shouldn't be corrupt, because I copied it into the world file verbatim. Exporting toolkits from KevEdit as .brd files seems to work fine.

My program used a fuzzy matching algorithm, so if two toolkits look 99% the same, the program classifies them as the same and only includes one copy. However, this means that a better-quality copy may sometimes be left out. So if you see an interesting toolkit but find that (for example) some scroll text has been deleted, let me know and I'll search for other copies of that toolkit.
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Post by Zenith Nadir »

tk0001.zzt, Dr.J2000's Sexy Toolkit:

"You so ugly you momma threw you in a dumpster and the rats would not come near you!"

"Cuz yuh see! My momma come take me away! I'm so sexy! I get humped every night!"

"I'm hot like: Lava"
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Post by Zenith Nadir »

i love how there's two different versions of "hm's wonkeriffic toolkit" and literally the only difference between them is that one is all in lowercase
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Post by Zenith Nadir »

there is no way i'm going to take all these mystical winds toolkit boards. i should have known nanobot would be incapable of keeping anything short. i'll just cherrypick two or three boards

edit: ahahaha

"If you are not an official member of Mystical Winds and you do not have David Hammond's express permission to use this toolkit, if proof is found that you have used it, you may be prosecuted by law."

he also released a public domain version which is exactly the same, but i'm going to take the one with the copyright message

welp, looks like i only took one board

aaaand here comes the billions of stk boards for me to ignore, you knew this was coming
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Post by Zenith Nadir »

i have never been so glad to see newt telling me he's not going to pretend he has copyright than i was just now, those stk boards are cancerous

god damn there are some horrible toolkits out there but the last "Phobos Inc. Toolkit" board in tk0004.zzt takes the cake

Redmage's PSYCO toolkit, by Redmage of FOT Z

fuckan nerds
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Post by Zenith Nadir »

oh JESUS, the scheme toolbox

fun fact: this was the original board that later slowly mutated into what paranoid machinations became. K? K.

and yes, you can see the start of that evolution in v2.00. god this brings back memories. the next version after that was "zenith's stk in a can" in tk0008.zzt

i'm seriously laughing at "The Everything Board" in tk0006.zzt, that shit is just plain inappropriately named

holy god what's this "ultratk", it stretches infinitely in all directions
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Zenith Nadir
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Post by Zenith Nadir »

and that's the end. let's see how many toolkits i snagged, shall we...

ten, including a more recent akware kit i didn't know about

that's enough for a newer version. i think i will do this thing.
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Post by Aplsos »

you better include at least one board of S TEA KAY (i vote EXTRA, it could be useful!)
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