I got bored...

Spectere · Post by **Spectere** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 9:57 am

...so I wrote a QB program to display ZZT boards. HERE YOU GO: http://www.spectere.net/files/brdview.zip

DOS application, should run on anything ZZT runs on. It gives you some board information before displaying it. Nothing fancy, I just needed something to do so yeah.

It doesn't peer into .ZZT files at all, which kind of limits its usefulness. You need to export boards to the .BRD format before this'll do anything. It displays lines, objects, and text properly. It should look almost identical to how it would look in ZZT. This actually has a lot more potential than is actually programmed in, since it saves most aspects of the board into memory (like all of the stats objects, sans ZZT-OOP code, which is discarded) but, eh, I'm lazy and tired.

You can either pass it a board file on the command line or just when you run the program (it lists all board files in the current directory because I'm so damn nice). It will even automatically attach the .BRD extension if you neglect to put it. WOW!

I included the source code (QuickBasic) inside of the ZIP, as well as a compiled EXE (compiled in QBX 7.1). THE SOURCE CODE BLOWS GUYS, I'M WARNING YOU. I write fairly managable and organized VB 6/.NET code but when it comes to QuickBasic code I just get all like OH FUCK THIS. Probably the most valuable part of the code are the screen drawing routines (which I snagged from some random web site). They are pretty obvious to use and if you can't figure it out the retardedly simple sub syntax then, quite frankly, you probably shouldn't be screwing around with them.

The largest board I gave it was, like 12K (which it rendered nicely...I think it was one of Nadir's toolkits). It should handle larger boards without a problem (since it completely discards ZZT-OOP code) but hey, you never know.

That is all. FEEL FREE TO POST ABOUT HOW MUCH IT SUCKS.

superbowl shuffle · Post by **superbowl shuffle** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 9:08 pm

Nice trojan, FUCKER.

Spectere · Post by **Spectere** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 9:41 pm

kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me.

Oh, and yeah, I definitely fucked something up in the code (I forgot to remove the CHDIR command I used while testing because I'm an idiot -- or because it was like 4:30 in the morning...your pick). I uploaded an updated ZIP.

nps · Post by **nps** » Wed Feb 02, 2005 6:39 am

It dies with an error if you input an empty string when it asks you for the file name. Wow, I sound smart. Maybe I should get glasses.

Spectere · Post by **Spectere** » Wed Feb 02, 2005 8:27 am

Oh come on, that's such a trivial error.

But yeah, there is absolutely ZERO error checking on that part (or, for that matter, in the whole program! it just crashes if anything goes wrong). The only bit of validation that it does is check for the .BRD extension and add it if necessary (which I did to make testing a tiny bit faster). I only wrote this so that I could understand how ZZT works a bit better. I didn't intend to release it originally.