So, the front page of z2 is mostly news updates from 6 years ago. It's safe to say that with the flow of games as it is, that having a front page with "News" isn't really going work out anymore. The rest of z2 is also in pretty abysmal shape. It's using a table based layout that looks sillier and sillier as your resolution moves beyond 1024x768. A large number of links are dead or mention contacting people like MadTom. There's a Links page which introduces people to Ozy and Millie and Livejournal.com.
The code powering the site is also awful (sorry Crank). It's mostly really awkward functions to spit out blocks of content that take raw HTML as a parameter so you get to escape every single quote used in the HTML.
So I decided to take a crack at modernizing the site a little. It's still very much a work in progress, and the current color scheme was picked arbitarily, but I have enough that I feel it's worth showing to anybody who may remain as well as to hopefully get people's blessings to continue it to completion and replace the current site. (Archiving it for posterity of course! I mean again, it has a links page that links livejournal.com and I'll be damned if that gets lost to time.)
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So here's the front page for the new design for a 1280x720 display:
The CSS is responsive, so it scales nicely to 1920x1080. Dropping down to 1024x768 shrinks the font a little, and going to a width of 800 pixels or lower switches to a more mobile friendly layout.
The front page goes from outdated news to an explanation of what the site is and what you'll find on it. Possibly including a tiny feed for the latest worlds/articles that have been posted.
On the left column are links relevant to ZZT the game. The Featured Game list is merged with the old Game of the Month and Classic Game of the Month awards, with the intent of also adding games which won a MadTom's Pick. (And ideally, we can squeeze out some fresh reviews for games which are representative of ZZT at its best and most unique.)
The database section is now "ZZT Worlds", to try and standardize some official terminology as well as deal with the fact that not every ZZT file is a game. It's filtered to only show ZZT Worlds. So selecting a letter and downloading something would be something you can run in ZZT.exe. Not Super ZZT, not a ZZM sounctrack, not a ZIG game, and not a utility. After writing this, I wonder if Featured Game should become Featured World.
The Mass Downloads link is a new addition. z2's zgames directory where everything in the database is stored, is only around 120 Megabytes, which is nothing these days. There is however overlap in some zip file names and zzt file names. So my plan is to split it up by letter, as well as those other categories (Super ZZT, Soundtracks, Utilities, and ZIG). Scripts will automatically put newly published files into the appropriate zips, updating them as necessary. Clicking 30 links beats clicking over a thousand.
Search a regular old search feature. Advanced search lets you specify specific fields.
Super ZZT and Utilities get their own links here as I feel they're both relevant enough, and lacking enough in content that listing everything for them on a single page is feasable. Soundtracks and ZIG games would be found by an article about them, or the advanced search.
Downloads lists what are the three most essential files if you plan to use ZZT in 2016. ZZT, DOSBox, and Kev-Edit. Clones only lists ones which are relevant. So, Super ZZT, MegaZeux, and ZIG (which gets grandfathered in by having games hosted on z2). It shold probably be expanded to include remakes like Lyon, and the various web ZZT clones/ports in the forums these days.
Moving on, let's look at the actual interface for browsing games!
The default view ditches ZZT's table listing, and takes a more visual approach. Title screen images have been generated and serve as a much nicer way to show off a game. Some changes compared to z2 include genre now being a hard set list (currently of 40 or so genres) rather than a free for all that also has lots of inconsistencies (Search for "szzt" vs "SuperZZT" on z2 for example). I'm open to adjusting this list as needed.
The big addition is the release date. Now, for most ZZT games this is unknown. The plan is for a script (which has already been written) to open up every zip file, and find the earliest last modified date of all the .zzt files in the zip. This should be an accurate enough guide for when things came out. There's also a hidden source field for where that information came from, as some release dates can be dug up by going through old news posts, or are sometimes included in text files with the zips.
Not yet shown on the site is a company field. In case you want to play every Interactive Fantasies title.
The 10 review limit will be removed. I guess storage was more of a concern in the early 2000s.
There's also a more traditional list view which sticks to the essentials and takes up less vertical space. An entire letter can be listed on a page easily enough.
All files have auto-generated links to ZU pages. Though very few games on ZU even have pages currently. A script will at the very least stub them out.
The View Files link basically does what Nanobot did on Zeuxworld years ago. It allows you to explore the contents of a zip, and will render through an HTML5 canvas the boards in any ZZT files contained within. It currently only supports ZZT and TXT files. I don't know if more advanced text formats can be reasonably implemented. When looking at ZZT boards, you can also click objects /scrolls to have their code displayed. Right clicking to save a screenshot of the canvas is also possible.
The upload page takes information from the uploader now rather than just throwing a file up. When a file is uploaded, zzt2png is used to automatically save a title screen image so any future uploads should handle that automatically.
Staff features will allow editing this information, as in some cases the automatic screenshots are either the wrong file (for compilations), or blank screens (for more interactive title screens).
A lot of code is reused throughout the site, the same function that handles browsing a letter is also used for displaying search results, or non-ZZT game categories.
While the left sidebar focuses on ZZT, the right sidebar focuses more on the ZZT community. Articles will make up the remainder of the site, either porting or outright rewriting pages on z2.
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There's a copy of the new site currently located at http://z2.pokyfriends.com/
The big things to figure out I feel are what articles should be kept, scrapped, and rewritten. (Again I want the current z2 PHP site to be kept alive for historical purposes,
nothing would actually be _deleted_.)
This new site is written in Python using Django. Its source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/DrDos0016/z2
Thoughts? Opinions? Feedback?
With Archive.org hosting ZZT games themselves, the most obvious thing to add is a link to play the games in a browser. If at all possible, I would love the for new and historical sites to actually get hosted on archive.org as well, but that is something to figure out at a later date.
