ZZT 4.0
Moderator: Terryn
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Zenith Nadir
- this is my hammer
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err. totally backwards compatible. replace your old zzt.exe with this one without any problems whatsoever, that's what i did and i've played over 200 zzt games from the archive so far without a single hitch or difficulty.
uhh what else. crashing on dark boards? anyone can help me recreate this problem on my machine i'll be happy to take a crack at fixing it. The water sound is gone because every one of my beta testers strongly suggested its removal. In the NO MSG version i have removed every sound and builtin message i have found so far (i already have half a dozen additional sounds removed for 4.0.1) because the NO MSG version gives people an opportunity to create their own sound effects without the builtins giving them grief. When i find and remove the duplicator sound you can bet it will make a lot of player-cloning games more bearable to play, since that noise prevents people making background music or sound effects because built-in sounds force players to hit their B key instead of hearing what the author has to say.
The point is, as always, that some hinderances have endeared us to ZZT while others have driven excellent storytellers away because glitches have produced bad experiences. Koopo stopped making the sequel to Rocket Xnight (Rocket Xnight World or whatever he called it) because he kept hitting up against teh 20k board limit and the ~350k world limit. He leaves the community, unable to finish the game and show off the months of work he'd spent developing this magic creation. Lynx's highly anticipated Dragon Warrior game, during the final stages of the game making process, got corrupted two or three times a week because it kept surpassing 20k a board for the complicated battle boards. This high rate of corruption led to significant frustration, and Lynx left the community, frustrated at being unable to complete his magnum opus and show his impressive capability as a ZZTer. CyQ had a marvelous tetris clone that, if completed, would have been well over 20k but less than 32k. We do not have CyQ's game. These people didn't leave because ZZT wasn't the GCS for them. They left because Tim Sweeney's file format allowed for 32k boards but he only allocated 20000 bytes in memory for them, leading to corrupted game files, runtime errors, and weeping jesus on the cross. I have felt the pleading voices of the dead spirits of ZZTers lost and frustrated, and I went on a voyage that started 4 years 5 months ago with Banana Quest. I started hexediting the zzt executable then, and i knew that somewhere in that (very messy) machine code was the source of every frustrated zzter, every digital storyteller whose needs were so close to being fulfilled, but whose dreams were shattered by corrupted and accidentally overwritten projects, amazing concepts that were a little too large for the 20k board limit, and others whose fondest dreams were actualized, but perverted because of certain irritating zzt builtins and limitations that had no real purpose being there; they weren't part of the spirit of zzt, just a barnacle left over from sweeney's poor spelling and sometimes neglectful programming. Like columbus, i have found new land. A couple of those errors that have done nothing but make ZZT less fun have now been removed. Should I manage to rearrange the machine code such that .zzt files load up in XMS, and fix a couple other errors such as the 101 board limit and object limit, ZZT's spirit will be sanctified in the holy fires. Whether that spirit is worth purifying is debatable. I'm in the Us now playing through the game archive, which means i've played over 1600 zzt games. Of those, a good 700 are not playable. This includes games that are probably technically playable, but utterly impossible to play because of stylistic choices on the author's part (a great example is SKATE.ZZT, a potentially awesome sidescroller engine ruined by its rigid #endgame when you land wrong or touch a wall) Of the 900 remaining, probably 500 are what i would call unfinished games, demos or games that just stop somewhere and don't continue. Of those remaining 400 or so, most (maybe 300-325) are 20-30 boards longer than the author really had material for. The best games appear to be crisp, funny, unique in engine innovation, writing, or atmosphere, and usually rather short. Whether that shortness is causal or correlative remains to be seen. I think of the shelved projects ZZTers have told me about, my own half-dozen shelved projects, and I look at the canon of our collective work as ZZTers, and I wonder whether an earlier release of this executable might have brought a few more of those crisp, funny games into being, or whether those crisp, funny, short games might have been crisp, funny, long games. I have put a lot of thought and a little time with a hex editor into the decisions I have made concerning ZZT 4.0 and its release. While containing far too many run-on sentances, this lengthy paragraph is my defense of that program and its release.
ENDFAIL
P.S. Nadir I agree with you on both counts
uhh what else. crashing on dark boards? anyone can help me recreate this problem on my machine i'll be happy to take a crack at fixing it. The water sound is gone because every one of my beta testers strongly suggested its removal. In the NO MSG version i have removed every sound and builtin message i have found so far (i already have half a dozen additional sounds removed for 4.0.1) because the NO MSG version gives people an opportunity to create their own sound effects without the builtins giving them grief. When i find and remove the duplicator sound you can bet it will make a lot of player-cloning games more bearable to play, since that noise prevents people making background music or sound effects because built-in sounds force players to hit their B key instead of hearing what the author has to say.
The point is, as always, that some hinderances have endeared us to ZZT while others have driven excellent storytellers away because glitches have produced bad experiences. Koopo stopped making the sequel to Rocket Xnight (Rocket Xnight World or whatever he called it) because he kept hitting up against teh 20k board limit and the ~350k world limit. He leaves the community, unable to finish the game and show off the months of work he'd spent developing this magic creation. Lynx's highly anticipated Dragon Warrior game, during the final stages of the game making process, got corrupted two or three times a week because it kept surpassing 20k a board for the complicated battle boards. This high rate of corruption led to significant frustration, and Lynx left the community, frustrated at being unable to complete his magnum opus and show his impressive capability as a ZZTer. CyQ had a marvelous tetris clone that, if completed, would have been well over 20k but less than 32k. We do not have CyQ's game. These people didn't leave because ZZT wasn't the GCS for them. They left because Tim Sweeney's file format allowed for 32k boards but he only allocated 20000 bytes in memory for them, leading to corrupted game files, runtime errors, and weeping jesus on the cross. I have felt the pleading voices of the dead spirits of ZZTers lost and frustrated, and I went on a voyage that started 4 years 5 months ago with Banana Quest. I started hexediting the zzt executable then, and i knew that somewhere in that (very messy) machine code was the source of every frustrated zzter, every digital storyteller whose needs were so close to being fulfilled, but whose dreams were shattered by corrupted and accidentally overwritten projects, amazing concepts that were a little too large for the 20k board limit, and others whose fondest dreams were actualized, but perverted because of certain irritating zzt builtins and limitations that had no real purpose being there; they weren't part of the spirit of zzt, just a barnacle left over from sweeney's poor spelling and sometimes neglectful programming. Like columbus, i have found new land. A couple of those errors that have done nothing but make ZZT less fun have now been removed. Should I manage to rearrange the machine code such that .zzt files load up in XMS, and fix a couple other errors such as the 101 board limit and object limit, ZZT's spirit will be sanctified in the holy fires. Whether that spirit is worth purifying is debatable. I'm in the Us now playing through the game archive, which means i've played over 1600 zzt games. Of those, a good 700 are not playable. This includes games that are probably technically playable, but utterly impossible to play because of stylistic choices on the author's part (a great example is SKATE.ZZT, a potentially awesome sidescroller engine ruined by its rigid #endgame when you land wrong or touch a wall) Of the 900 remaining, probably 500 are what i would call unfinished games, demos or games that just stop somewhere and don't continue. Of those remaining 400 or so, most (maybe 300-325) are 20-30 boards longer than the author really had material for. The best games appear to be crisp, funny, unique in engine innovation, writing, or atmosphere, and usually rather short. Whether that shortness is causal or correlative remains to be seen. I think of the shelved projects ZZTers have told me about, my own half-dozen shelved projects, and I look at the canon of our collective work as ZZTers, and I wonder whether an earlier release of this executable might have brought a few more of those crisp, funny games into being, or whether those crisp, funny, short games might have been crisp, funny, long games. I have put a lot of thought and a little time with a hex editor into the decisions I have made concerning ZZT 4.0 and its release. While containing far too many run-on sentances, this lengthy paragraph is my defense of that program and its release.
ENDFAIL
P.S. Nadir I agree with you on both counts
i read that whole thing suh
Zack: Preppy, charming and totally gorgeous! Zach is a schemer who would rather stay up all night figuring how to get out of an exam than studying for it!
Slater: The All-American athlete with dimples to die for! Captain of Bayside's football team, Slater is a chauvinist who -- believe it or not -- has an emotional side. What a combo!
Screech: Class clown and electronic genius! When Screech turns on the power, the fun never stops!
Slater: The All-American athlete with dimples to die for! Captain of Bayside's football team, Slater is a chauvinist who -- believe it or not -- has an emotional side. What a combo!
Screech: Class clown and electronic genius! When Screech turns on the power, the fun never stops!
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Furry Jesus Freak
- What can be said now?
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Zenith Nadir
- this is my hammer
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Ellypses
- Whaf yew vauhnt?
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I don't see the actual real reason to bicker about it, Q'man. The 4.0 is like the new paper-thin PS2. It's small and convenient. As the new thing, the 35k per board, is only a cool addition. But, it remains ZZT. Yea, I can understand if there were drastic changes that will screw up a whole line of games, stop working my old IBM PS/1, or undefines ZZT, or just won't work when you use it on the now old 3.2...wait a minute.
Quantum <strike>physics</strike> or what ever your name is, why did you even brought this up. The REAL main thing is that you can still play the old ZZT games on 4.0. Why do you still want to use 3.2?
It's time to make a leap into the future, bo'.
Quantum <strike>physics</strike> or what ever your name is, why did you even brought this up. The REAL main thing is that you can still play the old ZZT games on 4.0. Why do you still want to use 3.2?
It's time to make a leap into the future, bo'.
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Ryan Ferneau
- LOOK OUT FER BAAAD BOB
- Posts: 116
- Joined: Fri Mar 28, 2003 12:51 am
Re: Aghhh
Maybe it's because you're a crook.Nixon wrote:I decided to try out zzt 4.0. I used i for a few hours for making a game. I found that it always deleted my objects code, more than it often would. This could just be the game or is it zzt 4.0?
:freddy:
ZING!
FUNKY DEFINITION: MAKE THEM BOYS GO LOCO
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Ryan Ferneau
- LOOK OUT FER BAAAD BOB
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superbowl shuffle
- Official Clamp School Defender
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:mgwhore:
Yeah, I think it is time to join the zzt community, then again I aint sure anytime is a good time to join the zzt community. Oh yeah if ya gunna add new zzt commands put in some to make AI Programming a little easyer, like findingo out how far the player is away from the object and which direction and crap like that. Anyway, has anyones hard drive started to eat itself, cause thats what mine is doing, I have no longer anything the startup application section. I'm scared to turn it on incase it deletes my zzt and qb files, I think it is time to buy a new computer.
Something has happened to the influx of games on Z2, what>?
Something has happened to the influx of games on Z2, what>?