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Before I began drinking beer, I used to consider buying the icehouse game. I never did but then when I saw the beer, I remembered it!

you should come around more often

Yeah, I once saw a display a few years ago but couldn't afford a real set. Now the pieces are sold in multicolored sets, and you can play a full game with just one. This lowers the "joining cost" significantly.

I'm assuming this is the place to introduce myself, but since new members are so rare, you guys have all cluttered up the thread with worthless garbage.... I approve.

I am rather new to these forums, but I am definitely not new to ZZT. I've been playing with it for maybe 5 years, but have only recently discovered the possibilities contained in it. I downloaded the Encyclopedia the other day and I've been looking through it, gathering various ideas.

One item that caught my eye was the Side scrollers. Actually, I didn't even look at the side scrollers' engine, I decided it would be funner to build my own from scratch. (Rather than dealing with the tedious copying)

Now I'm working on a Mario Bros. game using my hand-made engine.

I do have a question, though...
Is there a way to have one object respond when another object (not creatures or walls) touches it? Or even better, when a specific object touches it?

not directly, there is one way to do it but it's kind of cheating

in fantasy world dizzy, i had a sidescrolling board where you had to push boulders into a pit. i made it so that whenever the "dizzy" object moved, if it was blocked in the direction it was trying to move in, it sent a message to the boulders to check if that object was blocked in the opposite direction; if so, there was a good chance that the dizzy object was next to the boulder object, and it would move as if it were pushed.

the best side-scrolling engine is the one in eJECTION13's "treasure hunter zzt", but if you're trying to make one from scratch maybe you shouldn't look just yet

also: hi

Awesome, we could use a few new faces. I joined a couple years ago and I'm still trying to get these folks to be more outgoing and welcoming to new ZZTers.

nadir has a point with his double-blocked statements, it might be more reliable if this could be done with :shot. The only way I can think of that it would always work is if you made a grid of empties and had each object put a certain type and color of wall or object, and check with an #if any. Basically, it'd be like so:

Active object moves off of grid square and onto grid line. If the active object is not blocked in the direction it last moved, then it's moving into an empty grid square. If it is blocked, it moves back. By now the dormant object that blocked it will have had time to go into a different loop by checking #if blocked in all four directions. The active object now sends a message to all other objects that it wants to know what it hit. The dormant object simply #puts any object that's not already used on the board and that can't move on its own, like a boulder or linewall. The active object checks for all possible responses and reacts differently depending on what it hit. If it doesn't find any of these, then the object it hit was not in fact an object but a wall, and it goes to some other action. Possibly, if only one of each type of say, solid wall was used, an object could even check to see which solid wall it hit, but this would be even harder.

Yeah, that's how it could be done. It'd be a mess to write up, though, I bet. Plus the grid would look messy in a sidescroller.

Both are interesting ideas... But Nadir's is simpler. I may use it, at least in some places.


I am also experiencing a problem with the sound. When I run ZZT on Windows XP, most of the time, all sounds are just various clicks and ticks. Can I fix this problem?


BTW, here's a BIG warning: I hardly ever finish games.

I have only "finished" two games, and both were simple, short, non-engine games. I have the same problem when I run ZZT in vista. DOSBox is a great Dos emulator that converts PC speaker sounds into soundblaster while the game is running. I'm using it to make a movie of Evil Sorcerer's Party right now.

I downloaded DOSbox, and I could run Commander Keen on it, but I can't seem to get it to run ZZT.

i don't use dosbox for zzt at ALL, it's never run badly for me on windows xp on any computer, although i believe you need to use it under windows vista? i may be wrong though? my pc speaker works fine as is, too; this varies wildly between computers, though, some are extremely quiet while others are case-vibratingly loud.

i have no idea why dosbox will run all manner of old apogee/id/epic games with no problem but labours under zzt. probably due to some ridiculous memory leak, or something else laughably inefficient.

Argh!
Now, not only DOSbox not run it, but when I try to run it the regular way, and just deal with the bad sound, I just get a message that says "C:\zzt\zzt.exe is not a valid Win32 application."

Dang, that's weird! What version of DOSBox are you using? I'm using DOSBox portable v0.72 and it's never complained about ZZT, plus it handles the sound just fine. Maybe some weird problem with a configuration file could be messing it up?

I looked up ZZT on the DOSBox website and it's apparently only been tested with version 0.58 and higher.

It's version 0.72... Juts downloaded it yesterday.
I didn't say the sound didn't work (The sound usually doesn't work when I run it without DOSbox or anything), just that the game won't start at all with or without DOSbox now. And I wouldn't know where to start with the configuration.

What are you doing to run ZZT in dosbox? Are you dragging it onto dosbox or opening it like a document, or are you mounting a drive in dosbox and navigating to it?

Also, have you moved around the files in ZZT since you installed ZZT? ZZT sometimes doesn't like being reorganized into directories. It seems to prefer to have everything in the same directory.

And of course, it could be a problem with windows. Is there some default action on starting a dos program?

I'm mounting it, like so:

Z:\mount c c:\zzt

Z:\c:

C:\ZZT.exe

C:\

That last one is all I get when I try to open it.

And no, I haven't moved it around... Sort of.
It actually used to be under my C:\unzipped folder, but when it wasn't working, I copied it up to C:\ just to see if that would fix it. It's the same thing no matter where it is.

And I'll check ZZT's properties to see if something's wrong...