z2

I've put together the first binary release of DreamZZT in close to 3 years: 3.0.4-beta1. Downloads are available for Windows, Mac OS X (10.4 universal), and Linux. Due to technical issues, builds for the Dreamcast are not available at this time. So head on over to the DreamZZT homepage and grab a copy!

Known issues with this beta:
* There is no menu when you push ESC, just press S to save or close the window to quit.
* There is no file browser, so saved games will always be 'saved.sav' and New Game will always load 'town.zzt'
* The game doesn't pause when debug command 'warp' is executed, allowing debug messages to overwrite the board selection dialog box.

Also, whoever maintains the Z2 front page, could you update the URL and screenshots on the DreamZZT page? They're terribly out-of-date.

-Sam

what is zzt?

Please to be explaining why a product can reach version 3.04 without having a functional saving mechanism or even a way back to the main menu?

Love

-FSFunky

edit: also are the "several technical issues" with the Dreamcast port the fact that you don't own a Dreamcast or your Dreamcast is broken

1. Saving works (as far as I've tested, please let me know if it stopped working). If you're on linux, you'll need write access to the installation directory, as that's where the save file will be written. If you run the installer as a normal user instead of as root (or with sudo) then it'll install inside your home directory, which you can write to.

2. The technical answer on the DC is that the new cross-platform library I switched to (Tiki) is not submitting the polygons fast enough before the DC times out and renders the frame anyway, so you only end up seeing the background and half of the foreground of the text screen. I can hack my local copy of Tiki to draw the screen with GL_QUADSs as the previous version did, instead of GL_TRIANGLE_STRIPs as the new version does, but I'd like to find a better solution to the problem so I don't have to maintain two versions of Tiki's text drawable.

3. DreamZZT has been at 3.x for a while now (3 years?), I just didn't get around to putting the menu back in before the first beta was released. It'll be back in beta2, along with a file browser for selecting other games / entering saved game filenames.

-Sam

Make this work for mobile Java so I can at last have ZZT on my phone, and you shall be my god.

c99, I'm afraid the special effects and graphics that you made will conflict with the games on the archive since many of them use water and other things as scenery. Could you possibly make an option for the water/custom graphics?

Yeah, there's a few unused bytes in the board header, so I'm going to use one of those to toggle the special effects per-board.

-Sam

Can you make it by default load games not made with your editor with custom water effects "off"? That'd be helpful. :)

Yes, the next version will default to off.

-Sam

What the hell is tiki? Seems to be a requirement, but Google only comes up with wiki stuff, not anything for games. Can't run it on anything else if I can't find it.

Tiki is only a requirement to build the source. You can check it out from sourceforge's subversion server at https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cadcdev/tiki/

-Sam

c99koder wrote:linux

Heh.