z2

Let's have a talk about the object limit. Specifically, let's talk about when objects are meant only for scenery and have no code. Are there any tricks for making statless objects? There is of course the option of using text when white is involved. And there are the player dummies. Are there dummies in other chars? Hmm?

i think you can have statless anything, but the usefulness of such things varies, like touching statless monsters will crash it, and statless conveyers will have a different char everytime the board is entered. I'm pretty sure kevedit has an option to remove stats.

Because an object's character is stored in its stat, statless objects aren't really that useful for art. In KevEdit they appear as smiley faces, which doesn't make them any more useful than dummies.

However, there is a rather neat trick that I'd forgotten about: "Whole-board illusion", found in the second file of the ZZT Encyclopedia. In theory, you could have 150 objects on one board and 150 on another. The objects on the illusion board would be drawn to the screen, but they would just be visual artifacts - they wouldn't be taking up any of your stats. However, the objects on the non-illusion board would be drawn over and wouldn't show up - to get around this, you would tell each object on the non-illusion board to run #char charNumber, forcing those tiles to be redrawn.

The illusion disappears if you save and restore the game, so it wouldn't be terribly well-suited to in-game graphics. However, if this was just for a short cutscene and that cutscene has to have more than 150 decorative objects, then it might be useful.

Or WiL could live up to the hype and actually boost the object limit.

I don't think any of this will work for me then, but thanks for the help.

A ricochet does not count as an object, I know, and presumably other things in f1, f2, and f3 don't either. It must be theoretically possible to have statless objects for a variety of chars.

It can't be because the character of the object is a stat.

WiL's ZZT 4.0 increases the object limit I think though.

Nah...it's just kilobyte limit for each board is raised and file size lowered.

Statless duplicators and transporters are the safes things you can use for art if it's involve direct contact with the players. Pushers are okey, and so is spinning guns, but spinning guns changes graphics just as much as statless conveyors does, and the down arrow is commonly used.

Blinkx does wonders in eliminating excessive font character usage when you take advantage with inverting character, and making solids using the same colour for both 'grounds.

Here's a screen shot from my latest font I've done back at the end of '04, and the "New World Order" STK.
The top is made up of only four basic terrains; solid, normal, water, and breakables, and manage to double the size of the palette by inverting colours. Those characters on the bottom are statless dupe, pusher, and transporter. Note that it's near from being perfected due to using pushers and it being an extra availible character when I just have to invert transporters like I did with the dupes.

I also turn solid into something between solid and normal character. I'm still able to make a true solid using white on white, and other colours as you can see between "popstar entertainment".


Like dang, were we just talk'n about statless and stats things only. Shoo...when y'all said art, this, blinkx and fonts came to mind. To me it's the only way around the limits.

thanks for posting that info Jur

that looks pretty neat, jur. id use that font.

viovis did something similar years ago with his "patriotism" magazine.

it was cool!

Where can one get blinkx anyway?

bmp2zzt is also missing from utilities, incidentally.

blinkx is in the archive, here

on the topic of utilities, has anyone ever used scancode for anything? It's in the archive uploaded by viovis, and lets you assign macros to the function keys (F11 = ?+i, etc). I was babbling on about autohotkey a while ago not working perfectly with zzt, but this program seems to work fine.

edit: oh, there was a threada while ago about it.

That's where that thing is. I don't think anybody ever used it for a game, although I considered edited Aura to use it.

But I can use that now for dosbox on the psp which doesn't suck now since it doesn't let me use shoulder buttons so i don't have enough buttons to play thanks to shit like Keyboard/Color.

superbowl shuffle wrote:Where can one get blinkx anyway?

bmp2zzt is also missing from utilities, incidentally.

they can be found here

Hot dog. And there's SZZT 4.0 too.