Leaderboard

An exhibit for the Yangtze giant softshell turtle, as a memorial to the species. Last Sunday the last known female died, leaving only two specimens left, both males. So unless there's somehow more out there(but we said that about the baiji, didn't we?), the species is basically extinct

Bad news... I hope some still live in Vietnamese/Chinese swamps. Great exhibit, I like that underwater viewing, seen something like that in large tanks in zoos (last time it was giant tank full of freshwater European fish, where you could walk around as if it was a pond, and descend underground to watch fish through the glass).

I just missed this reply. I think this is super interesting! I might give it a try some time down the road. I can't say I am too familiar with ani files or graphics programming but this could be an interesting entry point to learn. I will say, in the data dump I attached above, it seems to make direct reference to DirectDraw and IDirectSound, so it might be possible to find documentation of whatever graphics rendering version of DirectX(?) they used in the making of this game and eventually abstract that too. I'm not sure if I'm smart enough for that yet though lol. I did look at the Zoot source and I'd be eager to see if I can tackle some of Jay's wishlist in the readme if he'd be willing, but that might be a project for the end of the year. Edit: Found it, the game was programmed in DirectX 7.0: That's quoting that dump I sent. Edit 2: To be clear, I think they heavily-leveraged DirectX to program the graphics handling, but as far as I understand they used their own proprietary graphics engine that uses that API. Still, might be useful later on to someone. Edit 3: I just ran the process dump on one of my school project executables, and can at least say that it dumped all or most of the function names and variables I used in my project, so I want to think that those could in fact help me find more functions inside of the assembly.

I've asked before & been told that it's not possible. However, if in your pokings and proddings, you discover that there is a way to do it, I and many others would love you forever. 1. Larger maps - at least double, but the larger the better. 2. This might just be me, but looking at the void triggers extreme anxiety. On good days I can ignore it, on bad days, I can't even open the game. Some kind of matching terrain image that covers it would be awesome.

ZA is up again!

A beautiful tribute exhibit LL77

And here is a possible task from part of a conversation with Jay: But if an advanced ZT API did come into existence, one of the things I thought would be useful concerns recolors. I always thought it was a bad design by Blue Fang to put the pal file names inside the views. Instead, they should have put the pal file names inside the ani files, or in the ai/uca/ucb/ucs files if there are more than 1 animation for an object. Then you would only have to load the images for 1 color, then edit the ani files for the other colors to say what pal file to use. That makes the loading easier and it makes the ztd smaller. That would especially make animal recolors extremely tiny.

I found something totally by accident but thought you might want to know that something exists related to map size. It just needs to be found. I'm running a process dump of all of the strings the zoo.exe runs in the background, and a lot of them might turn out to be variables and functions. Initially it was a bunch of UI-related stuff but I think it's returning game loop stuff now. Check out what I have highlighted here: Anyway, as always, could be nothing, I dunno! We shall see, just thought it was relevant.

Ohh those are some cool ideas, thank you! I've been trying to figure out how the game tracks coordinates, but it's kind of difficult because it's not a straight x,y plane. I'll let you know if I find anything out when I get to that part of the game.

Sorry again if I've kind of been MIA - this migraine disorder and my arthritis will sometime team up against me and I'm stuck just barely making it through half a day. Ashea - you are so right about the guests, I don't know how many hours I've sat and picked up guests to plop them somewhere they need to be, only to watch them walk right past it. Drives me bonkers when they do that, lol. Okay, so the zoo is done. I changed up a couple of tanks to add the underwater tunnel (I accidentally spelled underwear...stupid post migraine brain fog, LOL) and that helped my zoo. Right now, guest population is 985, I did have 1,005 and got the Gold Plague and Zoo of the Year awards. Guest happiness hovers between 88%-90%. Animal happiness is at 97% with, I think, 180 animals. I did sell off some before I came on because some of the exhibits were too crowded, so that number isn't accurate. Zoo rating is 95%. Does anyone else have problems with guests being stuck in one spot for a while? I noticed some of mine started doing that, so I had to pick them up and move them over a couple spots to get them moving again. Some of them had been there for so long that I swear they were dead. Still more than willing to post my zoo file so everyone can walk around and play, where would I post it?