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I bet she has enjoyed going through this zoo You are so good in creating the natural looking zoos SavannahJan They are without exception stunning and inspiring

Jeff has been kicked out, banished, defunded, and exiled. This is because he exploded every computer at every zoo simultaneously, and since he has questionable design practices this also meant that every fence at every zoo disappeared. Obviously this is not good when most of your exhibits are extinct animals, and this incident has led to his understandable blacklisted status. Also he stole a bunch of dinosaur eggs so he's a wanted criminal. It's fine though. We have alternatives. Cadaverine is more than happy to take up the role of park builder! He's more of a mad scientist, but it's probably ok. We think we can trust him, because scheming little shapeshifters in lab coats are always trustworthy. As such he has been given access to all of our finances. Okay, more seriously, I want to pick this up again! I had a lot of fun making parks. I just have to download all my mods again (and maybe some new ones, idk) before I'm ready to build again. I did kind of disappear for several months. Oops! Happy new year. To finally post any kind of update regarding the computer situation, the old laptop was beyond salvageable. But first I would like to tell its story, because it did get me through for probably about seven or eight years. It had a lot of issues to begin with, namely lagginess and a yearning for the grave. It was old and not really built for gaming. To put it into perspective, some visual novels were too strong for it and would lead to game crashes, if not severe lag. Text and images was too much for it. A lot of modern websites were unusable; my computer physically could not handle opening them and would lag severely. It was a necessity to have task manager open 24/7 in case a webpage I opened froze the browser. As for that yearning for the grave, it had a hard time starting up. It was a bit like an old push mower, or maybe a car. You just had to turn it on and off and listen to it struggle until it finally worked. Shutting it down wasn't really an option, so I mostly let it sleep. I don't really recommend that for most computers but it was a genuine concern that one day it would just Not Wake Up. The first sign was a very specific one: after playing the sims 4, no matter when the game was played, it would inevitably have a fit and, at 5AM, go to the BIOS screen, and get stuck in a BIOS loop. The only way to get out of BIOS was wild. You had to tell it to boot up in safe mode, then turn the computer on and off three times (holding for several seconds each time). This would resolve the issue. It also did not boot up in safe mode. After three instances of that, it was clearly a sign, and I stopped playing the sims 4. The issue stopped. Some day in July, while working on a large artwork, my drawing tablet malfunctioned. This is not unusual. The computer didn't like playing nice and would, sometimes, randomly decide that my every input should lag severely. This would, as you expect, make it impossible to use. The only way to fix this was to restart the computer, which was a pain, because the computer did not like to turn back on. But fine. I was drawing 9 characters in one image, I really wanted to get this done. Save and exit. Alas, what greeted me upon its waking was a new (and final) BIOS loop. This one would not go away with the standard method. Every possible method out was examined, tried, and discarded once they failed. Long-dead forums were scoured. Useless help pages read through. Youtube videos watched. Eventually we noticed something very wrong, which was cause for concern: the boot menu had no listed hard drives. No OS. Obviously a computer kind of needs those to function. It was sent off to a tech guy who gave it a look over and declared it DOA. Which was kind of what I expected, but still. My art!!! Let this be a warning to always back up your files all the time, even if you don't think you should. I lost all the artfight artwork files for that year (though they were all uploaded onto artfight's site itself), including the massive character WIP. I sent the sketch to friends in messenger, though. So there's that. Though I had finished several characters... owch. Anyway, July was spent computer-less. I bought a lovely gaming laptop, with the intention of coming back to this thread, except almost immediately I realized my full steam library was open to me because I had a terabyte of drive space and a 4060 graphics card. Then I bought baldur's gate 3 and blacked out for several months. But I have returned!! I'm in the process of finding everything I had lost (er, mod-wise. That artwork is done for lol) and getting zoo tycoon back up and running. Looks like people made / found some cool stuff while I was away!

So to test out Serpyderpy's new freshwater mod and tank terrain change trick, as well as various freshwater fish mods, I made some ambitious flooded forest tanks yesterday. It was well received on Discord and inspired some other builds, so I thought why not share it here too? My dlupdate folder is a mess right now since aside from these attempts, I'm playing without user-made items for the PANDA contest. The map is barebone and just full of tanks for testing various MM animals. 1. Amazon basin This was V1 before the game crashed prematurely (still unsure of the cause). I salvaged a bit of it from an earlier save and then built a V2 below with some extra land for the tapirs, capybaras, otters, crocodilians, and anaconda. V2 is still my most ambitious tank so far with a very dense number of Hawkkeye's cichlids and piranhas - in fact, I cannot load the save file again without cutting down on the number of animals in this tank. I lost count but I would not be surprised if the total animal count surpasses 100. At this number of animal exhibit compatibility is nigh impossible, but if you cut down to ~10 species it should be achievable. Vegetation also started out very dense - and I love that, but I reduced it eventually to view the animals more easily. And honestly, they look even better in videos when you can see all the critters buzzing around. 2025-02-10 15-09-41.mp4 2. Mekong delta I am more mindful of vegetation this time around - no Amazonian giant water lillies, no swamp cypress, etc. There are also fewer fishes from this region available ingame compared to the Amazon, so I managed to keep most of them happy. There is no land portion like V2 Amazonia tank, but I recognize that this region has a loaded stack of tankable Zoo Tycoon animals (tapirs, Asian elephant, tigers, saltwater crocodile, etc) that can work should I ever do a land segment. 2025-02-10 15-05-31.mp4 The next flooded forest I want to make will be the North American Everglades. I also have an idea of making Jane's neutral rainforest foliage to be tank-placeable in future iterations (unless someone here knows of an underwater rainforest mod). If you think there are specific foliage, rocks, or tank-placeable scenery items that I should throw in, feel free to share them here.

I learned me some mobile and desktop app development for a class this past semester so I figured I'd practice those skills some more so I don't forget. Introducing PANDA (Project and Animal) Loader, a new tool that will help you manage your ZT1 and ZT2 mods with a UI. Target features will be: Quickly enable, disable, and delete your Zoo Tycoon mods without touching any files. If you'd like to follow progress or learn more about the project, this is the project page: https://github.com/GoosiferIO/PANDA-Loader This project stems from a discussion I started earlier this Fall, so you might see me try taking on some of those ideas: https://zootekphoenix.com/forums/topic/41046-local-lang-dll-generator/ No release yet but tentatively this Winter. See you all soon in my other projects as well. So happy to be on break again.

I've been working on a ZT1 graphics parsing library for several of my software projects. So far I've got it to read files somewhat successfully. As a proof of concept, I'm using it to make import/export tools for graphics editing software. I've been most successful with Krita, which is an open source painting program. You can directly import ZT1 graphics without using Zoot or APE. Download Krita (it's free): https://krita.org/en/ Download APE.KritaTools Preview v0.1.0: Download To install: Unzip and drop contents directly into %APPDATA%\krita\pykrita\ Open Krita and go to `Settings > Configure Krita > Python Plugin Manager` - Enable APE.KritaTools Go to `Tools > Load APE image into Krita`. It will ask you to find the extensionless graphic first (i.e. SE, NE, N, etc), and then again will ask you to open the pal file associated with it. There won't be a prompt for the second one, it will just open another dialog window to search for the file. Current issues: - Weird artifacts on every frame - Not very intuitive to open yet - No save function yet Much thanks to @jbl89's detailed specification of the ZT1 graphics format here: https://github.com/jbostoen/ZTStudio/wiki/ZT1-Graphics-Explained I'll keep iterating on this tool and improving it. Feel free to let me know if anything breaks on you! Looking for bugs. Github Repository: https://github.com/openztcc/APE.KritaTools

APE.KritaTools v1.1.1 Added Features Now supports correct offset alignments for every frame (Massive thank you to Jay for his help on this!) Bugfixes Fixed crash that prevented graphics from loading if they had a background frame Download and instructions: https://github.com/openztcc/APE.KritaTools/releases/tag/v1.1.1

Can't believe I've been working on this for a year lol. Here's another teaser. Development is moving pretty quickly now.