What screen size do you use?

[Yellowrose]

Particle another thing is a lot of members play on laptops that have either 15" or 17" screens not everyone has a desktop and not everyone has the higher resolution wide screen monitors so as I suggested a version the same length as the ingame menu so it's not cut off at the bottom but wider to show more items so like the screens above have it show possibly 5-8 items to a row for the lower resolutions.

[(Designer)Particle]

yellowrose, do you play in 800x600?

[Yellowrose]

I have a 22" wide screen at the moment my 24" went kaputs on me and not getting a new monitor until the end of Jan when income allows and most likely will go 27" - 30" but right now play at 1024x768 because I don't play full screen I play windowed because I'm a multi tasker and have discord and skype running with chats going when building or testing creations.

[(Designer)Particle]

Ok, no problems, I'm just still looking for the people that actually play in 800x600, the next version I make will fit fine on 1024x768 I promise.

 

Let me expand just a tiny bit here, remember this game was made in 2003, back then yes, computers had native 800x600 resolutions, and that was all pretty necessary, but it has been at least 15 years now since a computer was made that forced 800x600, and probably 10 years or so since computers were made that didn't go straight to a higher resolution when you install windows.  Think about it.  You haven't had to use 800x600 in forever.  Why should I make a mod that no one will actually use?

[Yellowrose]

the odd time I take it down to 800x600 because in windowed mode it won't let me resize the window and the bottom of the game window gets hidden behind my task bar so I always have to move the game window up as far as I can to the top of my screen so I can get to the zoo,  animal, and other stat icons at the bottom right of the game window.

 

[Yellowrose]

the game actually released in 2001 and there are a lot of people that still play that have aged and live on limited incomes and can't afford the upgrades for their systems like a lot of working young people can these days. Even with the huge drop in prices over the last 10 years even I struggle to save to get upgrades for my system. It's hard when you live on a pension and I'm in Canada so add a hundred or so to a monitor price you see in the states cause it usually costs about 100 - 150 more then what it can be bought in the States for. It's easy for anyone to say upgrade your system but not so easy to do a lot of the time. So there are a lot of older people playing on older systems. I think the mod is awesome from the screens I've seen and I'm going to try it myself but I think making 2 versions would cover everyone the current version with any adjustments you want to make and a version to support the older lower resolution older systems.

[(Designer)Particle]

Ok, I'll make a version that is for 800x600 then, but here is the thing...

 

I'm making a bunch of these mods, and many of them just WILL NOT FIT ON SMALLER SCREENS.  That is the whole point of them.  For example just now we were brainstorming out the next one and my mock version looks like this:

 

So if what you are saying is, I cannot make a mod unless I make it for 800x600 too, then that logic just is not making sense to me.  The point of this thread was to find out what screensizes I should shoot for as a base line, not for me to have to redo every mod I make for the UI to fit everyone's personal desires for their screens... that is just too much work.

[Yellowrose]

no that's not what I'm saying but this particular mod I think a lot of people would appreciate in 2 versions. I have mentioned a lot of people don't like to use hacks and that is what a lot of UI Mods are. Not to mention the fact that with the way ZT was coded. Only 1 hack of any type can be used at 1 time so if lets say you make 3 UI hacks only 1 of them could ever be used at a time. It's just the way the hard code of the game is. I don't think Blue Fang or Microsoft for that matter ever took into account game modding at the time Blue Fang coded the game.

 

[(Designer)Particle]

That is an interesting point, I would say actually the opposite, that microsoft/blue fang did take into account that the game would be modded.  The UI files are all just in a ztd like everything else.  In fact, all the ztds are as you know are only zip files, meaning anyone can look in them pretty easy.  They did that on purpose.  In fact if anyone were to decide to make the bigger menus mod for 800x600 they could do it too, I'm not holding some secret in a bag here.  This all happened for me by accident, I just was looking through the UI layouts and went, hmmm... I wonder... and then suddenly bigger menus was born.  But the part that takes the time isn't just a simple code change, I had to redo all the UI artwork to fit the bigger menus.  

 

But getting back to the thing about hacks... part of the fun of the zoo tycoon modding community is that everyone works very hard to make all the mods work  together and I want to do the same, but... if I were to never touch certain files because someone else already made a hack that uses that file, then that puts a limit on what you can do.  Bigger menus would never exist because it does interfere with Jay's purchase baby mod.  So while I can appreciate that the mods should all work together if possible, I'm not looking at that as a line that can't be crossed to make a better game.  If you had to make a choice between bigger menus, and a purchase baby mod, that would not be the end of the world!  (Thankfully though Jay told me I should try to integrate his mod with mine, hopefully he still feels that way, so that I can make a version of bigger menus that makes everyone happy in the end, which is a lot more work than just making one mod for everyone, but still I am willing to do it, if that's what people want.)

 

Also, in the zt world bigger menus is known as a 'hack' but in most mod communities it would simply be a 'mod', and conflicts with other mods wouldn't even be mentioned.  Typically like for skyrim or battlefield or wow or other heavily modded games, when conflicts occur, people just tell you to delete all your mods, add them in one at a time, and then... you'll know which ones conflict with eachother.  Some games even have tools that can go through your mod folder and tell you which mods conflict, but, that doesn't stop people from making mods that conflict.  And the larger or more comprehensive a mod is the more likely it is to conflict.  So in other words if I were to make an expansion that changed the UI, the R&D, the economy, the AI of the game, the Staff, the whatever else, and then released it, at the end of the day, you could either say, no way i'm not playing it, or you could play it.  It is a choice, no one is forcing that.  Just like when Blue Fang made MM and DD (actually just mods in a way) it broke so many of the user mods.  But who in their right mind would say, I don't want MM and DD because I'd rather keep my old mods...

 

Anyways sorry for going off topic a little, just some food for thought.  In my mind, Blue Fang was very much aware of what they were doing, and this game (zt1) was way ahead of the times.

 

A little quote from a skyrim tutorial on solving mod conflicts:

"Going crazy with mod installations, as we did in our previous Skyrim Overhaul kit, can lead to constant CTDs, freezing, black screens, glitches, and crashing; despite how fun running through every possible solution in a crash fix guide is, it's not fun at all to potentially wipe your Skyrim installation clean and remove all mods. Having installed well over 100 mods myself (with many, sadly, being removed), I've now tested a variety of methods to troubleshoot mods in Skyrim. Let's run through the troubleshooting techniques so you can find the conflicting mods in your TES installation! "

[(Designer)Particle]

Also, just going to throw this out there, I deleted that earlier post right after I posted it, because I realized it could sound condescending, and I don't want to do that.  I don't have much money, I use 2 computers that were both bought used, for pretty cheap, from a thrift store.  I go to a lot of garage sales and I see a lot of 24 inch monitors for 10 dollars, in fact both of the ones I'm using are from garage sales.  And I'm 49 and i only work part time.  So please at least understand I'm not saying that you need to be young and rich to buy this stuff.  Not at all.  I'm pretty sure even in canada they have garage sales, don't they?  :)