Particle's Projects

[(Designer)Particle]

The last week here in California has been so crazy, the sky has been bright orange!  Right now there is so much smoke in the air it is hard to breathe.  So I've been inside, working on this mod, it has been almost 6 months of busting my ass on this thing, but I still needed a hard week of work to get to the point where it was ready for testing, and the fires here have given me that chance, so I pushed hard and now we're pretty much done.  I'm just going to take a few more days to play with what I have here, and get a feel for if I like it all, then I will get it to you guys.

 

I think once the green test version is ready, I'll spend about another week or 2 getting the purple version ready, and then I'll submit them both for release.  But I won't be done with them, I feel like all this work has put me in a place where I have a finished concept, and a lot of knowledge about the Zoo Tycoon UI, both of those things could lead to an even better UI down the road.  So although I'm not making any promises, I hope to keep refining this project as time goes on.   But I have a lot of other projects that I set aside to get this one done, so for awhile I will just be working on bug fixes, and other simpler things.  :)

 

Last night I went through all the icons for items and removed their backgrounds, and centered them all properly.  It always bugged me that certain icons weren't centered properly, (like the nachos).  So I tried to fix that.  Also you can see, I did a new building icon that is a little more detailed:

 

[(Designer)VeganCannibalism]

Hope you're staying safe!

 

Your changes are looking spectacular! So clean and fresh! :D And thank you for realigning the item icons--the way the nachos always stood out like that always bugged me. :D

[Lelka]

That UI looks so cool! It looks bright and in order as well!

BTW, I got a kinda serious question. I'm using your bigger menu hack, and when I edited the .ini file to 1920x1080(which is the resolution of my laptop), two main issues occur.

1) Main menu is cornered to the down-right side a bit. This occurs to the ingame help menu as well.

2) When I open any zoo, the whole bottom UI is gone. It's like I'm only playing with the upper left side of the whole game.

Is this because I'm in fullscreen mode?

[(Designer)Particle]

I'm safe, there are no fires near me at this point.

I'm still working on this, but it should be soon...

 

Lelka, I don't exactly understand how that is happening, a few questions though:

1. If you uninstall all my mods, does it still look like that? 

2. The bigger menu hack has nothing to do with the zoo.ini or the screensize of your laptop. My program Zookini is made for editing the zoo.ini so maybe that is what you are referring to?

 

 

[Lelka]

Hmm, removed your mods and still tilted. I feel really sorry for bothering you, Particle.

Come to think of this...maybe it's the no CD cracked zoo.exe I use(which is renamed, when I got into some overcomplicated Zoo Tycoon installation process with Windows 10, which starts with renaming original zoo.exe to another name to make the proper .ini file that work for some unknown reason…) doesn't properly support the resolution.

Funny it supports 1600x900 but not 1920x1080 :/

 

Again, sorry to bother you, Particle. My Apologies. :(

 

[(Designer)Particle]

Oh don't worry about bothering me, I don't mind helping.  So the screenshots above are in 1920x1080 I assume?  But it looks ok in 1600x900?  If that is the case then most likely it is something to do with your video card and your monitor and how windows 10 talks to those 2 things.  That is not very helpful though I realize.  :(  Every system is kind of different and that is why I made zookini, to help with that issue, but an old game on new systems is sort of a gamble no matter what, so if you can get a nice widescreen resolution like 1600x900 to work, then that isn't too bad.  :)

 

[(Designer)Particle]

Alright first I'd like to say Jay has given permission to integrate his mods into this UI, so I figured out a way to do that.  A big thanks to Jay, because I love these mods, and I realize many other people do too, so now we don't have to uninstall them to play zoo tycoon with my new UI, which is awesome.

 

So now let's talk about developer.lyt.  This is a template that was left in the game upon release, found with all the rest of the UI templates, but they commented out the code for the button that opened the menu, and so no one saw this menu after launch, even though it was still around.  Anyone like me looking through the UI templates would find it and see it and wonder what it was.  Well Jay made a mod called developerMenuHack.ztd that put the button back in the main window, so you could open this panel again.  The problem was this panel wasn't very user friendly, and this is why Jay's hack was so great: He fixed it.  He put in missing icons for items and he also put in a freeform unlock so that the developer items showed up on every map, and added a button that said "Unlock Everything" on it because the old button that unlocked everything was just a x button (like for closing panels), etc.  He also created a mod called developerMapEditorHack.ztd that allowed you to edit maps, and this was all integrated into the developer Menu so the 2 mods worked together very well.  This was all many years ago, and most of you are probably familiar with these mods.

 

So now when I made my UI, I overwrote pretty much every UI file in the game, so Jay's mods no longer worked.  Fortunately there aren't really too many other mods that use any of these UI files, so the only things really conflicting with my UI were these 2 mods and also Jay's purchase baby hack.  This was why I asked Jay if I could integrate them and he said yes, so now you will be able to purchase babies and edit maps if you so choose, using his mods.  With the baby hack, the mod is completely integrated into mine, so it requires no other mods to work.  With the developerMenuHack, and also with the developerMapEditorHack, if you do not have those in your addons folder, then my version of the of the developer menu will still be there, just like it was with the original game, but it won't be very user friendly.  To make the entire thing work properly, you will still have to download Jay's mods and I will provide links to those, in case you don't know where to find them.  Here is a preview of what it looks like:

 

 

The long story short of this is... now there are zero known mods that won't work with this UI.  This doesn't mean we won't find some, but both Cricket and I have been using these UI's for many months now and we haven't found any other conflicting mods.  So I am very happy about this.

 

Almost done now...

[VNDragonV2]

Great job! So where is the button for dev mode located now? It doesn't seem to be on the top left anymore from your screenshot.
I also applaud the choice of not integrating the 2 dev mods into the UI file, even Jay recommends taking the map editor mod out when it's not needed so you don't accidentally delete the zoo wall.

[(Designer)Particle]

I thought it made sense to put the button under the buy objects panel, so the third tab with the construction helmet opens the developer menu.  It is not my ideal solution, because I couldn't get it to work as a true subpanel of the buy objects panel, but it seems to make sense anyways.  We'll see what you guys think.  :)

 

 

I just figured out how to do all this on Sunday, so things could change still.

 

Also I should mention that the default version of the UI has no hacks enabled, for people who don't want to use these mods.  To enable them you just add an extra ztd in, sort of the same way my bigger menus mod does it.

 

[(Designer)Particle]

This is the final test version of this mod.  What you see is what you will get, except for any bug fixes that I might have to make.

 

If you decide to test Jay's mods with this UI, then please for now make sure you install all the ztds into the same directory.  So if you have Jay's hacks in a folder called hacks, or something like that, then put my UI mods into the same folder.  For most people I assume this will be the dlupdate folder.  Do not rename the files please!  This will make it easier for me to fix problems.  The files should be in this order alphabetically:

 

developerMapEditorHack.ztd

developerMenuHack.ztd

particleUI_DREAM_EMERALD_test1.ztd

particleUI_DREAM_EMERALD_x1.ztd

 

If they are in that order, then everything will work right.  If on the other hand if you do not have Jay's hacks installed, you can just put particleUI_DREAM_EMERALD_test1.ztd in whatever addon folder you want.

 

This is the UI replacement mod test version:

[REMOVED]

 

This is the file that will make it so you can see Jay's hacks.

[REMOVED]

This is the link to Jay's developer mod

http://www.ztcdd.org/DD/index.php?topic=9290.0

This is the link to Jay's Map Editor mod (remember you should only use one map editor at a time)

http://www.ztcdd.org/DD/index.php?topic=9291.0

This is the link to the dll that provides strings for Jay's Hacks.  Although it is not required, I totally suggest you use it.  Just remember to put it into the zoo tycoon installation folder with the other dll files.  It does not go in your addons folder!

http://www.ztcdd.org/DG/index.php?topic=5353.0

 

And that is it!  I'm going to fix bugs for a week or so, and then submit this for download!