ZT EMU API

[Goosifer]

Woah, that's amazing! I've checked out a few of the ones you mentioned; jbl's Zoo Studio and Jay's knowledge of the innards of the game, I did reckon, would involve some sort of CS background. So happy to know we share (shared?) a career!

 

Absolutely excited to explore what the other programmers have figured out, or found could not be done! I do research at university, so I've learned that it's always important to read related work before you could even dare make progress of your own. I don't see myself figuring this out in a vacuum; trading resources with other smart folk as yourself is what makes this so much fun and rewarding. 😊

 

I understand your skepticism. If it helps, I am just as skeptical as you are, and anyone reading this thread should be too until proven otherwise!

[Fern]

Not so much skeptical but wary as I have seen so many things over the years that have caused conflicts or game crashing. Jay and I have fixed quite a few files. So have others. Hacks have also  caused problems since they often conflict with other hacks or ingame files. Some of ZTs ingame files are hacks. The guest.ai is one. The ingame Research Buildings are also a hack. The sequence for loading in the ini is important because ZT often overrode earlier files with an update when they released a new part. For example when the dinos were released they updated the original animals to be predator or prey for the dinos. The original guest.ai was updated for the new buildings like the dino putting green.

[Goosifer]

Ah, got it. Yeah I wouldn't be too keen on anything breaking my game either, and I could not promise that whatever comes from this would not do the same--it's just the way about the nature of the game being so old and mods that use a custom API in general. That said, I don't plan on really changing anything about the game myself-only to abstract the assembly instructions that only the machine can read, which really just means: make the source code readable and accessible. In my case, just some of the source code; not all of it, as you'd have to be a mad genius to make sense of it all. Once an early version is out and people want to play with it, I would encourage anyone to make a backup of the exe file anyway.

 

The Venn diagram of programmers and artists in the ZT1 modding scene at the moment seems to lean heavily in-favor of the artists so it may just be myself that gets a kick out of my API, so it might not be a problem in the end.

[Fern]

11 minutes ago, Eric said:

mad genius

Oh we had one of those although he was know as MadScientist and he created the original Zoot which Jay then improved on. http://www.ztcdd.org/DG/index.php?topic=4773.0

Zoot is Open Source and the code is also available there.

[Goosifer]

Fern, that is such an incredible resource I will need to check out, I had no idea Zoot was open source. Thank you so much! So funny that he just so happened to go by MadScientist.

[HeatherL]

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.

[Goosifer]

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.

[Goosifer]

2 hours ago, HeatherL said:

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.

 

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.

 

[Fern]

Eric, Here is a starting point for you on this map question. Read this thread where Jay does give some info.

 

[Fern]

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.