What would cause disappearing fences/animals in buy menu?

[cadaverine]

Not about modded creatures being invisible, or blank icons. I was having an issue with modded ZT1 that I couldn't find anything about, though maybe I missed a post somewhere.

 

While making this post I managed to get all my ztds and langs working together, rendering all of this not an immediate concern, but if anyone wants to maybe guess at what was happening I would appreciate it so I can avoid issues in the future.

 

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Whatever is going on, it causes the game to claim:

• there are no animals except for the yeti (selecting other tabs, such as DD or MM, does not bring anything up.)
• no scenery items available to purchase at all, no foliage or rocks
• no shops or buildings*
• no fences or tanks
• basically, unless you want to place terrain for your free-roaming yeti, the purchase menus show nothing.
• I've yet to see if you can hire staff or shelters, though I doubt it; I forgot to check those tabs.

 

*a test showed that while no shops or buildings are available during normal freeform gameplay, the tutorial you're forced into when first starting the game works just fine, and the snack stand can be placed/deleted. However, upon going to freeform you will be unable to buy anything.

 

When loading into the game without the issue present, it sometimes displays that there is only one animal (yeti) and no items for several seconds. Other times everything is available almost immediately. Presumably this is simply just everything loading in. My current leading theory is that sometimes while loading everything in, the game gets stuck loading. Several minutes can pass with nothing happening. If nothing loads in that first time, The Issue is present.

 

░░▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓████ ADDITIONAL DETAILS ████▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒░░

• I am running windows 11, with severe overkill for this old game. memory is 16gb, graphics nvidia geforce rtx 4060, processor ryzen 7000 series, don't recall exact, and drive space ~500gb, 1TB total. The game loads quickly and runs perfectly fine with a new OS and modern 'gaming' PC. Noting that just because I know some older games don't play nicely with modern hardware, and it could be something deeper I'm unaware of.
• Due to the odd tutorial thing, I assume the object files are present and functional, but simply cannot be traditionally accessed through the menu? Or aren't loading?
• This bug is only sometimes fixed upon removal of known troublemaking files. If removing the file doesn't fix it, then only a full uninstall+reinstall fixes it.
• The unmodified game has no issues, and has all animals + objects from all expansions.
• Modded things seem to appear in the menu just fine*. All zoo tycoon buildings will be gone, but modded ones (such as the configured doors) are present. Only modded paths, animals (and the download yeti. lol.), etc.
• Something in dlupdates also triggered it. Tested other dlls and they worked fine, added the ztd mods in in one big go, got the bug again.

 

* the one exception being fences and tanks, for some reason. Those will never appear.

 

░░▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓████ FILES THAT CAUSED THE ISSUE ████▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒░░

• LANG--ZBorsato , specifically from zooberry, has consistently given me trouble. I've gotten it to work through a fresh download and copy+pasting it. It seems to not like being moved directly into the ZT folder.
• LANG--Jane , from here at zootek, caused the issue exactly once. removing the file fixed it, and when I put it back in, the issue did not reappear. Maybe I was just impatient the first time waiting for stuff to load? I'm starting to feel that this is very much a me issue. None of the other .dll lang files from here had problems.
• Unknown .ztd file. As the game is working I'm scared to go poking around; I'm assuming maybe one of the hacks or an animal wanting borsato's lang, but everything seems okay currently.

[cadaverine]

Actually, is it something with some default .dll / ID (i admit I'm not too sure how this stuff works on a deeper technical level...) breaking? Would that be why, say, modded buildings appear but modded fences do not?

 

For example are modded tank walls using the base tank walls info (which the game for whatever reason can't find, thus never loading them modded or not), meanwhile the buildings are using a functional mod-centric lang file, and thus function?

[Fern]

You need to complete all the tutorials.

All scenarios (the tutorials are part of them) restrict the ingame files available. Different restrictions for each scenario.

For freeform maps you start with a few basics and more are released every so many game months of play. If you want everything available at the start then use the freeform unlock

 

[cadaverine]

12 minutes ago, Fern said:

You need to complete all the tutorials.

All scenarios (the tutorials are part of them) restrict the ingame files available. Different restrictions for each scenario.

For freeform maps you start with a few basics and more are released every so many game months of play. If you want everything available at the start then use the freeform unlock

 

 

oh, yeah, I'm aware of some stuff being restricted until you either finish certain scenarios, research them, or are playing in freeform for a certain length of time.

 

In this case, however, it was quite literally nothing. I'm not using that as hyperbole, in the sense of "not a lot of things," I mean genuinely not a single item. No fence, no animals save for the yeti, no buildings, scenery, rocks, foliage, etc. If you start a freeform game and the game is working properly, you can at least get snack/drink vending machines and small restrooms right away, using them as an example. 

 

If the Mystery Bug was happening, not even those would be there. I don't remember the exact message that displayed, but text appeared in the buy menu. Something like "There are no items in this category." But for every category. I've never seen that before! It was rather odd. Happy that I've solved it now, somehow, but... still. An odd little bug.

 

I mean, it would certainly be news to me if freeform mode refused to let you do anything but buy yetis and play around with the terrain. World's hardest challenge.

[Fern]

From Jay: My first thought was that they have more than 3000 things across all purchase menu tabs. I don't know if it will help, but there is the "Zoo Tycoon 1 Limits And Suggested Solutions" topic at DG:

http://www.ztcdd.org/DG/index.php?topic=4514.0

I believe some versions of MS Windows want things in other folders rather than ZT's folders. But I do not know for sure. Although I tested ZT in Windows 11 and put things in folders within ZT that I set up, I don't remember if I actually tried the dlupdate folder. I don't know if it would be useful to see what is in their ZT folder and subfolders. As for the comment about nothing showing up in purchase menus while ZT is loading things, yes, that does happen. But the purchase menus should be okay within a couple seconds after starting or loading a zoo. ZT can also not do things while it is checking unlocking at certain times of a game year. That includes when a zoo or started or loaded. So it is best to wait a couple seconds before opening the purchase menus, especially if there are a lot of user made things that ZT has to load. As for the comments about LANG--ZBorsato.dll and LANG--Jane.dll, I always have both in my ZT, in XP and in Windows 11. So neither should cause a problem.

[cadaverine]

It's definitely odd. I initially thought it was because I was over the 3000 limit, too -- I was running a lot of mods the first time it popped up, so I removed some, and yet it persisted. Pulled all of them and it continued, so I just uninstalled and reinstalled. I decided to go through the mod list after that to see what could be messing with it (or just to see if anything else could be the culprit), starting with the .dlls... and borsato's triggered it.

 

I can confirm now (or whenever I first fixed it) that it's not the langs. In the past I used them all just fine without running into errors. And in the present, nobody else was reporting issues so I was leaning towards it being a me problem. Still, I thought maybeeee I should post about this lol. Just in case.

 

I have the five lang .dlls directly from zootek's downloads sections + borsato's archived from zooberry, and they're working and playing nicely with everything (I have zoo tycoon open right now!). More mods, too, and nothing's vanishing or acting weird. I won't complain about it working.

 

I appreciate the help though! I tripped over the .ztd limit on accident earlier because I straight-up forgot it existed. So when this odd occurrence popped up, even when I 'solved' it (somehow), I thought it best to ask the forums. Just in case one of you guys encountered something similar. 

 

Hope you have a good day/night, Fern :3c