Possible bug report: Freeform unlocks reset after 20 in game play time.

[(Designer)Zarawatto]

I wonder if anyone else had this issue before. As the title says, my freeform unlocks went back to unavailable status after the gameplay time went up to 20 years.

 

Some points I have to explain before:

Firstly, I know some user created items have config files that might trigger these kind of bugs. This means I should try a new game with just the original contents in order to reproduce this bug.

Second, I'm running the ZooAdmin's map editor, which also runs a main role in this. The map editor unlocks every item available in the game despite research, unlockables with time or scenario items like statues. The las time I made a zoo that big was my Ice age themed park, which reached 34 years of in game time. But with this tool active, if this happent it might went unnoticed.

 

Now, the timeline of this events:

As I wrote in other post, I'm building an indian theme zoo. Naturally, like I've done before, I'm running the Zoo Map editor to erase the walls like i did in my japanese zoo. Today, I'm finishing a highland exhibit started yesterday. I started placing foliage, mostly himalayan pine & himalayan birch. I had to restart the game to erase zoo map editor at some point because I erased animal food by mistake (xD) and, when the game launched again, himalayan trees weren't in the foliage menu. Casually, after some minutes the game reached july 1st, year 21 and the "More items available" appeared in my screen. My childish mind thought this was some breakthrough of some unknown unlockable after 20 years of gameplay, but this had no sense, so I restarted the game with map editor again just to find himalayan tree was there again.

 

This was not just me missing the foliage items, without the map editor the menu was lacking it with other items that should be available after some freeform gameplay.

 

In this SS you may take a look at the exhibit with himalayan trees placed before erasing map editor from the root directory AND the foliage menu lacking some unlock items despite the gameplay in june year 21 after erasing map editor:

 

Spoiler

 

Anyone else noticed this before? Might some user created item trigger this bug?

[Fern]

From Jay: All programs have lots of limits. It is rare for people to know what those limits are, especially when they don't have access to the source code. All numbers will have limits, no matter the program. But those numbers can have different limits, depending on how the numbers are used internally. ZT does not save inside saved games what has been unlocked. Instead, it saves the current zoo date in the saved game. When ZT loads the saved game, it then looks at the current zoo date to see if it needs to unlock things again. But I don't know how ZT does that date check internally. There certainly would be a limit of some sort in that calculation, but I do not know what that limit is. I can give an example of another of ZT's limits. Buildings get their messages from ".dll" files. The messages are associated with ID numbers. The ID number has to be in the range of 0 to 65535. Sometimes ZT does calculations to determine an ID number. For tooltips for example, ZT looks for an ID that is 30000 higher than the specified ID. Many designers in the early days of ZT did not realize this. So they might use ID 8000 for the tooltip. It worked for a while, then suddenly a different message would be shown. That is because ZT added 30000 to that and looked for 38000. If ZT couldn't find 38000, it used 8000 for the tooltip. But if someone eventually created something using 38000, ZT suddenly starting using that for the first person's tooltip. Even more confusing is if the first person chose a high number for the ID for the tooltip. For example, they may have chosen 38000. ZT adds 30000 to that, giving 68000. That is higher than the 65535 limit. So the number wraps around, subtracting 65536 from it, giving 2464 as the ID to check. So I am sure ZT would eventually do something like that in its calculations for unlocking things. But I do not know what number would cause the calculation to wrap around and keep things unlocked instead of unlocking them. I have a zoo called ThisIsZootopia that is in year 25 and everything is unlocked. But I don't know if there was a point where things became unavailable again, and were unlocked again. We also know that unlock file names with "-" in their names can confuse ZT concerning unlocking things. But we have seen it the other way around, where it unlocks more than expected rather than less. Still, it is possible it can do both. I don't worry about things not being unlocked. I keep the Developer Menu Hack in my ZT. Among other things, that includes a button to unlock everything. So I use that when something is not available that I want to be.