Zoo Tycoon beta

[(Admin)Savannahjan]

Jens, it is so nice to hear from you. How are things going with you? You were very young when we first met you, what have you been up to? We would love for you to visit often.

 

Thanks so much for posting these. I love the buildings, especially the petting zoo; much prefer it to the final. Question: Does this version still work?

[Fern]

I love the buildings, especially the petting zoo; much prefer it to the final. Question: Does this version still work?

It is in the beta version I have and working. But it took me forever to extract the graphics for the beta gift shop had 35 sets of graphics per view. It was the easiest to capture and reassemble. Even if we can get the other buildings you would not be able to change the roof/wall colours.

[jbl89]

Fern, just a question, but why extract the graphics? Are the image formats different? It might be interesting to note.
I thought they were the same, so you could just copy-paste them?

 

Also interesting, just spotted (empty) folders in researchl.ztd. One's named "sunfish" which sounds very interesting, another one "antibi" (antibiotics?), ...

 

On the swamp terrain: I think someone did try in the past, or succeeded. You can easily add terrain, and I had a first glimpse at it as well, but the game crashed - I think it's lacking graphics, if I compare it to the other terrains in ZT. Also, the previous terrains had more characteristics defined, I think they were actually satisfying several types of terrain needs (let's say prairie might have been savannah + sand + dirt).

[Fern]

The gift shop has a rotating koala animation and the version I have of zoot (never released as it messes up other things) that extacts all the animations separately which would be an indication that BF made those things a different way from the normal scenery. This applies to all colour changing buildings and animated scenery like the waterfall and other scenery that does not show up inthe released version of zoot.

 

I did do the swamp terrain and it does not crash for me but the merge and joining with other terrains do not work as they should as that it would appear are part of the actual game program which by law we cannot change.

[jbl89]

I believe you Fern, but I'm curious how you jump to that conclusion. Due to not finding traces in the regular files, or did someone decompile Zoo Tycoon to investigate stuff or ....?

[Fern]

I work with Jay and he a programmer (you would know him from ZKL) and he has looked through everything we can access without decompiling the program and neither of us found anything. As I mentioned elsewhere I used a trick. For a complete terrain change that does mean that it cannot be used in exhibits as it would think it was the terrain base you used and you can only place it certain ways.

Colour changes work weirdly too. Here is a water colour with the "blend off" and "blend on" controls enabled. This is another indicator that there is something in the program that provided the "blend off" colour which is the usual ingame colour. Note the strategic placement of ice. This is needed or your get random squares of the original blue. I think I also played with the snow terrain which you can see in the right hand shot.

[jbl89]

I wish we could get in touch with DJ_Pluffs somehow to ask about this possible Marine Mania beta.

 

Also, related to the decompiling: http://www.indiedb.com/games/openrct2

Not sure how long they'll stay up though.

[Fern]

From Jay

That OpenRCT2 topic is old, from when the project first started. Since then, the project got its own site and that is where people should go concerning it:

 

https://openrct2.org/

 

My understanding is the OpenRCT2 program is still not stable. They are making many changes to it every day. I go to the site every month to see what progress they have made.

[jbl89]

On 9/16/2014 at 3:43 AM, Fern said:

The gift shop has a rotating koala animation and the version I have of zoot (never released as it messes up other things) that extacts all the animations separately which would be an indication that BF made those things a different way from the normal scenery. This applies to all colour changing buildings and animated scenery like the waterfall and other scenery that does not show up inthe released version of zoot.

 

Actually, haven't tried it with beta, but ZT Studio DOES support graphics like the waterfall which don't show up in APE/ZOOT.

Still unsure why it needed extracting; I'd use the original graphics, perhaps do some HEX-editing so the name doesn't conflict anymore?