[HN Gopher] ZZT: Epic's First Game
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ZZT: Epic's First Game
Author : mariuz
Score : 64 points
Date : 2021-02-22 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.howtogeek.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.howtogeek.com)
| dang wrote:
| If curious, past threads:
|
| _The Reconstruction of ZZT_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609474 - March 2020 (39
| comments)
|
| _Museum of ZZT_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17656822
| - July 2018 (14 comments)
|
| _The Last ZZT Disk_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6772696 - Nov 2013 (6
| comments)
|
| _zztmmo - classic zzt game engine + node.js + jQuery_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1323888 - May 2010 (6
| comments)
|
| Others?
| VectorLock wrote:
| >try it out using this neat HTML5-based emulation
|
| Click on the link and get met with an "Unable to load Adobe Flash
| plugin" box. Not HTML5 so much I think. :)
| asiekierka wrote:
| ZZT Ultra is an older project to try and re-implement ZZT in
| ActionScript 3; it did receive an HTML5 port attempt a few
| years later, though.
|
| The best way to play ZZT on the web currently is to use the
| dedicated Zeta emulator; it's integrated with the Museum of
| ZZT, as well as used by most ZZT-based games published on Itch.
| jmcgough wrote:
| I have so many good memories of being a part of the amazing ZZT
| community and the surprisingly solid games a bunch of teenagers
| made for fun (burger joint, november eve, the zelda trilogy), as
| well as making my own crappy little games for friends to play.
|
| The engine for ZZT was so quirky with lots of limitations, so it
| was fascinating to see the ideas that people came up with to make
| elaborate games like RPGs, survival horror, etc.
|
| People would ship games they called toolboxes, which had unique
| and interesting objects or unnaturally colored blocks that you
| could use for your own games.
|
| There was a series called ZZTV that was an anthology of small
| games, stories, and teenage rants
| https://museumofzzt.com/article/422/closer-look-zztv-3
| asiekierka wrote:
| >People would ship games they called toolboxes.
|
| The term was "toolkits". While most probably followed the
| convention due to Alexis Janson's 1994 Super Tool Kit, or STK -
| which utilized hex editing to unlock far more color variants
| than the engine itself offered - there were actually earlier,
| based on using in-world interactions to get a more limited set
| of color variants - such as "Tim's Toolkit" from 1992.
| endgame wrote:
| https://museumofzzt.com/article/500/closer-look-z-files-v251
| waiseristy wrote:
| This writer must not remember the way Fornite originally
| released. It has had such a weird history.
|
| The game originally was not battle royale, and released as a paid
| early-access title. To this day, you still have to pony up 15$ to
| get access to the game as it was released back in 2017. The
| battle royale expansion was added after the game completely
| flopped on release and the absolutely insane energy around DayZ
| and PubG started bubbling over to the rest of the industry.
| Fornite : Battle Royale was the only way at the time to play a
| royale-type game on a minimally spec'd machine and thus quickly
| became a total hit.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Wrt to the last sentence - PUBG ran like a old dog when it was
| in it's infancy so there was a big gap for fortnite to take.
| waiseristy wrote:
| Oh totally, and the various Arma mods that this all spawned
| out of were on par or even worse
| chrysoprace wrote:
| Potentially unpopular opinion: I much preferred the zombie
| apocalypse objective game that Fortnite was in early access.
| Now it's just a generic battle royale.
| endgame wrote:
| Despite ZZT being 30 years old, the Museum of ZZT (mentioned
| briefly at the end of the article) has attracted a small but
| vibrant community. Zeta sets ZZT free from DOS and DOSBox, and
| because Zeta can be even compiled to JS, games can be published
| to places like Itch.
|
| Example: The King In Yellow Borders, a horror game:
| https://stale-meme-emporium.itch.io/the-king-in-yellow-borde...
|
| The other massive shot-in-the-arm for ZZT was asiekierka's
| disassembly and reconstruction of the original Pascal source
| code: https://github.com/asiekierka/reconstruction-of-zzt (Tim
| Sweeney allowed the reconstruction to be released under the MIT
| licence.)
|
| As an accidental 30th birthday celebration, the community remixed
| the first world - Town of ZZT - and Dr. Dos livestreamed the
| first half of it just the other day:
| https://museumofzzt.com/file/t/TOWNRMIX.zip
|
| Also, Dr. Dos was recently interviewed on "Preserving Worlds",
| discussing ZZT, the Museum, and Zeta:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhCYQI_XBl0
| asiekierka wrote:
| Minor correction regarding Zeta: It's still technically an
| emulator of a DOS environment - just an incredibly bare-bones
| one, with enough implemented to run ZZT/Super ZZT and little
| more. However, being made to run a specific executable lets it
| do some other tricks - such as reduce input lag or introduce an
| "idlehack" to prevent 100% CPU usage. Zeta was designed over a
| year before the Reconstruction of ZZT was even a seriously
| entertained idea, and I'd have certainly gone about it
| differently had I had hindsight.
|
| Also, Zeta is a JavaScript/WebAssembly project in this regard
| (the C part of the codebase is compiled to WASM, but can also
| produce an SDL-based desktop variant) and developed as such;
| not just JS!
| TurkTurkleton wrote:
| Since I imagine there are many HN readers that might not get
| it: "The King in Yellow Borders" is a ZZT inside joke. When
| editing a ZZT world, new boards by default are created with a
| yellow border of what (if memory serves me) in Unicode would be
| U+2593 "dark shade" blocks. A game containing boards that
| maintain these borders in an unironic way would generally be
| perceived as... well, I'd say "amateurish" but ZZT creators
| were generally all amateurs, so let's go with "unrefined".
|
| (It's also a pun on _The King in Yellow_ but that reference is
| explained in the itch.io page.)
| endgame wrote:
| In those days we called them char 178 (from Code Page 437,
| and possibly others).
| [deleted]
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Despite what the article said about no programming required, ZZT
| was a very fun early programming environment. The creatures in
| the game were literally called Objects and passed messages to
| each other to activate each other's functions to store
| information, move, sing, shoot, etc. By doing this in conjunction
| with the easy level builder, it was possible to manage fairly
| complex world and story state. Alan Kay may have approved, if he
| ever saw it.
| throwanem wrote:
| I learned a fair bit from ZZT, maybe more than I did from
| MegaZeux - even if I did find the latter more fun to build
| stuff in, mainly just because it was more capable overall.
| asiekierka wrote:
| The amount of worthwhile short games and art created with ZZT in
| the past has always made me feel rather astonished. That people
| are still making new, high-quality productions in it in the
| present - even moreso.
|
| By the way - If you're a ZZT (or MegaZeux!) user from the
| 90s/early 00s and still have archives from that period of any
| kind - that is world collections, etc. - we'd love to hear more!
| A common misconception is that we have preserved almost all ZZT
| worlds ever released to the public. Unfortunately, that's not
| true; while it's getting better thanks to modern efforts (with
| hundreds of previously unknown worlds archived in the past two-
| three years), archives especially from the BBS and AOL-centric
| eras (1991-1998) remain particularly spotty.
| benhoyt wrote:
| ZZT holds a special place in my heart. I played the shareware
| "Town of ZZT" as a teenager, made my own (very incomplete)
| worlds, and had fun with the programming language, ZZT-OOP -- a
| very quirky beast.
|
| Every few years I have a silly notion I want to write a similar
| game but with a real programming language like Lua (or one of my
| own creation). Then I sketch up the easy stuff for a bit, but
| give up as soon as it gets hard. :-)
|
| I think there's been something of a resurgence of ZZT stuff in
| recent times, thanks in no small part to Adrian Siekierka's work,
| particularly his "Reconstruction of ZZT", a reverse engineering
| of the lost Turbo Pascal source code. That project is incredible
| to me -- the reconstructed source code, when compiled with Turbo
| Pascal 5.5, compiles to an executable file that's byte-for-byte
| identical to the original ZZT.EXE. His description is here:
| https://blog.asie.pl/2020/08/reconstructing-zzt/
|
| One fun thing I did do was take Adrian's Pascal source code, and
| write a Pascal-to-Go transpiler to produce a Go version of the
| same. It kinda works: https://benhoyt.com/writings/zzt-in-go/
|
| There's also a fully functioning Rust port, which was written
| before the reconstructed source was available:
| https://github.com/yokljo/ruzzt
| mbg721 wrote:
| I also have fond memories of ZZT; my first encounter with it
| was a shareware disc of "SuperZZT's Monster Zoo", which I
| gather was a somewhat less-popular sequel with a screen that
| was allowed to scroll rather than paging over. Some of the fan-
| made worlds were really impressive in how they managed to
| accomplish visual and gameplay effects.
| endgame wrote:
| If the Town of ZZT holds a special place in your heart, I
| _strongly_ recommend the Town Remix.
| tolstoshev wrote:
| I went to highschool with Tim and remember when he was writing
| this in his parents basement while going to UMD. Little did we
| know what would come from his tiny shareware business.
| asiekierka wrote:
| I'd like to ask a fairly specific question as a ZZT
| archivist/researcher; it's okay if you don't remember the
| answer.
|
| Based on interviews with Tim Sweeney, it is said that he would
| let other people playtest pre-release versions of ZZT. What
| wasn't clear from the context is if anyone else ever had their
| own copy of these pre-release versions, which have been for a
| long time - due to some features and traits present in some of
| the pack-in worlds which were not possible to achieve with the
| editor as released - a source of speculation in the community.
| Do you happen to have any recollection of that?
| echelon wrote:
| Any memories of your interactions with him that you wouldn't
| mind sharing?
| abduhl wrote:
| Did ZZT allow consumers to use other programmers' programs on
| their programming system so that these other programs could be
| run within ZZT or was the ZZT platform an unethical and walled
| garden? Was the walled garden an antitrust violation? Why were
| other "app stores" not allowed?!
| gameswithgo wrote:
| zzt allowed you to do anything you wanted, same with unreal and
| unreal script
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