I wasn’t happy with Kev‘s mock drum riffs, so I used DOSBox‘s wav recorder to digitize the original ZZT drum effects.
Here are two samples of how the new drums sound in DreamZZT:
Code Red’s title screen (507KB mp3)
Town of ZZT’s ending music (124KB mp3)
Much better 🙂
Gregory Janson is way too good with ZZT-OOP. I spent the day trying to get Mission: Enigma running on DreamZZT, and it’s uncovered a LOT of bugs and interesting ZZT quirks. The hardest part, though, has been trying to solve the puzzles. Mission: Enigma is pretty challenging, and very well done!
In the process of picking apart Mission: Enigma, I’ve added two more debug commands:
watch – Lets you select an object to watch the ZZT-OOP of. Now the debug console will only display the ZZT-OOP of objects that you’re currenctly watching, instead of every object on the board. Makes it much easier to follow what’s going on!
inspect – Lets you view an object’s entire ZZT-OOP program in a text window.
flags – displays a list of the currently set flags.
Also, since Mission: Enigma’s title screen is so amuzing, I finally got around to letting you actually watch the title screen and press enter to start the game when you’re ready. You can also actually return the main menu again by pressing ESC.
Finally, after putting them off for six years, I had an epiphany last week on how to implement Centipedes! Got them in this weekend and they seem to work pretty well. The only objects still not implemented in DreamZZT are slime, ricochets, and ninja stars.
The National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm warning for NJ tonight. The last paragraph of the warning is:
IN ADDITION TO LARGE HAIL AND DAMAGING WINDS… CONTINUOUS CLOUD TO GROUND LIGHTNING IS OCCURRING WITH THIS STORM. MOVE INDOORS IMMEDIATELY! LIGHTNING IS ONE OF NATURES NUMBER ONE KILLERS. REMEMBER… IF YOU CAN HEAR THUNDER… YOU ARE CLOSE ENOUGH TO BE STRUCK BY LIGHTNING.
Wow. That’s not scary at all. When did the NWS get so dramatic?
DreamZZT’s source code is now available under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2. The source can be browsed or checked out of my public Subversion repository, and is also available from the DreamZZT homepage. In order to build DreamZZT, you’ll first need to build tiki.
To celebrate, I’ve put together the first binary release of DreamZZT in close to 3 years: 3.0.4-beta1. Downloads are available for Windows, Mac OS X (10.4 universal), and Linux. Due to technical issues, builds for the Dreamcast are not available at this time. So head on over to the DreamZZT homepage and grab a copy!
Known issues with this beta:
Please report any other bugs either in the comments here or over at the forums.
Woah, I went to feed my fish this morning, and there was a dead bee floating in the tank! I have no idea how it even got in there, but I guess my fish kicked its ass.
And in other news, I hate pollen.
PLANTS! STOP HAVING SEX RIGHT NOW! IT MAKES MY NOSE RUN!
That is all.
You can now execute ZZT-OOP statements directly from the debug console. I put together a quick little demo video of the debug console that you can grab here (8 MB, QuickTime 7.1).
I also made a lot of progress in moving the source from C to C++. I’ve decided DreamZZT 3.0 will be open source (GNU General Public License, version 2), so I guess I have to make it presentable 😛 All of the objects in the game world are now represented by their own C++ classes, which is a pretty good start. I still need to create classes for the boards and the overall world.
As for what still needs to be done before I start rolling out public betas again, here’s a quick to-do list off the top of my head:
* Sharks
* Slime
* Stars
* Slap the GPL header on top of all the source files
* Grab the drum patterns from kevedit and add them to my music player (yay, GPL!)
* Finish rewriting the guts in C++
* BUGS BUGS BUGS!
I made a lot of progress on DreamZZT this weekend. I finally got around to writing the AI for bears and ruffians, which just leaves sharks, slime, and centipedes left to do. The centipedes are going to be the most complicated to write, so I’m going to continue to ignore them for now. If you want to play Centepede, go to an arcade 😛
I also got sound working! Just the melodies for now, no drums, but it’s a lot more interesting with noises 🙂 I tried to capture another movie with Snapz Pro X, but the sound gets pretty choppy while recording, so you’ll all just have to wait ’til it’s released.
Honey jumped into one of my dresser drawers today, had to grab a picture!
