ADG Episode 203 - ZZT
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- Опубліковано 13 лип 2024
- It's amazing what you can do with just a bit of text mode...
Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look at ZZT, the game creation system made by Tim Sweeney which launched his startup company Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, which became Epic MegaGames the very next year.
Although ZZT is severely outdated compared to some other similar game creation systems, notably Megazeux, it came out at a time when the notion of a GCS hadn't really been realized and was mostly reserved for inventory based adventure titles. That said, there were still tons of fun games made for this thing and it's still neat to go back to it for sake of nostalgia, though anyone wanting to make a text mode based game and not wanting to have to deal with severe limitations is probably better off sticking with modern versions of Megazeux. :B
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Additional Information and Corrections:
* Here's where you want to go if you want to get ZZT and a bunch of games to go with it: zzt.org
* Yes, I know that I showed the program at 1:1 pixel aspect even though it normally wouldn't have looked like that on real hardware. This is another one of those things I feel plays better on a modern system with a wide screen display without the aspect correction letterboxing it. You can see the original aspect ratio when the game stats show up. ;)
* Although I listed it in the game stats, I neglected to mention that the monochrome support is also able to utilize the "bold" character feature, so it's technically able to produce three shades, not just two. This is handled automatically depending on which colours are being used. The Monochrome support is also why the selected colour when editing is typed out on screen.
* The name "ZZT" doesn't actually mean anything and was simply a means to ensure that this thing always showed up at the bottom of any game lists on BBSes and whatnot. :B
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Seriously, it's *mindblowing* how creative ZZT world builders get. I remember coming across one game whose premise was "you're working at a burger joint", and the entire game takes place on a single board.
That game was aptly named "Burger Joint". :P
I remember playing that back in 2002. I never could beat it...
Hey, I made The Mercenary - it was a nice surprise to see it again :) And similar to what you say at the end of the video, I was originally writing it in Megazeux before deciding it would be more impressive if I tried to cram it into ZZT's limits instead - I think that was the only reason it got any attention.
This was a great look at ZZT from someone outside the community - people used to abuse the editor's quirks in amazing ways to make things that were never intended, like the continuous scrolling Run-On shown in the video, and the unbelievable Preposterous Machines, which does things like algorithmically solving the Towers of Brahma and calculating Mandelbrot sets.
Didn't you also make SIlent ZZT?
Wow blast from the past! I designed a lot of my own zzt games in the 90s.
I played this all the time back in the day, it is fun to mess around with.
Oh man I was waiting for this episode. As a kid I wanted nothing more than to create games. I made all sorts of games to show my friends to impress them and make them laugh, often parodying real life situations (making annoying little brothers get flushed down toilets and whatnot). It was my introduction to programming.
Unfortunately once I had the skills to develop games entirely on my own, I lost the passion after making a few. I learned what a pain in the ass it can be.
ZZT was my jam! I tried making a couple games that I never finished but the programming was surprisingly easy to learn and it was fun seeing the complex stuff other programmers could pull off with it!
In 9th grade I programmed ZZT-OOP during school class on the back of my notebook. When I got home I'd make the board. Too bad there were only like 8 global boolean variables :D
ZZT is so nostalgic for me I get goosebumps whenever I use it. :P
The visuals of this game have always intrigued me, time to find out what it's all about!
I made a Haunted House inventory puzzle adventure game for ZZT when I was 12 but I think it was lost. It was just called Haunted House and had all the classic monsters and they were mostly defeated using their commonly known weakness, which let you obtain the item needed to defeat the next monster.
I remember playing this game on my 486 :D
A buddy and I used to play this game all the time when we were in high school in the 90s, and upload custom maps to our favorite BBS.
So this is ZZT ... I remember downloading it from a BBS back in like 94/95 ish, I was too young to even know what to do. Considering I had alternatives such as DooM and Commander Keen, you can imagine how unimpressed my young mind was at the time. I was constantly baffled as to why I kept seeing ZZT everywhere.
ZZT was my bread and butter as a kid. I played it and made some really terrible "games" because I didn't understand ZZT-OOP.
I still have fond memories of Burger Joint.
Me and my sibling discovered ZZT around 1998, I remember an MST3k style game in ZZT.
Wow I just became aware of this for the 1st time by seeing it on Joel's "Shareware Madness part 11" Wish I found about this sooner too!!! Much like you lead me into finding "Rogue" and its variants, this one will be a big deal too... This sort of looks like Ultima games could be if you stripped out all the cheesyness, all the insta-death traps, basically all the bullshit really, and left only the good parts of it. Definitely looking more into this one... Thanks!
No one ever commented on the visual bug in the editor when copying objects?! Well here's the answer, yep it's a real bug! I remember this vividly happening on my 486 back in the day running this in MS DOS.
I recommend watching the 2014 SGDQ speedrun of ZZT (ua-cam.com/video/ZK1RvPFU0HA/v-deo.htmlm40s). Most of the audience is mightily confused about what's going on for the 7 minutes it takes to finish the game.
Man, this was the shit back in the day. The game maker was in the free, unregistered version and everything.
I remember your port of Town of ZZT to MZX. It was a decent job.
+louman-eightyfour I eventually did fix the problem it was having with keys and counter name conflicts with later MegaZeux versions. Dunno if the fix is generally available in the MegaZeux community or not but it IS available on my website! :B
Notification comes in, jump straight onto watch haha.
I heard the ZZT noises for your transitions when I started watching these videos a day or two ago, and wondered if you'd done ZZT yet. Here it is! :)
I tried making a few games in zzt. Also it was fun and easy to dl games from AOL
holy crap this was my favorite game in the early 90s and I forgot about it until now. My brother was a big megazeux fan but I was more into ZZT
YES!!! IV'E BEEN WAITING FOR THIS!!!!!!
That was a cool episode. I never played ZZT (or MegaZeux or what ever the other one was called) but I heard about them occasionally from friends. It would have been nice if you had shown some details on how to actually "make" a game with it (is it some sort of programming/scripting language? is it integrated in the game as some sort of "edit mode" or do you have to create the game with a special tool? Or with a simple text editor? how does debugging work? etc.) but I'm sure I'll find some of that stuff on UA-cam if I want to take a deeper look
As for the next game, I'm thinking it might be either one of the Alien Breed games or Chaos Engine...
+Darkstar I didn't show the editor because I feel it would've been kinda boring. You just plop stuff down and when you place an "object" you're able to select its appearance and then script it. There's otherwise very little to it. :B
this comment is like 2 years old but I've done a bit of programming in both ZZT and MegaZeux, though mostly MegaZeux (the last time I tried messing with ZZT's scripting language was something like 15 years ago). With both, there's an editor that you open that lets you create a new "world". The world is split across different boards, which you can place things within the game, much like Mario Maker. One of the types of things is the Object/Robot in ZZT/MegaZeux, which can be programmed with ZZT-OOP/Robotic respectively in a built-in editor that pops up either when they're placed or I think you hit enter, so you write code within the programs themselves, and the scripts are directly tied to the entity that's placed on the board (meaning that if you accidentally delete it, you delete all of your code). Neither one originally had debuggers (MegaZeux added viewing all variables and breakpoints sometime within this decade), but I believe both have a test board feature that lets you jump in without needing to play through the entire game.
I played ZZT extensively in my early childhood and found MegaZeux in my early 20s. I couldn't get into the latter because all the extra features overwhelmed me and I didn't have really good tutorials to work from.
+Nathan Karr It actually took almost a year for me to completely transition from ZZT to MegaZeux, but it did ultimately happen as I discovered just how much more I could do with it. :B
By the time I found MegaZeux, I already had several years of the OHRRPGCE under my belt and even though it was a DOS engine for making a completely different type of game, it was also more in line with what I generally wanted to build anyway. (Now it's not even a DOS program anymore, after getting ported from QuickBasic to FreeBasic.)
Don't forget Megazeux review! I actually made some of my first attempts at a full game on MZX. (Did you review MZX already? You mention it in this review...) A two-player fantasy game called Trial by Fire. Also, Super ZZT. ALSO, Code Red was the best ZZT "game." It was amazing at the time and shared throughout tons of BBSes.
+Chris Katko I covered MegaZeux way back in Season 1. ;)
You rule. I don't know your whole catalog... I'm kinda working my way backwards. :) great work though
+Chris Katko If you ever need to check, I have an alphabetical list of all episodes: www.pixelships.com/adg/index2.html
I remember getting through the shareware version of ZZT; I lived in a town of less than 100 people, and was in high school.
The school bully just happened to run the only BBS for 100 miles; he didn't like me, so he was always telling me about the cool ZZT-made games that I'd never get to play.
So.... in a way, I envy you for finding out about it later. :p
I was playing Cataclysm: Bright Nights and it made me think of ZZT and I was like "I wonder if there are any videos on ZZT on UA-cam" and found your channel and now I'm like "I know what I'll be watching for the next several weeks." Nothing like looking at the playlists and seeing a thumbnail for OMF: 2097 to get me hyped to watch your videos. I'm looking forward to the Deathtrack and Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic videos that must be in there somewhere, right?
Glad you found the channel! Alas, 325 episodes later and those two games you mentioned haven't even been requested. (And my requests list is over 300 entries big!) There's an eMail at the end of every video you can fire off requests too so I can add them to my requests list, plus you can check an alphabetized list of DOS games I've already reviewed on my website! www.pixelships.com/adg/index2.html
@@Pixelmusement Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic still has one of my absolute favorite "space parts" in a space-based RPG. Like many sci-fi critics have also stated, they realized that the way space combat is normally portrayed is stupid (though the game probably did it due to technical difficulty) and instead, it'd be your ship's computer responsible for combat, so updating your programming skill upgrades your space combat, and space combat it auto-handled by your ship's computer level and RNG, you just select the target.
Heh, gotta ask - what happened to aspect correction? And more curiously, why is there a (bad) PC speaker rendition of Iron Maiden's 'The Mercenary' over the end credits? :)
+x86VileR Well, I already answered the aspect correction thing in the video description, but as for the credits music, I just tossed in the title screen music from one of the ZZT games I was playing, which was also called "The Mercenary"; Didn't know it was a PC Speaker re-imagining of an actual song. :o
Hey, I was doing what I could with limited options, okay? ;) Nice that someone actually recognized it!
FYI, you're pronouncing "Potomac" wrong. It's not "poto-mac," it's closer to "poe-toe-mac." Great video, though.
Somehow I doubt the next game is Alien Breed but I can hope.
Didn't you cover this already? Or was it a filler? EDIT: Never mind, it was Krodz.
If you use ZZT version 2.0, it will buffer every input. The problem with this is if your typematic rate is higher than the step rate. If you hold down an arrow, the player will keep running in the direction you held long after you let go because of the buffering. The latest 3.2 version does not have any differences in OOP or creature behavior since 2.0, so it is perfectly usable. (Source: I reverse engineered the whole thing.)
+saxxonpike Good to know, but it still means it's better to use 3.2 over 2.0. ;)
Pixelmusement For standard play? Of course! There's also the benefit of using the 8x14 font where there aren't one pixel gaps between text columns. I should put together a version difference guide, come to think of it. It's safe to say most games were made when 3.2 was the latest version.
9:00 You mention key lag. It looks like it's the BIOS input key lag. As in, press A and hold. It outputs A... then after a delay starts repeating AAAAAAA...until you let up. You might be able to customize that delay time in DOSBox or your vintage computer's BIOS (or possibly with a third-party DOS tool).
+Chris Katko That aspect doesn't help but no, the lag is related to how the game is timing itself out and is playing in DOSBox exactly how I remember it playing on my old DOS systems with the BIOS set to very short key repeat settings.
"You need a white key to take off the Skates"
Any twitch livestreams coming soon?
+Solis4Champ Soon! I was hoping to start earlier in the month but I don't have all the acoustic foam up yet for improving live audio quality, nor do I have the webcam itself for doing facecam yet. I'll probably be starting up with them sometime next month, March at the absolute latest!
I hope you're talking about Operation Carnage at the end or I'm gonna be super sad :(
HI if you like this try Super ZZT Monster Zoo it was one of my favorites from that design.
This game looks like that newer game VVVVVV, even though that game is more of a retro-game in accordance with the Commodore 64.
VVVVVV has a lot more in common with Jet Set Willy and Monty Mole than this.
Reminds me of Dungeons of Kroz
I gotta say Kris, I think I like the previous incarnation of the game/program info screen better. I'm talking about the one that had rectangles that had representations of what each audio/video mode was like. This new one looks pretty plain.
+imwithstupid086 I'm still thinking of ways of improving the new overlays because yeah, I'm not 100% on board with them, but none of the previous ones look right at 1080p so I had to make something new. If I come up with any improvements I'll definitely apply them! :B
I never really noticed that problem since I rarely watch stuff on 1080p.
@@imwithstupid086 Me too, I've been watching youtube in 360p for years, on rare cases I go to 480p. For me, the most important aspect of any video is keeping text readable on the player window (and even more importantly when watching on mobile screens, which I also rarely do since I hate these plastic toys...) This is one of the few channels out there that has readable text no matter what
dude my name is a dos game sick!
Iron Maiden. 😎
12:33 "...simply by testing various flags down the list until one of them turns True" From a programming perspective, doesn't this flood the program with CPU cycles? Can't a practice like this potentially slowdown some machines? I've been studying and modifying Doom mods, removing features mostly, so some mods become "playable" on my older laptop. One thing I noticed by doing this is a trend of people becoming lazy and reckless in their coding in direct proportion as hardware speed becomes much faster and common. By analizing Doom scripts I've seen some things that should be simple like enemies or weapons having While loops inside of them that consumed a lot of CPU, at least it was noticeable on my machine.
+FeelingShred Remember that with ZZT, you're ultimately severely limited as to what you can do programmatically as the language is not very complex, nor are the things you can do with it, so even if such a procedure of testing multiple flags sounds computationally expensive, (which it isn't, actually), you don't really have a lot of other options. :P
@@Pixelmusement I might be overestimating the CPU impact of "While" loops and "If/ElseIf/Else" loops ;) Then, I can rest a bit and focus on other things
+FeelingShred Let's put it another way. If you were programming on an SNES or an old 8-bit console, yes, you would absolutely worry about stuff like that because those CPUs run at around 4 MHz. When ZZT was released, a typical IBM-compatible computer CPU would be running between 20 and 33 MHz. That speed gives you a LOT more flexibility when it comes to the commands you send to the CPU since so much of the actual slowdown is from the graphical side of things, not the CPU side... at least at an integer level. You start getting into floating point and it wouldn't be until Pentium CPUs debuted and optimized those speeds FIFTEEN-FOLD for the same MHz speed of CPU that it became possible for games like Quake to exist. :B
@@Pixelmusement Wow, very interesting, and comforting to hear. Yeah, I have basic notions of programming and some C coding (very very basic stuff) so in my head I was thinking like this: any "task" you give to the processor will consume CPU time regardless of its level of complexity. For example: if I have a "While" loop running endlessly in the background, without ever stopping, I thought that this While loop would "steal" processing time from other more important tasks. So if this is not the case I can stop obsessing about it =D
+FeelingShred You're kind of making a lot of assumptions there and it's a bit difficult to correct them all in the space of a concise comment, but it's more apt to say that you DO still have to worry about letting loops run away from you. If you want to loop through a dozen flags once per frame of gameplay, you're good, but if you code your loop without some way to mitigate that and tell it "Hey, only do this loop ONCE per frame of gameplay", then you're in trouble when it starts trying to do the same checks a zillion times per game loop! However, ZZT and MegaZeux have caps on how many instructions can be executed per programmed entity per cycle of game logic. MegaZeux's cap I believe is 40, no idea what ZZT's is. If this were BASIC or C though, you better believe you gotta worry about runaway loops! :P
I created a magnum opus in ZZT as a teenager and then my HDD crashed. Not cool.
+909sickle Replace "ZZT" with "MegaZeux" and that's me too. :/
@@Pixelmusement Oh no. Perhaps you learned your lesson after that, but I created a second opus in Visual Basic using Windows graphical API calls and also wrote 1/3 of a sci-fi novel... and then my hard drive crashed.
+909sickle Our HDD crash was the excuse needed to invest in our first CD burner. I keep regular backups now of everything I make! :B
I was born in 1995 but played this as a child lol
Oh crap I realized that the makers of fortnite made this
+GASTRO GAMING Technically. Tim Sweeney was pretty much solely responsible for making ZZT and he is indeed listed in the credits for Fortnite... along with hundreds of other people. ;)