[HN Gopher] The Reconstruction of ZZT
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The Reconstruction of ZZT
Author : endgame
Score : 52 points
Date : 2020-03-17 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| npongratz wrote:
| This is fantastic. Tangentially, I did not know the source code
| was lost:
|
| "Please don't ask for the source; if I had it, I'd release it,
| but I lost it in a crash a long time ago." -Tim Sweeney
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19991010013339/http://www.epicga...
|
| I find the whole thing interesting, because I remember the
| shareware versions that I downloaded from my friendly
| neighborhood BBS offered the source code for a fee; a large fee,
| if memory serves. I wonder if any of the purchasers of said
| source code might still have it sitting around on their floppies
| somewhere.
| asiekierka wrote:
| >I remember the shareware versions that I downloaded from my
| friendly neighborhood BBS offered the source code for a fee; a
| large fee, if memory serves.
|
| None of the BBS releases for ZZT we found have such a
| statement; though I do think there exist some pieces of
| software which did.
| npongratz wrote:
| Very interesting! I'll try to dig out my old floppies with
| the shareware version and see.
|
| Thank you so much for what you did here! This is seriously
| awesome!
|
| Edit: I haven't found the floppy yet, but as I think about it
| some more, I may be remembering Kroz (and not ZZT) as
| offering the source code for a fee...
| [deleted]
| tssva wrote:
| The source for Kroz was definitely available for a fee.
| endgame wrote:
| BTW, I'm replying to Asiekierka, who built this
| reconstruction and secured Tim's permission to do so.
| Minor49er wrote:
| ZZT is great. Without it, we wouldn't have gotten MegaZeux. Both
| had really fun communities
| danbolt wrote:
| This is so lovely to see! ZZT got me into programming in a very
| holistic, human, way. I'm happy that it's being explored.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Me too! I spent an entire summer when I was 11 making a weird
| adventure game in ZZT using the scripting tools. It was pretty
| fun!
| benhoyt wrote:
| asiekierka, I'm very impressed. How did you go about building
| this? Did you start with the assembly and work backwards to
| Pascal? Did you use a Pascal decompiler? Even then I can't
| imagine how you managed to get the output byte-for-byte
| equivalent...
|
| Anyway, as someone who downloaded ZZT from BBSes and wrote ZZT-
| OOP back in the day, I love this. I recently started writing a
| version of ZZT in Go, but haven't progressed since being able to
| load and display worlds. :-|
| csense wrote:
| For those who are unaware, ZZT was a text-mode DOS adventure game
| written in 1991 by the founder of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney.
|
| It included a level editor and scripting language, which allowed
| anyone to unleash their creativity and design their own text-mode
| games using the ZZT engine.
|
| This was absolutely unique at the time.
|
| As a company, Epic is still hugely successful. Most gamers in
| 2020 have probably heard of Fortnite and Unreal Engine. According
| to Wikipedia, Tim Sweeney still owns over 50% of the company.
|
| ZZT explored a lot of ideas about how to build a game creation
| system, which influenced Unreal Engine, which itself was hugely
| influential throughout the game industry.
|
| The standard paradigms for today's game engines and editors was
| clearly influenced by ZZT.
| bartread wrote:
| > It included a level editor and scripting language, which
| allowed anyone to unleash their creativity and design their own
| text-mode games using the ZZT engine.
|
| > This was absolutely revolutionary at the time.
|
| Well... OK, I'll give you this _maybe_ in the DOS world and
| _maybe_ on the US side of the Atlantic. Maybe. And granted that
| we didn 't all, me included, have access to the latest and
| greatest of anything back then: you knew only what you were
| exposed to through computing magazines, cover disks, and
| printed manuals, and you might not have extensive access to
| many of those. Almost all of my paper round income went on
| computer magazines back then.
|
| Still, AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit), based on an earlier
| program called GAGS, was released for DOS in 1987.
|
| Moreover, in the 8-bit world, The Quill was released for the ZX
| Spectrum in 1983, GAC (Graphic Adventure Creator) was released
| in 1985 for Amstrad, ZX Spectrum, C64, and even BBC Micro, and
| PAW (Professional Adventure Writer) - a successor to Quill -
| was released in 1987.
|
| Point being, a wide variety of text and graphic adventure
| "construction set" programs were introduced in the early 1980s,
| and were widespread by the early 1990s.
| asiekierka wrote:
| They indeed were; ZZT is far from the first game creation
| tool.
|
| However, most of those were either commercial products or
| restricted the editing capabilities in some manner to free
| users. ZZT was shareware, but the registered version differed
| solely in the amount of official game worlds available (and
| the lack of a registration message on exit). The editor was
| fully-featured and no restrictions were put on usage. This is
| what I think makes it stand out from other game creation
| tools of the era and what made it a popular tool on BBSes.
| mntmoss wrote:
| The "free" of it definitely made a difference, but there
| was also a certain lack of concern about the shape of the
| resulting product that made ZZT feel different and more
| flexible than the preceding tools when you tried to work
| with it.
|
| It had built-in, non-configurable stuff for action gameplay
| with some puzzle elements. It did very little with regards
| to assets, unlike contemporaries - no animation sets or
| hitbox definitions or music importer or similar ideas,
| really just a level editor. It was just not good in terms
| of shelf-space bullet points - nothing flashy about it. If
| that was all that it had, it would not be a hugely
| differentiated game since the level editor concept had been
| around since Lode Runner.
|
| But it also had code, and code integrated in a way that was
| well documented and tutorialized. It had scripted
| behaviors, functionality to manipulate and transform the
| board, and hypertext dialogues with event flag toggles.
| Having the hypertext and flags may have been the one most
| critical part of all this since it really enabled choice-
| based interactive storytelling techniques, and that's a
| huge deal even if you didn't have enough of an algorithms
| background to try abusing the other functionality to make a
| platformer or whatnot.
|
| And so I think the longevity of ZZT really rests in the way
| that it guides you towards code, because it has so little
| else to offer.
| acheron wrote:
| This is awesome.
|
| Who would have guessed of all the games I was playing in 1993
| that ZZT would be the one where the creator went on to become a
| billionaire...
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