The (Marginal) Silliness of ZZT

The (Marginal) Silliness of ZZT is a one-off experimental fork of ZZT by Alex West, made in April 2020, shortly after the release of the Reconstruction of ZZT. It contains a handful of example implementations of some commonly added features, as well as a couple more experimental additions. No worlds have been created for this fork.

• ZZT-OOP commands regarding board darkness
  • “#darken” - darkens the board
  • “#brighten” - undarkens the board
  • “isdark” condition - returns true if the board is dark

• New ZZT-OOP accessible counters
  • EnergizerTicks = “ENERGY”
  • TorchTicks = “WICK”
  • The standard #give, #take, and ?cheat operations apply
  • Note: #giving or cheating yourself energy will not play the energizer song. You should write your own music.

• Examples of how to have a keypress set a flag or send a message
  • Pressing 'Z' is equivalent to “#send all:test”
    • For performance reasons, one could change “all” to a specific object name (eg. “inventory:do”)
  • Pressing 'X' is equivalent to “#set test” or “?+test”
  • These changes can be found towards the end of the procedure ElementPlayerTick()
  • Both of these examples check if the player statID is 0, in order to avoid spurious effects from player clones elsewhere in the stat list.

Most of these features have found their way into more mature forks, such as FirmWeave.

These are experimental one-off features that have known issues in their implementation:

• Customizable player color (per board)
  • Removed the instances where the game forces the default color.
  • Modified the editor to change the player color to “choice on dark blue”, though any color should work in theory (but KevEdit apparently forces the default color for it as well…)
  • Known issues
    • Energizer and damage color cycling were removed
    • When the game is paused after using a passage, the passage underneath the player is not displayed

• Player-shootable stars
  • Modified ElementStarTick to handle player-sourced stars correctly (they go anti-seek)
  • Player shoots stars when using an energizer
  • Known issue: Stars don't give the player score

• Documentation/Source code