trizbort
trizbort copied to clipboard
henck
MiniZyll export
I have been thinking about developing an adventuring system based on the 1984 game Zyll's user interface. Zyll requires no typing, and still delivers a fun adventuring experience, albeit with some D&D features added:
It's a WIP called "MiniZyll" as it would offer "mini" adventures that could be dropped into a larger website. On the other hand, it might also be a full-screen thing. There would be multiple adventures implemented as resources to be loaded into the base system.
Trizbort may be a nice tool to create resources files for "MiniZyll": It allows map creation, connections, and objects. The original Zyll is heavy on locked doors, so these will need to be added to Trizbort. There are also several monsters, so Trizbort would have to add features for that. The idea here is not to change Trizbort too much - it should not be a tool geared towards use with MiniZyll - but to add a couple of extra fields in the .trizbort files that MiniZyll could interpret in its own way.
I also thought that I'd like to make MiniZyll reminiscent of the first text adventures with static graphics, like Level 9's "Jewels of Darkness" or Interplay's "Mindshadow" and "Tracer Saunction". For MiniZyll, screens would be drawn in SVG, with as few polygons as possible. I considered making an SVG draw routine that would draw the images as slowly as the original games, and visibly color them in, but that will probably get old fast. Still, to draw room images for a 100-room adventure would require keeping to images simple anyway. I thought about keeping a CGA color palette, but again, probably a bad idea. It turns out SVG files get big fast, so for detailed graphics, it would be better to convert them to PNG format after all.
Since Zyll requires no typing, just button-clicking, it is also a good candidate for localizable games. Making a text parser in anything beyond English is hard; translating room descriptions is simple.
It seems the Adventure/Quest is doing some of the stuff you want, except mostly for the look and feel (and trizbort map can interact with it) I will follow your thought on this project, but i don't have time to help out at the moment.
Edit: oh, I misread your thread, nonetheless I am curious what you will implement in this one, and maybe will be able to contribute in the future to export it to Quest easier
Or to export to others platform
I think that Quest supports (locked) doors, so adding a door feature to Trizbort would make the Quest export more useful, of course. TADS definitely has it, with vast possibilities. When building door support, I'll definitely want to support existing exporters more than I want this for MiniZyll, because MiniZyll may never materialize.
I confirm that Quest supports locked door. So yeah, it could be useful. In the same way, Quest has a list of items you can find in each of the rooms, (like keys) with description of containers you can see through and container you can't. as well as different type of object.
I don't know for any other platform (nowadays i use Ink for my project, and it is not the same structure AT ALL)
If you were unaware: Trizbort does have support for objects in rooms, and for container objects. The user interface never made it clear that it was possible to drag objects into other objects, but the latest code has a help system that points this out. See-through containers are not implemented. There is also an object classification system (Actor, Scenery, or Item). This system was added with TADS in mind, which makes these distinctions. However, it would probably be helpful for Quest as well.
Ink looks mighty interesting, by the way.
Oh, I was totally unaware there was also this distinction!
Yeah, Ink is interesting, but I don't see how easily export in this format, but... I am thinking, now, about how to export for Ink...
If it's helpful for your project (and you can provide a spec for what the Ink export looks like), we can definitely add that.