It's not much, but it's a start.

hax0r is ported, and runs! It even drops the telnet connection when you hit the "NO CARRIER" point. Are you excited? I'm fucking excited.

Bugs I don't understand:

1. Weird character on the upper-left corner
2. Enter key does not work in SyncTerm or flashterm, only PuTTY

In other news, did you know you can send money to Tim Sweeny's father and have him send you a disk with the registered version of ZZT on it? Or that ZZT is not pronounced, "Zed zed tee" (or "Zee zee tee" for you heretic Americans), but "Zzt", like a sound effect? Now you do!

Integrating my stackless python game engine is progressing smoothly, though it's turned out to be a little bit more work than I had initially bargained for.

Big change #1 is that the game loop no longer runs as fast as possible; rather it only runs in response to external events (keypresses + timers). Obviously, since I'm going to be running this thing on a server that I share with a couple hundred other people, using 100% CPU all of the time is not the best way to go. It's actually kind of bugged me for a long while that the engine did that, so it's nice to have a fix.

Big change #2 is that a bunch of global variables containing the current high-level "game state" (ie, which board we're on, which board we're heading to next, etc) got split into a new kind of object called a Client. This was kind of bad design in the first place, but I really needed this new entity once I introduced multiplayer.

The good news is that these two big changes are done, and a proof-of-concept port of hax0r over telnet to work the bugs out should be coming soon!

I'm kind of leaning towards only supporting SyncTERM over flashterm. Advantages to SyncTERM: ANSI music support, the smiley face character works. Disadvantages: Seperate app that you'll have to download, rather than clicking a button on a webpage. The ANSI music "language" looks sort of like ZZT's music language, so you can imagine that I'm pretty hyped about supporting THAT.

I'm writing a telnet server for realtime online multiplayer ANSI gaming and game-creation. Realtime collaboration is so much easier when everything happens on the server, and it's so much easier for everything to happen on the server when it only has to worry about spitting out 80x25 character images. I'm almost done with the plumbing (parsing ANSI escape codes from a telnet stream, an internal representation of an ANSI screen, diffing two ANSI screens to minimize the amount of shit sent over the wire), and it should be pretty straightforward to port my Stackless Python game engine to use this new framework. Might this mean a textmode port of Hax0r?

Anyone want to contribute some sweet ANSI?

Ideas for scripting are welcome. I don't really think ZZT-OOP is the way to go (Goto-based programming! Brillant!); a more Klik & Play-style if-this-happens-then-do-this approach is probably better. I can expand on this if anyone is interested.

I want a Shakespeare Shakespeare Revolution t-shirt. I am not a graphic designer. Here is what I have:

Now, I would not be ashamed to wear such a shirt, but I wonder if it couldn't be punched up a bit. And I wonder if you fine people would like to help!

Thoughts:

1. I've doctored the screenshot enough that I wouldn't find it a terrible sin to replace the default Klikfont with some real Shakespearean shit.
2. If there's a spot that would be drastically helped by the addition of a different colour, it needs to be a great big spot that I can block off with masking tape, and not a detail.
3. Where does the glow-in-the-dark go? Shakespeare's sunglasses? The word "SPLEENY"?
4. Definitely needs more hamburgers/umbrellas.

Announcing KNPGen -- a tool for randomly generating Klik & Play screenshots!

It works like this: First, you need to generate the cache of KNP images to use, so drag a directory full of IMG files onto KNPGen.exe. Once the cache exists, you can just run KNPGen.exe on its own to generate new screenshots using that library. If you run KNPGen.exe on its own without a cache, it will scan the current directory, so you can plunk it in with a Klik & Play game to remix it.

Enjoy!

I just realized this morning that I desperately want a Shakespeare Shakespeare Revolution t-shirt.

Glorious Trainwrecks Dot Com is turning two years old on the 24th of April (less than three short weeks!), and while I don't have the stamina to put together a Year Two collection, I am planning a little birthday surprise for all of you wonderful people. But it's a secret! Shhhh.

I'm close! I've been plugging away at it for a couple of hours every other evening or so. Every time I poke at it, I get a little bit closer to cracking what I need to know, which is really pretty cool.

(To be clear: What I have is still far, far away from a full understanding of the file format that would be required to, say, write them, or put together some sort of KlikVM. But I am one structure away from pulling out proper animation data, which feels really awesome.)

Yes, it's finally here! A tool to extract graphics directly from Klik & Play .img files! Source code is included.

I'm still working on cracking the .gam format, which is a lot tougher, but will allow me to extract the graphics in the proper order, and automatically group the images by object / animation / direction.