Qbasicnews.com

One of my prime programming hobbies is working with the old DOS game maker, ZZT. Maybe someone here has heard of it? My goal is to, in QBASIC, create an editor that would allow a user to edit their ZZT games with advanced features and tools. This has been done before by other ZZT users, and my goal is to design one with improved capabilities.

I'm relatively new to QBASIC and know only basic commands. My question is, can anyone give me any advice on how I might go about creating an editor for ZZT? I know it will take a long time before I'd be able to start on this, just knowing basic facts of QBASIC. Can something such as this even be made in QBASIC?

If anyone has advice for me, I'd appreciate hearing it!

What is a ZZT (I can probably help you if I know).

yeah, post a link to a site which hosts ZZT. It sound interesting.

Basically ZZT is an old ascii game that came with an editor that would allow you to create new games using it's engine. I've never played it myself but I've heard a lot about it, you can get some info on it here ..

http://www.autofish.net/creation/video_g...index.html

Making an editor is simple. First you need to make an interface for the user. Next you translate whatever the user has "created" on the screen and save it in ZZT's file format.

Although ZZT was released in '91 and is long outdated, there is still a community full of ZZT-users if you're interested in downloading or using the program.

http://zzt.the-underdogs.org/ -Z2, the current center of ZZT activity

BigBasicQ: Good advice, thanks. Maybe I'll start working on an interface.

Hey check out AsciiQuest by Momoguru. It's not ZZT format but from the little bit I played with it I got the feeling you could do quite a bit with it. I can't remember if it comes with the source or not and I'm at work so I can't check but if you dig ZZT, you very well might enjoy AsciiQuest.