♦ Livestream of the ZZT world "ZZT Encyclopedia Online" by Chronos30 (2002) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/zeol2002/]. ♦
Further exploration of the ZZT Encyclopedia's final 2002 edition. Covering World 4 "Counters" and World 5 "Flags and Conditions". Things got a lot more technical in these worlds, and the dated information really begins to show up far more often. While the previous worlds didn't feel all that inaccurate, there's a lot of things the ZZT community didn't understand about ZZT at the time, with some best guesses that aren't good information today.
The first world though is nice in including a simple store with some frills in the form of having a one-time key to purchase that an object fetches for players and the ability to rob the store and have it go out of business. The Encyclopedia never really felt focused on newcomers, so it was nice to see something that would be a great reference for folks just learning their ZZTs.
Today though, the rest of the world is loaded with incorrect assumptions about how ZZT's time counter works, resulting in a lot of confusion between "time" the counter and "time limit" value set on each board. These days, time is known to be one of ZZT's most useful counters, one that resets to zero every time the board is entered (or player hurt from harmful elements) as well as the only counter whose value can be kept hidden from players during gameplay.
Much of the other boards focus on ways to compare counters, often inefficiently (most of this work can be done in one or two cycles), and with too much code to make their usage outside of a tech demo impractical. "Detect the player pressed T" sounds great, until you learn that the method requires every board in your game to be dark.
The flags world has one edge over the older 3C version in that it opens with some helpful information clearing up some older misinformation about the dangers of setting the same flag twice (a thing you can't actually do) and clarifying the flag limit to be ten and not nine. Great! That alone is enough to recommend the Online variant over 3C. Unfortunately, the boards that reference this incorrect information haven't been modified making it still very easy to walk away with the wrong idea after you read paragraph after paragraph of outright false information mixed in with some genuine techniques to squeeze more use out of your _ten_ allotted flags.
♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (1:05:25) End of Ad Break 1
♦ Play this world directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/zeol2002/
♦ Originally streamed on June 2nd, 2023 ♦
