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Costanzee's Projects
Topic Started: Mar 22 2017, 12:07 AM (1,317 Views)
Costanzee
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Here's a little project I've whipped up in an hour.

ZooMod Launcher
A Custom Launcher for Zoo Tycoon 2
By Costanzee


What is ZooMod?
ZooMod is a launcher designed specifically for use with Zoo Tycoon 2. The idea is to allow mod management to become much easier, and allow the user to modify specific values (graphics settings, persistent unlocks) without the need for XML swapping, modification or launching zt.exe

How does ZooMod’s Mod Manager work?
The ZooMod mod manager works via symbolic linking of Z2F files (the file format used to store and distribute mods) to the Zoo Tycoon 2 directory. The idea is to have a Zoo Tycoon 2 directory that looks and feels vanilla for ease-of-access, but will still load all of your custom content into the game as if it were installed into the main directory.

Where can I download ZooMod?
ZooMod is still under development and will not be available for download until a functional version has been created. At that time, a webpage logging release notes and patches will be posted, along with a download link.

How can I help?
Right now, I’d love any and all suggestions regarding what I should do with ZooMod and the direction it should take. I will make it clear that just because something is suggested, does not mean I will do it. These things take time and effort, and some suggestions may simply be out of my reach as a hobby programmer. In the future, I may take on other people to help me with various aspects of the project, but as of right now, this is not necessary. (As an aside, if you have a better name than ZooMod, PLEASE suggest it to me, I’m not a fan of the name as it stands, I’m just not creative enough)

How did you make ZooMod?
Lots of time, effort, sweat, tears and screaming at my computer. As far as software goes, GIMP 2.0 was used for all image-editing and Visual Studio 2015 was used for the IDE. The language being used is C#. If you’d like to learn how to use Visual Studio and write your own applications, check out MSDN or Stack Overflow.


Screenshots

Posted ImagePosted Image


--> Link To The Google Doc

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RGDS
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Sounds great, definitely going to be very usefull
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HENDRIX
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-retired-

Great to see another programmer! :D
Nice idea, but what exactly is the advantage of using symbolic links? Couldn't you just as well have it shuffle the files back and forth between the mod folder and the ZT2 folder? It should be easy enough to identify the original files just via name, so the program could identify every mod file easily.
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Costanzee
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HENDRIX
Mar 22 2017, 04:28 AM

Nice idea, but what exactly is the advantage of using symbolic links? Couldn't you just as well have it shuffle the files back and forth between the mod folder and the ZT2 folder? It should be easy enough to identify the original files just via name, so the program could identify every mod file easily.
This is absolutely true, and definitely something I've thought about. I may include an option to do both. The only reason symbolic links interest me is that the files can be stored in one spot as a constant, and if for whatever reason, your mod folder and ZT2 installation are on different drives (like mine) then symbolic links should provide a slight performance increase in the launcher, as it won't have to actually write any files to either drive.

In the case of them being on the same drive, however, you're right in that shuffling them back and forth is a much more efficient way of doing things. Thanks for bringing this up, I'd gotten so into designing the program to work well on my specific system that I hadn't thought about the other potential users and better ways to implement this solution on their systems. :D
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RGDS
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In APE2 you can see all the mods you have ingame.
I have many stuff that I would like to delete but I don't know in what pack or download they are. Just to make my game lighter though.
Is it something that could be added to your application?
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Costanzee
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RGDS
Mar 22 2017, 01:03 PM
In APE2 you can see all the mods you have ingame.
I have many stuff that I would like to delete but I don't know in what pack or download they are. Just to make my game lighter though.
Is it something that could be added to your application?
How do you mean? I suppose I could look into opening Z2Fs and searching them, as they're just ZIPs, but I'm not exactly sure what you'd want to see out of the feature. Do you mean like a textbox where you can search for a specific item or animal, then the program will find any and all Z2Fs referencing that string, then you can delete them? Sorry if I'm not being clear, trying to put what you'd actually want a program to do in words can be pretty difficult!
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HENDRIX
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Right, you save copying time.

That is something I have been thinking about too, some sort of pack deconstructing... Pretty easy to add that to ape2.
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Costanzee
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HENDRIX
Mar 22 2017, 01:10 PM
Right, you save copying time.

That is something I have been thinking about too, some sort of pack deconstructing... Pretty easy to add that to ape2.
Yeah, this feature might actually be more fit for a program like APE2, but I think I'll look into it, if only to provide another potential solution and to throw another brain at the issue. I was actually going to ask you if I could include a method to launch APE2 through ZooMod. Obviously the user would need to download APE2 seperately, and point to it's path in the program, but after that the two should be able to work pretty well together!
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RGDS
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Oh if one of you guys can do that, it would be absolutely fantastic. I really need to get my game lighter, and there is many pack I own for one or two things outta 20.
I also have some hidden downloads that I can't find, I don't know the name of them. I can see them in APE2 but it's the ingame name haha
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HENDRIX
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Yeah sure that's simple enough. Feel free to do that. I could do so vice-versa too.
I've been thinking about recoding APE2 in C# with an object-oriented approach. The current code is huge and a mess, and many people have trouble running the "frozen" python exe files. Which library are you using for your GUI, if I may ask?

Now something else that would be great: a download manager very much like the one that comes built-in with ZT2. I have tried hacking the existing one, but it's pretty much pointless because the download info file on the ZT server is long gone, and I have no clue how exactly that should look.
It would be fairly straightforward, put a simple XML on server that stores name, version number, release date and download link for each file and query that from the program.

Now lemme implement that file origin traceback and deconstruction thing in APE2...
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Costanzee
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HENDRIX
Mar 22 2017, 01:34 PM
Which library are you using for your GUI, if I may ask?
I'm currently using Windows Forms. Visual Studio 2015 comes with a really easy GUI designer built in, which makes GUI creation super easy. You simply assign functions or write functions for each item in your GUI. You can do all kinds of fun stuff like updating label texts and things like that really easily. Sometimes using actual code to draw something on the screen is necessary, but for the most part, it's really not.
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Costanzee
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Hopefully this doesn't count as a double-post (as I interpreted the rules, it shouldn't be, but I've been wrong before), but to avoid this conundrum in the future, and so you have a centralized place to read about any updates I make or news about my projects that aren't big enough to post in the board about, check out my Dev Blog. It's linked in my sig, but here's another link for convenience sake: DevBlog
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