Solid HUD

Solid HUD is a drop-in alternative to ZZT v3.2 which changes the information displayed on the sidebar better suited to those familiar with ZZT's controls and iconography. It is intended to make ZZT worlds easier to navigate and show a lot of information in a limited space making it easy to embed a small portion of the sidebar onto a scene for a live stream, lessening the need to use a considerable amount of space on including the entire sidebar.

In addition, Solid HUD aims to provide cheats and adjustments to the standard ZZT experience which make things smoother while not breaking compatibility.

HUD Changes

Solid HUD presents the standard ZZT sidebar's information in a more limited space by using a two column layout for basic information.

The left column displays the player's health, gems, torches, and collected keys (with uncollected keys displayed using an empty silhouette). The right column displays ammo and score with two additional rows of new information.

New Information

The upper portion of the HUD displays energizer cycles remaining, revealing a normally hidden counter. The double exclamation character displays the time remaining on boards with a time limit.

The lower half is entirely new information:

The bullet shows the maximum number of shots the player is allowed to have on screen for the board.
The passage shows the number of passages (with stats) on the board.
The silhouetted arrows are used to indicated boards that connect to the current board.
The inverted smiley face is used to show the total number of stat elements on the current board.
The gamma symbol is used to show the current number of flags set.
The musical notes are used to show the size of the sound buffer.

Dynamic Icons

A few of the icons on the HUD will change to indicate additional information:

The smiley icon by the player's health will become a flashing red exclamation point on boards where the "Re-Enter When Zapped" property is set.
The torch icon will fade as the torch cycles remaining decreases. The fade looks as follows: "█░▒▓ ".
The musical notes will change from white to dark gray when sound is disabled with "B".

Cheats

Several cheats have also been added as well as existing cheats modified in order to make it easier to deal with harsh game design and bugs.

Note that all cheats that use '+' and '-' minus to toggle state also set/clear flags with those names. Setting flags can be avoided by simply omitting the '+'. Clearing flags can be avoided by using '/' instead. This means ?/DARK is a valid cheat to turn off darkness without activating anti-cheat measures used in certain worlds. (?/DEBUG is an exception as the debug check uses the flag being set or not to determine debug status).

?AMMO, ?TORCHES, and ?GEMS now give 50, 30, and 50 of each counter.
?ENERGIZE gives 75 energize ticks to the player. This is the length of an energizer item.
?FLAGS lists all currently set flags.
?+/-FREEZE prevents all stats except the first (the player) from getting a chance to tick.
?+/-NOCLIP allows the player to walk on any element. WARNING, you still touch the element you're blocked by and can currently escape the board with this enabled.
?PASSAGE and ?TELEPORT - Opens the board selection menu from the editor allow you to change boards during gameplay.
?REPAIR will reconstruct the border of a board if the player has used the zap cheat while on an edge.
?SCORE gives 50 points
?SPEED - Opens the speed selection prompt during gameplay.
?+/-STARS will cause all stars to set their remaining duration to 0 when they tick. You can still be harmed by a star thrown directly onto the player.
?+/-VISIBLE toggles the display of invisible walls.
% will display the ratio of boards that have been visited and the total number of boards in the world as a fraction and percentage
?! will repeat the last input entered on the cheat prompt regardless of whether or not it was valid.

Additional Modifications

Other modifications have been made to make some aspects of ZZT easier to work with.

The built-in ZZT editor will now open worlds locked with the SECRET flag as well as renamed save files
The initial configuration screen automatically defaults to Keyboard input and Color graphics. Launch SolidHUD with the argument /c to display the configuration screen.

Known Bugs

The audio buffer length is frequently non-zero when launching ZZT resulting in the buffer being "stuck" at one number until sound is toggled or a sound is played.
The new HUD will update the entire display when any of its information changes. This can be flickery on more active boards.
Something is off with the editor so that you can't just make a change to a title screen and hit escape without saving. Always manually save a world.

Changelog

v07 (2023-07-04)

Added ?STARS, ?SCORE, ?ENERGIZE, and ?! cheats.

v06 (2021-12-26)

?BOARD is yet another alias for ?PASSAGE.
Energizer duration remaining now displays in the proper row
Changes below were part of v05 but undocumented:
Pausing with "P" displays the current board title
When a board is visited a checkmark is added to the board title
?% will use these checkmarks to should how many board have been visited, the total boards in the file, and a percentage visited. This is a rough approximate of how far into a file you are.
?REPAIR will recreate ZZT's border of edge tiles

v05 (2021-09-19)

?AMMO, ?TORCHES, and ?GEMS now give 10x their standard amounts
Object shooting now tracks if the shoot noise has been added to the sound queue recently making for quieter action sequences

v04

Removed sound effects from the player moving. I'm sorry they bug me when I can hear them!
The most recently restored save file will be duplicated on top of the list of saves.

v03

ZZT automatically starts in Keyboard + Color mode. Use /c to show the configuration screen.
The "About ZZT" window no longer opens automatically.
Added ?FLAGS cheat.
#put, #become, and #change result in HUD updates for more accurate stat counts.
HUD updates are called in various stat creation/destroying functions.
#set and #clear result in HUD updates for more accurate flag counts.

v02

Message windows no longer close when holding shift and a direction (unless joystick mode is enabled).
Implemented Asie's ?TELEPORT cheat from OpenZoo.
Implemented Asie's ?SPEED cheat from OpenZoo.
Recreated Asie's "Unpause on P" patch from OpenZoo.
ZZT's editor no longer checks if the world is a save or locked.

Credits

Solid HUD is based off of The Reconstruction of ZZT by Asie, without whom this project would not be possible.

DrDos0016/solid-hud