Menu Filter Scrolling Hack
(http://ztcdd.org/DD/DownloadFiles/Utilities/MenuFilterScrollingHackByJay.jpg)
Author: Jay
Keywords: Hack
Date Released: July 15, 2025
Current ztd date: July 5, 2025
zip File Size: 9.03 KB
Compatibility: DD, MM, and CC
Description: DD, MM, and CC come with a Menu Filter in many of the purchase menus, as well as the staff and research menus. The Menu Filter is set to "All" by default when starting new zoos. The "All" can be clicked and an expansion pack can be selected. In MM and CC, it allows selecting "All", "Zoo Tycoon", "Dinosaur Digs", or "Marine Mania". Then the purchase menu will show only things that came with one of those. For example, if "Marine Mania" is selected, the Animals purchase menu shows only animals that come with Marine Mania.
In 2002, Mark Bell showed how people could add their own entry to that Menu Filter for personal use. But ZT's menu filter has room only for ZT's 4 entries. So Mark also provided a hack to expand the menu filter to allow 5 entries. Even though it was intended for personal use, some people added entries to that Menu Filter and released their versions, all using Mark's hack. The problem with that is only 1 additional entry can be added, so the various user made entries cannot be used at the same time.
The attached MenuFilterScrollingHackByJay.ztd corrects that problem. I expanded the Menu Filter box to be almost as tall as the purchase menus, easily having enough room for all the current user made entries. In addition, if it gets to the point where there are more entries than can fit in the window, the up arrow and down arrow can be used to scroll through the entire list, no matter how many there are. This is a hack of ZT's xpac.lyt file. So it cannot be used at the same time as any other xpac.lyt hack. Besides the hacks made for the above (which are no longer necessary), the only other xpac.lyt hacks I know about are particleUI_DreamEmerald_v1.ztd, particleUI_DreamEmerald_v1-PlusMoveablePurchaseMenu.ztd, and particleUI_LostAmethyst_v1.ztd.
Instructions: Extract MenuFilterScrollingHackByJay.ztd from MenuFilterScrollingHackByJay.zip. Although this could be placed in the dlupdate folder or a hacks folder, the best place to put MenuFilterScrollingHackByJay.ztd is in a hacks2 or hacks2-unused folder. That allows having particleUI_DreamEmerald_v1.ztd, particleUI_DreamEmerald_v1-PlusMoveablePurchaseMenu.ztd, or particleUI_LostAmethyst_v1.ztd in a hacks folder, if you use any of those ".ztd" files. If you do not have a hacks2 or hacks2-unused folder in your ZT folder yet, here is how to set it up, which only needs to be done one time:
1. The zoo.ini file in ZT's main folder needs to be edited. Just to be safe, copy that zoo.ini elsewhere to save as a backup. Depending on how your MS Windows is set up, you might not see the ".ini" part of that file name. If you see 2 files called "zoo", the smaller file is zoo.ini.
2. The zoo.ini file can be edited with any text editor, such as WordPad. The Notepad program can be used instead of WordPad, but WordPad is a little more powerful. As an example of starting WordPad in Windows XP, click start->All Programs->Accessories->WordPad. Starting WordPad in other versions of MS Windows could be different. In WordPad, click File->Open. In the "Open" window, go to ZT's main folder. To do this on my computer, I clicked "My Computer", double-clicked "Local Disk (C:)", double-clicked "Program Files", double-clicked "Microsoft Games", and double-clicked "Zoo Tycoon". I then changed the "Files of type:" setting to "All Documents (*.*)". I then clicked "zoo.ini" and clicked the Open button.
3. There is a line in zoo.ini that starts with "path=". The line is different, depending on the ZT version and whether you have edited the line before. If the line has not been edited before, it looks like this for CC:
path=./dlupdate;./updates;./xpack2/loc;./xpack2;./dupdate;./zupdate1;./xpack1/loc;./xpack1;./zupdate;./loc;.
No matter how the line looks, we want to add "./hacks2;" close to the "=". Although not necessary for MenuFilterScrollingHackByJay.ztd, it would also be useful to have "./mapmaker;" before "./hacks2;" in case you ever want to edit maps, and it would also be useful to have "./hacks;./favorite;" after "./hacks2;" to allow for other hacks and for favorite ".ztd" files. So you would click right after the "=" and type: ./mapmaker;./hacks2;./hacks;./favorite;
In my case, that line now looks like this:
path=./mapmaker;./hacks2;./hacks;./favorite;./dlupdate;./updates;./xpack2/loc;./xpack2;./dupdate;./zupdate1;./xpack1/loc;./xpack1;./zupdate;./loc;.
4. Save the change inside the zoo.ini file. To do this in WordPad, click File->Save. Then close the WordPad window.
5. In ZT's main folder, create a new folder called: hacks2
6. Put MenuFilterScrollingHackByJay.ztd in the hacks2 folder you created in step 5.
Once the above setup is done, if you ever want ZT not to see the files in the hacks2 folder, rename the hacks2 folder to hacks2-unused. To have ZT see those files again, rename the hacks2-unused folder back to hacks2.
Click here to download MenuFilterScrollingHackByJay.zip (http://ztcdd.org/DD/DownloadFiles/Utilities/MenuFilterScrollingHackByJay.zip)
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This download may be made available at any site as a backup as long as the download is not modified and the information in this post is also included, including this information. The main location for this download is at the following ztcdd link, which is where it would be updated before anywhere else:
http://www.ztcdd.org/DD/index.php?topic=13122.0 (http://www.ztcdd.org/DD/index.php?topic=13122.0)