Welcome

[fern]

Wow. Can't wait to see it.

[dr rick]

Well here it is, 1/10 full size (2270x1400 pixels), saved as a jpeg to reduce the size of the file still further (I normally save the bits I am working in a lossless PNG format so that the image does not get degraded by being saved over and over again. The making of the actual picture is very nearly completed. The sky, various ranges of mountains and foothills all come from different original public domain images. The trees on the distant ridges are from various mountain slopes around the world, with several ridges coming from different parts of Mauritius. On the nearest tree covered ridge, I constructed the ridge, covered it with soil, covered the soil with patches of ferns and then planted all the individual trees. 

The nearest ridges and the flat grasslandin the foreground are covered with flowering meadow, which was originally two different flat. meadows, one with pink flowers and the other with yellow flowers. I worked out, by experimentation, how to make the flat meadow represent interlocking ridges. I planted a few trees as horses should always have shade they can shelter under for hot sunny days.

I cut the horses out of hundreds of different pictures, adding hooves and noses where these were hidden by the grass of the field that the particular horse was in. I have tried to represent every genetic colour combination that horses can have as well as everything from miniature horses through ponies and normal sized horses to giant plough-horses. The only things that are missiing are Przewalski's wild horses and Akhal Teke horses from Turkmenestan, both of which will have their own picture once I have completed this one.

I still have about half the horses to add to this picture and then I have to turn the picture into a painting using a combination of two paint programs, Corel Painter 2020 and Dynamic Auto Painter. I have configured these to use information on colour and direction of blocks of colour in the image I have created to put synthesised brushtrokes onto a virtual canvas... So it has taken me two months to get to this point and I think that I have about a months worth of work left to do.

[fern]

Absolutely love it.  Stunning and my favourite animals.

[Jay]

I also love the picture. It is colorful and detailed.

[caddienoah]

It's beautiful. I read your explanation...I couldn't do it. I barely could do a map in two months.
I cannot wait to see the completed work!

[toodlepops]

 

[dr rick]

Dear all, I am so very sorry for the very long silence while I have learned how to live with a slowly progressive disabling motor neurone disease. However, I  am now through the worst of the adaptation and what is much more exciting is that I have spent the last three years working on my memory which had ben badly damaged by the MND. I decided to throw all my resources at that and at learning how to paint using a PC, an iPad and and iPhone. How well I have succeeded as an artist you can judge for yourselves, there is an old blog which I restarted very recently https://drrickblog.wordpress.com/cats-so-many-cats/ , I also have a Flickr page which is supposed to be aeroplanes, racing cars and things to do with living on the autistic spectrum and has about 200 paintings , but needs tidying up https://www.flickr.com/photos/drrickzt/ and finally I have three pages on a wellbeing site open to all, wth a Christian ethos. I am fascinated by flowers, biodiversity, light, reflections, symmetry and things that look as though they might be symmetrical, plus also representational art about abstract ideas like peace.
I do have one piece of potentially good news to share. Because my brain is now working as well as it ever did, I am a patient fellow (a scientist working in the field of MND who has MND) at the international symposium with 1200 other delegates, and someone was talking about games which can be adapted for people who control their computer, as I do, with a limited range of inputs, or indeed  single swich like Stephen Hawking did, or eye gaze technology. I asked if this game (the original pixel-based animations in Zoo Tycoon up to Complete Collection, but not including the later versions of the game like zoo tycoon 2) would be adaptable to use this platform and the answer is a resounding yes.
The last time I looked, you could still buy Zoo Tycoon CC repackaged by a company that specialises in cheap old software, from places like pound or dollar shops. Does anyone know if any of those versions of the game are still on the market anywhere in the world? Although rebadged the only file thy had changed was the ini file that set the game going, to include and extra screen with the new owner's logo on it. I successfully used the full range of user-made creations on myyne, so that had made no changes to the game code, but I guess that was 2018 or something like that. You can stall get it in the UK second-user but  I can't find any  evidence the the ubisoft version i still available new.
1 in 300 adults will develop MND sometime in their life, so if we can make Zoo Tycoon available to that community, that is millions of people at any one time. No changes need to be made to the game or to the user-made creations, all that is needed is for the people who make the interface platform to be convinced that it is worthwhile (that's my job) and then the number of people playing the game will start to increase again, and whatever downloads are still available or can be rescued and made available again, all those items will start to be downloaded again. The game is ideal for people living with MND because it does not involve any particular need for speed. A person could download a user-made tem, add it to the game and then, using just the movements of their eyes or just instruction given through a single switch, slowly inch the item into position and slowly but surely create a really interesting zoo.

[Jay]

Hi Dr. Rick.

Of course, it is wonderful to see you here again. You have been missed. And of course it is good to hear about the progress. Thanks for the links. I looked at the pictures and read most of the words.

As for your question about Zoo Tycoon CC, I am not aware of it being sold anywhere other than people selling ones they bought. As far as I know, Microsoft still owns the rights to all versions. When Ubisoft made it available, they got permission from Microsoft to re-release it. So if anyone wanted to re-release it again, including with changes to make it available to those with MMD or others, I assume they could contact Microsoft.

Once again, it is wonderful to see you here again.

[fern]

Hi Rick. Good to hear you are doing well considering. Have missed you here.   
Your finished downloads are still available over at DG. ZooTek Phoenix is still up and running. ZA and ZKL are still around for downloads but are quiet.

[dr rick]

Hello both of you, thank you for your kind greetings. I am so glad that you are keeping things going, that is truly a labour of love, and I love you both for it!
It is actually  pretty good news that Microsoft still own the rights to the game, because they are usually quite supportive of people living with disabilities. They might be prepared to licence the game to one of the organisations that support the MND/ALS community. It is definitely something I shall ask them about. I don't think any adaptation to the game or user-made creations would  be needed at all. The neat thing about single switch control and eye gaze technology is that the system is essentially a mouse emulator, and so once it has done its trickery in reading your gaze direction, it turns that  information into mouse instruction in the usb bus, just like any other mouse.
I forgot to put the links to the wellbeing site, or its name - duh! https://underthethinkingtree.com/ricks-paintings/ and also https://underthethinkingtree.com/rick-tells-his-story/  and https://underthethinkingtree.com/prayer-reflections/
They changed my life when I was really struggling, by inviting me to be their artist in residence. I think I have probably just made my breakthrough as an artist, but I can't announce anything yet, but if we get from where we are now, up the last little bit of the hill, I shall suddenly cease to be a largely unknown artist living with MND... (I am well known to the people of Cambridgeshire and I'm called Rick the artist on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and have appeared on local TV, (when I had an exhibition at Peterborough Cathedral) We shall see, whatever happens it is extraordinarily exciting. By downloading BBC Sounds you can listen to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire anywhere in the world - we  know this because we have listeners in America and elsewhere. Louise Hulland does two programmes a week and I always contribute to those, and usually to Dotty McLeod.  Love from Rick

[Jay]

I had gotten the first link from your flickr page. And the first link gave me the second link. But I hadn't noticed the page from your third link. So thanks for posting them.

[Cricket]

Dr. Rick, it's so great to hear from you again!!   

Wow.  If the interface platform for Zoo Tycoon could be adapted like you talked, that would be so amazing!

[Eric]

Hello!

My name is Eric. I originally joined the Zoo Tycoon community when I had just turned 13 years old back in 2006. I had a blast being a part many forums and somehow got up to moderating some of them, including ZooAdmin and a few others lost to time. At some point I think I owned/ran the most active forum for a while (Northern Skies had 10,000 members and 200,000+ messages!). I was a teenager and had no idea how to be a webmaster so mistakes were made along the way.

I was also a Zoo Tycoon 2 designer and was lucky to be one of the members of Artifex along with Penguinman, Mikaboshi, and others. I didn't have a lot of notoriety but all of this is to say: the Zoo Tycoon community is what got me interested in computer science.

16 years later and now I'm majoring in CS with a couple of years left. Recently I came back and rejoined ZooTek. The community as a whole isn't what it used to be, but I'm so fond of my time with it that I decided to take on an ambitious project over at Tek.

Anyway, Fern encouraged me to join a couple of times and I figured it would be a fun way to exchange messages with Jay once in a blue moon. I've heard lots of great things!

It helps that I've got the ZT1 design bug.

[fern]

You made it here. Great. Have fun.

[Jay]

Welcome, Eric.

Good luck and, more importantly, have fun with your designing and programming. Happy Zoo Tycooning.