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Terminology
Animation An animation is like a video: it consists of a series of frames. If you play this series of frames (pictures) fast enough, it will look like a small movie.
APE Animal Project Editor. A basic editor which was released by Blue Fang. It helped users to create lots of new content, based on existing game content. You could for example pick an in-game statue, and you can configure a few things (e.g. price) and change its graphics. This way, you'd create new content for Zoo Tycoon.
Blender A free and open source 3D modelling program.
Color palette A collection of unique colors.
Frame An animation consists of multiple frames. You can compare a frame with a picture.
GIMP Short for Graphic Image Manipulation Program. A free and open source alternative to PhotoShop.
Rotation fixing When you have created a new graphic of e.g. a statue for ZT1, you'll often find that it is not correctly positioned in the game. You will have to use a tool to move it to the left/right/top/bottom. Also called offsets, offsetting.
View ZT1 has a few different views in-game: S, SE, SW, N, NE, NW, E. NE means North East, and you also see S for South, W for West.
You might be wondering why some directions are missing. This is because ZT1 cleverly mirrors images. When a view for "West" is needed, ZT1 simply uses the "E" (East) view and mirrors it in-game.
ZIP (Archive) (file) This is a file format which compresses its contents. It reduces the file size, which makes it faster to download. Each .ZIP-file is basically a folder you can open. It is mainly used to compress data and to easily share files on the internet.
ZOOT A tool developed by MadScientist, a fan. It focuses solely on ZT1 Graphics. You can export graphics to .PNG-files. It also supports "rotation fixing".
ZT Studio The name of this tool.
ZT1 Color palette Each ZT1 Graphic file comes with a color palette. It's a file with a .pal file extension. Theoretically it can contain a maximum of 256 colors. Not all color palettes have this many colors, but the first entry is reserved and determines the transparent color. So you can have up to 255 different colors per graphic which uses this color palette. A color palette can be used by multiple ZT1 Graphic files.
ZT1 Graphic (file) A graphic file in a format which is only used for Zoo Tycoon. This file represents a view in the game. Strangely enough, this file format has no file extension at all.
ZTD (file) This is simply a ZIP-archive. The extension of .ZIP has been changed to .ZTD, which stands for Zoo Tycoon Download.
ANI (file) Unique to Zoo Tycoon. An INI file which contains some information about the graphic offsets.
INI (file) A common older file format. Often used to store settings and configurations. For more info, use Google or Wikipedia.
Not relevant to ZT Studio, but it's good to know Zoo Tycoon has several file extensions which are basically INI files: cfg (config), scn (scenario), ai, uca (user created animal), ucs (user created scenery), ani (animation file), ...
PNG (file) A common file format (Portable Network Graphic) which supports transparency (invisible background).
ZIP (Archive) (file) This is a common file format which compresses its contents. It reduces the file size, which makes it faster to download. Each .ZIP-file is basically a folder you can open. It is mainly used to compress data and to easily share files on the internet.
ZTD (file) Unique to Zoo Tycoon. This is simply a ZIP-archive. The extension of .ZIP has been changed to .ZTD, which stands for Zoo Tycoon Download.
APE Animal Project Editor. A basic editor which was released by Blue Fang. It helped users to create lots of new content, based on existing game content. You could for example pick an in-game statue, and you can configure a few things (e.g. price) and change its graphics. This way, you'd create new content for Zoo Tycoon.
Blender A free and open source 3D modelling program.
GIMP Short for Graphic Image Manipulation Program. A free and open source alternative to PhotoShop.
ZOOT A tool developed by MadScientist, a fan. It focuses solely on ZT1 Graphics. You can export graphics to .PNG-files. It also supports "rotation fixing".
ZT Studio The name of this tool.