The first official Day of Zeux, hosted by Wondercow, was held in late 1998, under the premise that solo competitors and teams formed beforehand are given a topic and have 24 hours to create a game in MegaZeux from scratch based on the topic. This was based on the earlier Blitzkriegzeux, where games took place in a much shorter period of time and had solo competitors only. The competition was a huge success, and it soon became community tradition to hold them every six months. Variants on the timeframe of the Day of Zeux were also held, including the Weekend of Zeux.
In the summer of 2001, a new twist was added to the Day of Zeux in the form of two separate topics - a general topic, and a specific topic, intended for those who had trouble with ideas. The introduction of this modification created the Dualstream Day of Zeux, and was met with much praise, encouraging future competitions to become Dualstream.
This page will have up-to-date information on the Winter 2014 Dualstream Day of Zeux, which is scheduled to begin on January 10th, 2014, 19:00:00 GMT and is being hosted by Insidious.
Submission Options | January 10th, 2014, 19:29:50 GMT |
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Valid submission options for this DoZ, in order of preference are via ftp to ftp.cyberkat.eu username/password doz/doz, via email to insidious@cyberkat.eu, or on the forums http://www.digitalmzx.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=15557 | |
DsDoZ Winter 2014 Officially Announced! | December 13th, 2013, 23:08:22 GMT |
If you're reading this, the Winter DsDoZ 2014 has been announced. Sign up now to participate on January 10th at 2:00 PM EST (19:00 UTC). |
When the topics are announced, they're usually announced on IRC first. If you do not have an IRC client, some good options are mIRC and XiRCON for Windows, Ircle for MacOS, and xchat for Linux (there is also a Windows version available). The server you'll want to join is SlashNET. The topic will be announced in #mzx.
Teams. Teams will consist of one to three people. If necessary, you may also appoint an alternate member who can take the place of any member of your team should they be unable to attend the Day of Zeux. This alternate member can only be added to your team at the start of the DoZ, before the topics are announced. Signups will be accepted from the time the form goes on the page until the Day of Zeux ends (for obvious reasons, the alternate member field will be removed at go time).
Topics. When the Day of Zeux starts, two topics will be presented: an abstract topic and a concrete topic. These are going to be posted pretty much everywhere - DMZX, IRC, and here on the DoZ site. You may only use one topic as your game's theme.
The topic used by your entry should be clearly labelled on the title screen, in a readme file included with the game, wherever. If the topic of your game is not known, you risk disqualification based on theme (if you choose the 'theme-light' scoresheet, as detailed below)
Scoresheets. There are two different scoresheets that your game may be judged under: theme-heavy and theme-light. The exact differences between these scoresheets are detailed below, but as the names suggest, the 'Theme' scoring category is more highly weighted in the former. However, the theme-light scoresheet also requires you to get an average score of greater than 5. If your game does not make this threshold, it will be summarily disqualified.
As with the topic, the scoresheet you want your game to be judged under should be indicated somewhere in your submission. If you do not choose a scoresheet, the one chosen will be dependent on the topic you chose to follow. If you choose the abstract topic, the default scoresheet will be the 'theme-heavy' sheet. If you choose the concrete topic, the default scoresheet will be the 'theme-light' sheet.
No anonymity. Each team will receive a number prior to the start of the competition. No anonymity rule will apply during this DoZ. However, the archive file you submit must have a filename that matches your team number. It is, of course, not mandatory that you disclose the name of yourself or your team; if you wish to remain anonymous, that is acceptable.
External Material. All material except music, sound, and the default MZX charsets/palette must be created within the 24 hour period. If any evidence of material such as engines, character sets, palettes, and artwork having been created before the topic announcement is found, your team will be disqualified. Use of external programs such as CharWorks and Palzor during the Day of Zeux is permitted, as long as it is done within the 24 hours.
Game Submission. Your game must be submitted with all necessary files in one or more archives (see the Patch Submission rule below). The archive should be one of these formats: .zip, .rar, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz or .tar.bz2.
If your game is archived in a different format and/or password protected, it may be summarily disqualified.
To help alleviate confusion for the purposes of judging the games, your game should only make use of a single .MZX file. If you wish to have multiple .MZX files and use 'swap world' to switch between them, these should be clearly labelled as such. If you include multiple .MZX files it may be unclear to the judges which one they are supposed to be playing.
The archive you submit should have a filename that begins with your team's team number (ie. 424.zip for team 424). The game will be expected to run as intended when it is extracted, so make sure you include all music, WAVs, and, of course, the .MZX file. You will have two choices for entry submission: FTP and HTTP upload. Links to these will become available when game submission becomes available (12 hours into the competition).
Out of these two methods, FTP is by far the recommended one. There are many reasons why FTP is superior to HTTP for the purposes of file submission, but one that applies to submitters is this: when you submit your DoZ entry via FTP, the time you began uploading is the time you will be penalised for (if it occurs in the penalty portion of the grace period). If you use HTTP, the time your upload finishes is the time you will be penalised for. If your submission is quite large and your connection is quite slow, this can make a big difference to your score in the final minutes of the DoZ.
Grace Period. (NB: Grace Period and Patch Submission rules are subject to change for now.) Following the end of the 24 hours, a one hour grace period will be in effect for late submissions and patch submissions (see below). Any games submitted after the first fifteen minutes of this period will receive a score penalty depending on how late it was received. Any games submitted after the DoZ and grace period have ended may be judged, but disqualified.
1-15: no deduction from final score 16-30: 10% deduction from final score 31-45: 20% deduction from final score 46-60: 30% deduction from final score
Patch Submissions. At your option, you may divide your submission up into multiple archives (as was historically done in a lot of older Megazeux games, where the music and sound files were placed into separate archives to allow users to skip the sound archives to save download time). These archives will then be merged before being released.This is especially useful if you have a slow connection, because it allows you to upload the sound and music files for your entry first and continue working on your game .MZX file, submitting that (and any other changed files) in a second archive at the end. Additionally, you may use this to create patch submissions for your game. The archives will be merged in order of submission time. (Files from newer submissions will overwrite files from older submissions)
When you upload a patch to the game, please use the following naming: ######-N.zip, where ###### is your team number and N is the number of the patch.
MegaZeux Version. The judges will be playing your game in MZX 2.84c, so please make sure it runs well in that version before submission. All three SMZX modes are permitted, but no bonus will be given just because you are using SMZX, so if you're going to use it, use it right. It is highly recommended that you do not use MZX fork versions, as the files these produce will not play properly in 2.84c. You run the risk of being scored down, without gaining any advantages.
Other rules.
And them's the scoring rules. Good luck.
Sign up is now closed.
The following teams participated in the Day of Zeux: