About a year ago, Exophase rejoined MegaZeux development to start evolving robotic and the robot editor. You can see his proposal and outlined plan here. Due to time constraints/external factors this work was paused around three months later. Much work was done however, with phase 1 of the plan more or less completed. Some high quality documentation was also written and many details worked out. (The name of the source branch this work went into was 'debytecode'; this is the codename being used to refer to these changes.)

I've decided to revive this work and continue development of it as much as I can. What we need right now are people to download an alpha-quality version of MegaZeux, with the changes, and play around with it. Solid bug reports and good feedback on the changes is important. Most of the language changes aren't documented in MZX itself (the help file will require some revision eventually). "Legacy" worlds will be converted to the new syntax on load, which will allow you to experiment with all the various transformations. At the moment the 'debytecode' and 'trunk' builds are totally isolated (though they share the same code base); I do not have any immediate plans to change this.

You can download builds for your favourite platform (except, temporarily, OS X) from here:

http://mzx.devzero.co.uk/snapshots/debytecode-1634/

Moving forward I plan to look at the other design phases and continue development. Future changes will inevitably lead to language alterations which will be incompatible with this alpha. Compatibility may or may not be retained, at my discretion. IOW, you probably shouldn't create any epic games using this alpha build. This build will not allow new worlds to be saved over any legacy world with the same name, which should prevent possible accidents.

I hope people will try it out and feed back on this thread. If you find a game that doesn't play correctly in this version, please file a report on the bug tracker. Additionally, if MZX crashes, or you find a bug in the new editor, please also file a bug.

--ajs.

DISQUALIFIED ENTRIES: 62239 (Malwyn, Risu2112, Wervyn) and 72165 (Seventh Shade), both due to low theme average

12TH PLACE: Last Place or Bust (mzxrules) - isolation puzzle puzzle platformer - 184/1200 (grats on reaching ur goal)
11TH PLACE: For Liberty (Spike) - For Liberty - 514/1200
10TH PLACE: The Bee's Knees (Captain Failmore) - ALIENS ON AN ELEVATOR - 563/1200
9TH PLACE: Knights of Danika (Goshi) - PRISON ESCAPE - 587/1200
8TH PLACE: The Moanatoans (ThdPro) - TurnCoat - 643/1200
7TH PLACE: Vortex Productions (Hey all, RyanThunder here.) - Voluntary Solitude - 722/1200
6TH PLACE: MEDIUM RARE WARE (Lachesis, Captain Hammer, Druaga) - THOSE ALIEN INVADER! - 766/1200
5TH PLACE: Oh god, dragons (Kom) - Abandoned - 775/1200
4TH PLACE: logicow AKA logicow and the logicow (logicow) - Duck Rescue - 788/1200

3RD PLACE: Fight For Ya' Life, AKA Maxim and the Maxims (Maxim, Maxim, Maxim) - Antares - 795/1200
2ND PLACE: Team Betamax (GreaseMonkey, CJA, asiekiurkel) - FORSAKEN DAYLIGHT - 937/1200
1ST PLACE: Ku-Ritoru-Ritoru (Lancer-X) - Celestial Altar - 1063/1200

Individual judge results and comments:
http://doz.digitalmzx.net/judging/

Thanks for flying Day of Zeux. We hope you enjoy our great deals this summer.

The DoZ is over and the entries have arrived. You can grab the torrent here:

http://devzero.co.uk/~alistair/DOZ2010Q1.torrent

Results should arrive in no more than a week from now.