Yoot Tower (Windows)

Yoot Tower
Also known as: The Tower II (JP) Developer: OPeNBooK9003 Publishers: OPeNBooK9003 (JP), Sega (US) Platform: Windows Released in JP: 1998 Released in US: March 31, 1999 This game has debugging material.

The rebranded sequel to SimTower. Unfortunately, due to poor sales, the expansions were not localized. Such as a Christmas level, and a cameo by the movie monster Gamera.

To do: Regional differences. There's also a Macintosh version.

Debugging Functions

To do: Check JP version (The Tower II) and its various expansions (there were five, only released in Japan). Possibly check the Towerkit CD-ROM Japan-only release as well? Run on actual Windows because the game appears to be buggy in wine (or maybe it's that I didn't properly install it?)

note: this cheat is listed in GameFAQs but only the money increase effect is documented, not any of the debugging features

At any time during gameplay, press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + D. Four things should now happen:

1. You should get $500,000,000 in extra funds.
2. The message "DEBUG BONUS!!" will appear in the message bar in the Information window.
3. A new Debug menu should appear in the menubar.
4. A new item "System Information" will be added to the Help menu.

You can repeat the keystroke to get more funds, but as the value seems to be stored as a signed 32-bit integer, funds can overflow and become negative quickly.

Debug Menu

Display

This submenu controls various debug displays.

The first section of the submenu contains a series of options. Only one of these can be selected at any time:

• Normal Display: turns debugging display off.
• FloorInfo-Tenant: this places an outline around tenant rooms.
• FloorInfo-Mover: this places an outline around transport rooms.
• FloorInfo-Request: this places blue or magenta outlines around sections of each floor; a blue outline indicates the nearest transport (elevator/escalator/etc) is to the left; magenta means it's to the right.
• BkgndInfo: this flashes a grid showing background graphic chunks.

The next group of options opens windows.

• Pool: this opens a window displaying info about tenant demands. Clicking on an item shows more detail in sub-items; click again to collapse the detail (think of a tree interface in a file browser, but done more crudely). There are several levels of detail to show.
• People: this opens a "People link" window that provides a constantly changing list of numeric codes.

To do: Perhaps try and translate the codes, though there's no context whatsoever. Codes don't appear related to those shown in FloorInfo-Tenant.

• Event: this opens a window showing information about the various in-game events, with an 'EVENT START' button. Pressing the button switches the event from 'Standby' to either 'Running!', 'Waiting!', or 'Waiting' (it's unclear if the two are different somehow). It appears only two events can be queued up; subsequent presses put the event into 'Waiting!' state. The game is paused while this window is open, and all other controls are disabled.

To do: What do the fields in this window mean? Events eventually do run--Status switches to '1', 'Running!' goes back to 'Standby'--but there's no other feedback I can see.

The final group of options do miscellaneous things:

• Draw Palette table: this draws the game's current palette at the top left corner of the screen. Left-clicking closes it again.
• Grid: this option draws a grid over the game screen.

Step Run

With this option checked, time freezes. A new "DEBUG" window opens that consists solely of a single button, "STEP". Each time this button is clicked, time is advanced forward based on the speed the game is set to: at Low Speed, each click is approximately 2 minutes; at Normal and Middle Speed, approximately 10 minutes; and at High Speed, approximately an hour. (It's difficult to gauge precisely how much time goes, given the clock moves quite rapidly.)

Note that this does not immediately forward time, but rather is cumulative: for example, if the game is set at Normal Speed, you click "STEP" twice, when Step Run is turned off again, time will jump forward around 20 minutes. Also, the game must not be Paused, or clicks do nothing.

Speed measuring

This submenu contains options displays information about game speed.

The first group of options stop the UI (not the whole game) for several seconds to calculate rendering benchmarks, then pauses the game to report the result in a modal messagebox. The game resumes when this messagebox is closed.

• Display speed measuring: calculates and reports how many frames per second of gameplay the game can render on screen.
• Offscreen speed measuring: calculates and reports how many frames per second of gameplay the game can render offscreen.
• IDLE speed measuring: calculates some value "Idles/sec".
• All load measuring: calculates some value "Idles/sec".

To do: I tested these two options in Windows; nothing happened and I was given no results. Curious.

The second group of options contains one option: Display IPS. With this checked, a window "IPS" opens that displays this "Idle/Sec" measure in real time. Closing this window via the 'X' widget does not uncheck the option in the Debug menu.

To do: What does this measure? Is it a count of cycles per second where the game is doing nothing (idling)? On my system it merely threw up 'Static', even when paused or on an empty lot.

Grade UP/Grade DOWN

These two options increase and decrease your tower's ranking (number of stars). Grading down also appears to show the Grade Up message box instead of the Grade Down message box. The Plug-In and Item fields are always empty, but upgrade/downgrade options apply correctly.

There are no bounds checks; grading up or down too far will crash the game, as will Grading Down from a 2 Star tower.

Help Menu

System Information

This option merely opens up a dialogue which will show useful (to debugging) info about memory usage and loaded plugins.