ZONE

A zone is an area in the game used to show the text of the zone being entered, to load islands, and to create locations to spawn specific vehicles and pedestrians. It is controlled by .zon files, which use the IPL format.

Structure

All the .zon files start with a section identifier and ends with the keyword "end", both in a single line.

Example:

zone
...
end

Format

The basic format for a .zon file for GTA3 and Vice City is:

Name, Type, X1, Y1, Z1, X2, Y2, Z2, Island

And for San Andreas:

Name, Type, X1, Y1, Z1, X2, Y2, Z2, Island, Text

Name

Name and text of zone used from the .gxt file

Type

Type of zone

X1, Y1, Z1

The bottom left corner of the zone

X2, Y2, Z2

The top right corner of the zone

Island

The island number

Text

Text of the zone used from the GXT file

Note that for San Andreas, the text of the zone to be displayed is also related to by an internally hardcoded table which links that zone name to its respective audio description for the police radio. This is actually the cause of a bug in the game - the zone 'SUN' (which is correctly named 'Temple' in the GXT file) gets announced as 'Sunnyside' on the police radio. This is because the internal table has two consecutive entries called 'SUN' and only the second one gets used, meaning whenever the player is in a zone named and defined as 'SUN' in this file, the police will always announce this as 'Sunnyside' since 'SUN' points to that audio entry.

GTA3

Island number 1: Portland
Island number 2: Staunton
Island number 3: Shoreside Vale

Gta3.zon

Type: 0, 1, or 2
The gta3.zon controls the text of the zone that shows up in the game as you enter a new zone. The main.scm uses this to check if you are in the zone. The gta3.zon can be viewed through KEd but it can be only edited by hand. The main.scm<main.scm.

Map.zon

Type: 3
The map.zon controls the loading of an entire island as you travel from one island to another. It tells the game where to load. The map.zon can be viewed through KEd but it can be only edited by hand.

Vice City

Island number 1: Vice City Beach
Island number 2: Vice City Mainland

Info.zon

Type: 2
The info.zon, with the help of the main.scm, controls which pedestrian and vehicles spawn in that specific zone. The info.zon can be viewed through KEd but it can be only edited by hand. The main.scm uses this file so you cannot just delete the lines in the file without editing the main.scm. This zone uses island number 1.

Map.zon

Type: 3
The map.zon controls the loading of an entire island as you travel from one island to another. It tells the game where to load. The map.zon can be viewed through KEd but it can be only edited by hand. You can make the loading of the islands by deleting the entire section.

Navig.zon

Type: 0 or 1
The navig.zon controls the text of the zone that shows up in the game as you enter a new zone. The main.scm uses this to check if you are in the zone. The navig.zon can be viewed through KEd but it can be only edited by hand. The main.scm<main.scm. This zone uses island number 1.

San Andreas

Island number 1: Los Santos
Island number 2: San Fierro
Island number 3: Las Venturas

Info.zon

Type: 0
The Info.zon controls the text of the zone that shows up in the game as you enter a new zone. It also controls which pedestrian and vehicles spawn in that specific zone, with the help of the main.scm. The main.scm<main.scm. This zone uses island number 1 only.

Map.zon

Type: 3
The map.zon controls the island zones and also the type of cop car (LA,SF or LV) if there is no zone, it spawns the country cop car. The last value is always UNUSED for zones controlling the island-ID's. Normally you have all zone-names stored in the map.zon and the island-boundary-zones with their ID's in the map.zon. The last number is the Island-ID.

You can lock/unlock them using SCM.

External Link

Map File Definitions