Lightning Legacy Menu
Lightning Legacy Menu restores the animated, “stormy” main-menu that shipped briefly with the first B42 unstable build of Project Zomboid: a looping background video, periodic lightning-flash overlay, and the original scrolling credits
—plus two extra credit lines for the community members who preserved the assets.
Everything is Lua-only; no class replacements, no byte-code patches, and the menu UI remains fully clickable.
When Project Zomboid B42 first hit unstable, the title screen featured a moody background
That menu was removed after controversy around potential AI-generated imagery, and all supporting files/classes were stripped from later builds.
This mod brings it back.
Two synced videos – pztitletest.bik (base loop) and pztitletest_light.bik (lightning). Both play in lock-step; a short timer flips to the flash video for 1.50 s every ~25 s, recreating the thunder effect.
Zero UI impact – we hook MainScreen:prerender() and only decide which texture to draw. All buttons, sub-menus and tooltips behave exactly as in vanilla.
Credits preserved & extended – the vanilla credit list scrolls as before, preceded by:
• Idea & encouragement – Try Honesty
• Asset recovery – Ash / EtherealShigure
Pure Lua implementation – no Java patching, no JVM bytecode edits, multiplayer-safe.
• Nostalgia / curation – lets players who missed the first unstable build experience the original vision.
• Template for others – shows how fully animated backgrounds can be added with nothing more than Lua and Bink videos. Replace the two textures and tweak the timer constants to build your own themed menus.
Why so heavy? The videos are native 2560×1440 and converted from the original BK2 to BIK, so the download is ~450 MB. That’s all data; no code bloat.
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CREDITS & TRIVIA
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Made with the *help* of AI… because sometimes you have to fight controversy with even more controversy.
Don’t worry: the videos themselves are still 100 % AI&human-made pixels from 2024 – we just asked the robot to wire them back in.
Workshop ID: 3520676549
Mod ID: LightningLegacyMenu
