The Dink Network

D-Mod Movie Example

August 26th, 2003
v1.00
Score : 9.0 exceptional
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
I love this file. I just wish I’d come across it earlier as it would’ve saved me a lot of time and fast tracked my DinkC/DMOD learning curve.

It runs like a DMOD, and it is very entertaining. You get to see a fairly long movie of Dink doing things like running from screen to screen, talking to other characters, getting attacked by a duck – all beautifully made.

There is this nice banter between the author and Dink to help illustrate what is happening.

Of course you need to look at the source scripts to fully understand what is happening, and to do this you do need to have a grasp of the basic DinkC concepts and how scripts work. Also you need to have a look at the map to see how the advancing snow screen was made. (I was impressed with this as I did something similar in Creeping Sands, but in an entirely different way).

This file is amusing for everyone, but not completely suitable for the novice DMOD author – such an author (I feel) will need to spend time deciphering what commands do – not necessarily a bad thing as just doing that will help the author learn more about DinkC – but at the same time a fully commented, or documented file listing what is happening in a couple of the scenes would have really nailed this.

Even so I think this file is something all DMOD authors should look at – at some point after coming to grips with the basics of DinkC. I’ve made 2 epics and 1 quest and 1 romp and I found things to learn from it.

Overall 9.0 out of 10. (If it had a more detailed breakdown of what each command is doing and warps etc it’d be 9.9)
July 12th, 2002
v1.00
Score : 8.5 good
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This is a cool dmod-like tutorial about how to make a cut-scene (or movie) in your dmod. This dmod starts with some basic simple movement to show how you can do with them, and then add a few cool tricks to showcase what you can do in the dmod. This tutorial basically does quite a nice job in explaining all the moves to a certain details. Some little humor was even put into this presentation. Even if you know how to do those things, seeing this movie might still give you a little laugh here or there.

Although all sources of the scripts were attached uncompressed, it might be even better if the author can say more clearly in the dmod especially toward to the end. Although there are not many scripts over there, it might be still a pain for newbies to fight through every script to understand all the tricks.

For a great dmod, there must be some short films or cut-scenes in there to best tell or even develop a great story. So if you can understand what is going on in this movie example, you should be able to do it yourself.

Although the author did not really emphasize on the small details in this presentation, I really hope anyone who is going to do the cut-scenes in his/her dmods could take care of the great details, something like people really walk up each other if a cinversation is going to begin. Remember to freeze Dink or make him uncontrolable all the time during a short film where Dink is not supposed to move by the player so that you won't see annoying words that shouldn't appear or move Dink to some place that might make the next move difficult.

Overall, this is a pretty good tutorial that you can learn most of basic moves to create a great cut-scene. However, you cannot find too many fancy tricks in this file, so in my opinion, an 8.5 score should do this file justice.