The Dink Network

Medieval Status Bars

Description
Contains new status and screenlock bars and an inventory screen I made based on some famous medieval paintings.
Released:August 7th, 2010
File Size:113.24 KB
Downloads:123
Release Notes:Initial version.
June 22nd, 2012
v1.00
Score : 6.0 fair
slimeg.gif
metatarasal
Bard He/Him Netherlands
I object 
One easy way of personalizing your DMOD is by having some custom made status bars. The status bar is something a player will be looking at all the time, so personalizing this is a great way of giving your own twist to your DMOD. Medieval Status Bars is Synbi's variant on the good old status bars.

The file contains a clear and consise readme explaining how you can use these graphics in your own DMOD. There are two parts of the interface you can add: One consists of the status bars and the other consists out of a custom inventory screen and the screenlock bars. This means that if you want to only use the custom inventory screen you'll get new screenlock bars as well, whether you want them or not. This isn't really the fault of this file, this is simply how Dink works. But this means that in practice you'll usually use both the custom inventory as the custom status bars. You can fiddle around with this when you know your way around Dink though.

The custom inventory screen absolutely doesn't work for me. It has two drawings over the the places where magic and weapons are placed. These drawings look fine, but it makes the entire inventory screen not look like an inventory screen anymore. It has no visible empty spots, just items pasted on top of a drawing. I really feel an empty inventory should have visible empty slots.

The status bars are much better. They have a 'wooden' look to them as opposed to the more stone-like appearance of the original game's status bars. These status bars are also based on a painting, but it has a much more medieval sense to it. It looks pretty decent but I found the appearance of the status bar to be a little bit too crowded because of this. However the text on these bars is still readable. Many custom status bars experiment with all kinds of exotic and usually unreadable fonts but these bars have a very simple font that is easy to read.

To summarize: Less is more. Unfortunately I think the emphasis for these status bars was a little bit too much on the addition of nice graphics. Unfortunately these graphics are a little bit too prominent and distract from the basic function of the status bars and inventory screens: Simply efficiently getting information to the player. I liked the status bars but the inventory screen really didn't work for me. So I will only recommend this if you only need the statusbars, unfortunately I can't recommend the total package.