The Dink Network

Hi, i've read several tutorials provided on this site including the one talking about the dink.ini.

I want to do several things:

1) Remove all the existing graphics from my DMOD

I'm currently using the Skeleton provided with WinDinkEdit. And I'm gonna make a DMOD which does not use a single frame from the old game (dont ask why - hard to explain). To achieve my goal I removed all the Lines from Dink.Ini which work with existing frames. This seems to be correct - no old frames are loaded in WinDinkEdit!

2) I wanna add a new animation
In the title screen I want to have an animated cursor. The 3 frames are stored in the Files Mouse-1.bmp to Mouse-3.bmp in the \graphics\mouse-Directory of my DMOD. To add them in the Editor I added the following line to Dink.ini:

load_sequence_now graphics\mouse- 1 BLACK
According to the Tutorial about Dink.ini there has to be a sequence now with 3 sprites in it, which show my cursor in 3 different colors (white, light-gray,dark-gray). There is 1 Sequence in WinDinkEdit, but it has 0 frames. What did I do wrong? I can't see any help in the tutorials on this site, so I'm asking the community.

I hope someone will help me soon!

First of all, graphics should be named -01, -02, -03 et cetera, which you may or may not have seen in those tutorials...

Second, the mouse graphic isn't in the Graphics directory. The bitmap used for the mousecursor is in the dink\Tiles directory, file S08.bmp. There's no sequence for the cursor so an animated cursor is kinda hard to make, let's say not possible afaik.

As for adding graphics, it shouldn't be that hard, simply use the load_sequence_now line to load them into the editor.

Don't use load_sequence_now for all your graphics. Unless you want the loading of your d-mod to take up 20 minutes

Just use load_sequence most of the time and preload the graphics when you need them.

You can't remove all existing graphics from your DMOD without causing quite serious problems. For example, the blood animation is called directly from the engine, with no DinkC scripting involved, and if you didn't have a sequence there for when something hit something else, Dink would probably crash.

Also, the graphics numbers 1-10 are for 'special use'.

I would recommend basing the 'number' or amount of bmps of your graphics for specific slots on those used in the original.

By this I mean:

Dink crawling into a hole: this sequence has 18 bmps. If you replace these bmps with ones that require more than 18 bmps some strange things start happening. I tried this in Belgotha DMOD in which the new main character flew into a hole, it had 19 bmps, and suddenly rocks were turning into pillbugs when I tested the game. I removed bmp number 19 and the rocks stayed rocks.

I'm guessing that those graphics that the original engine calls directly by sequence slot number are used with code that expects only a certain number of graphics (i.e. 18 for the crawl thru a hole).

Dink based graphics such as dying, blood, status bar stuff such as numbers, health bar, magic recharge bar would all be ones to watch out for.

Eldron is the only one I know of who has attempted total conversion before. If you can track him down, ask him questions.

I had planned on Necromancer being a total conversion, but my dreams are now nightmares.

You probably won't find Eldron. He's busy doing uh, things, with uh, people. Mmmhmm. And if you're a goth-type person, stay away. Run faaaaar far away.

Simon, I had this experience and saw that you just have to make dir.ff file - no glitch then, even when the new sequence does not have the same number of frames.

So the final word is...

You CAN add more or less frames in sequences?

Yes

Do you need to ffcreate each time before you test your Dmod?

No, if you want, you can also run the D-Mod without ff-ing the bitmaps in a directory.

But you'll get the glitches if you test un-ff'd with sequences with new/different amounts of bmps (me... I'd keep this the same if I can... I've had some weird stuff happen, even with dir.ff but then I tend to use almost all the available graphics sequence slots, so maybe I'm asking for it )