The Dink Network

CAN ANYONE GIVE ME ONE... i need one because im totally confused on how to makeone i try to make one but it just comes up woth only a little bit of purple squares and rest are red with a M or a S on the squares plz help

That is a map, if you select a purple square, it creates a screen and turns red. Get a tutorial on DinkC, some of them have guides to Dinkedit

but when i click to go into a red square it exits dinkedit

also when i push space to detail map it exits me out of it too

Sounds like you've tried to open dink.dat or hard.dat with WinDinkEdit. You must open map.dat.

But then how can Dinkedit read the MAP.DAT when it opened the DINK.DAT?

He mentioned clicking, that's why I thought about WinDinkEdit.
WinDinkEdit will list open every *.dat file in the directory. Since there's no map.dat in a new D-Mod directory, the next-logical try would be to open dink.dat.

If it really IS DinkEdit, I don't know what to do. Probably the whole v1.07 thing, and possibly compatibility...

If it has no MAP.DAT then why are there red squares?

check that the files arent read-only. if the map file is read-only it will exit because dink edit tries to automatically save but cant.

That happens when you edit a screen and press ESC, it attempts to save the screen and crashes

Seems I was confused with an older WinDinkEdit. It could open any .dat file (and it saw data, so it displayed red squares). The newest one automatically opens the map.dat, and gives an error when it doesn't exist.

DE with map.dat: here
DE without map.dat: here.

As you see, in both cases the minimap rendered correctly, and the now visible maps were red squares: No map.dat still gives red squares, because it gets that information from the dink.dat.

I also tried to run dinkedit on a read-only map.dat and dink.dat:

None read-only: DE behaves normally. (the so-called null-test)

Only map.dat read-only: Didn't crash when creating minimap; didn't crash when opening a screen; crashed when closing a screen; crashed when trying to create a new screen.

Only dink.dat read-only: Didn't crash when creating minimap; didn't crash when opening a screen; didn't crash when closing a screen; crashed when trying to create a new screen.

Both read-only: Didn't crash when creating minimap; didn't crash when opening a screen; crashed when closing a screen; crashed when trying to create a new screen.

What the conclusion is? I don't know. If the program did crash when creating a minimap; it isn't the writability of either the map.dat or the dink.dat. I leave the case to other professionals.

To answer your earlier question "But then how can DinkEdit read the MAP.DAT when it opened the DINK.DAT?" in this case:

I think DinkEdit reads the dink.dat, and for each map square it detect, it reads map.dat for additional information (Like looking up words in a dictionary).

WinDinkEdit reads the information in the map.dat and uses dink.dat to determine where it should belong (Like when you sort things).

I'd really like it when Dink only used one map file instead of map.dat, dink.dat. Not to speak of hard.dat, which might be included into it as well.

Thanks, I never thought DinkEdit would read the DINK.DAT.

It seems that the DINK.DAT stores the location of the squares and weither it's purple or red and the MAP.DAT does the rest (like storing the sprites locations, etc)

And the HARD.DAT stores all the hardness