Re: A love letter to DMOD authors
Thoughts for DMOD authors from one who merely plays them:
Those of you who make DMODs - first of all, thanks! If not for your DMODs, the original Dink game would have become sameold-sameold rapidly. I have an extremely high intelligence, yet what you people do is something that boggles my mind. I guess I'm not geared to programming stuff the way I am to plain old English. What amazes me is how you can do all that hard, brain-frying programming LABOR without losing your creative focus in the morass of symbols, .d files, .c files, and other geeky yippledung.
I would DEARLY love to see somebody find whatever it is that makes the music in Dink games simply stop. Nothing starts it again except saving the game, exiting and restarting it. The problem is likely in the original Dink engine. Maybe it only affects piece-of-caca sound cards like mine, too. (I have a Sound Blaster AudioPCI126 or 128 - it's NOT a true SB, but an Ensoniq that only synthesizes SB sound and registers itself at IO7 and IRQ7, making it invisible to certain DOS-based games - and sometimes .wav files do extremely ODD - often screechy - things. Sometimes, though the music is playing fine, something happens to make the upper and lower registers play in VERY different key signatures - painful to listen to, to say the least. Like I said, it's a piece of...) The music in ANY Dink game will go off after I've been playing it a while. I don't have a problem with the music stopping, getting shrieky, or playing in different key signatures in any other game - only Dink games. Yeah, I know, "get a new sound card." But still, a problem with the engine is still a problem...
Can someone check this out? And maybe devise a kind of "patch" that'll stop it? That'd be really great.
What NOT to do:
Some people try to play out their fantasies in a mod, and those tend to get cloying or just plain boring. Going for the maximum sex and/or grossout is NOT the way to make a good DMOD; it only makes people think you're a sophomoric fool. An occasional touch of either, even if it's a big touch, isn't bad if it doesn't overshadow the whole thing. Think, instead, of "story, story, story" when you're making one. The sex - and any gross stuff - should be the salt and pepper, not the meat.
Some say to themselves, "I'm gonna make this REAL HARD!" and that will kill people's interest real fast if you do. Get other people to try out your tough spots and tell you if maybe they're just a little too tough.
What TO do:
The best ones are, first and foremost, extremely playable - and get you engrossed. Next best criteria is a really good story line, with good text (I love it when there's text associated with almost everything you hit or touch, especially if it's cute, funny, informative or clever - or you occasionally find something neat by surprise). Please note, too, that humor does not always have to be dirty. One of the best for funny stuff is Quest for Cheese - and I can't recall any dirty stuff. May we see many more like it. Even though I've been through it many times, it's still able to make me giggle.
Others - the best of them - show a masterful orchestration of interesting, engrossing story line, a "quest" (or more than one) that "grabs" the player by the short hairs and won't let him go, a nice sprinkling of humor, a bit 'o the bawdy, music that is particularly suited to the situations you're in, and tying it all together with unique maps (or variations on old ones), hidden places and things (absolutely EVERYBODY loves finding secrets - just don't make them too hard to find), an occasional puzzle or two, and any other kind of surprises you can think of. Oh, and if you've just GOTTA have a dungeon or underground scene, consider giving the player the option to get rid of the darkness. It's been done before, in other games, like Shadow Flare.
Everybody needs their daily giggle, so lace those DMODs with good stuff. It's therapeutic, you know, for whatever ails you. Sprinkling it here and there makes it more effective than if you're obviously hell-bent on being hysterically funny. Like in Pilgrim, where he encounters the dolmen who tells them of having his rocks separated - it's funnier simply because it's so unexpected.
Be EXTREMELY careful about avoiding people getting stuck in the scenery. I think you call this a "hardness bug." For people like me, who just play the games, it's more like a scorpion (alacran) than a garden variety bug. And I ought to know, because I live in Mexico, and got bit by one two years ago - zapped me in my bed, too. Que huevos! He knew my wrath, I can tell you. Hurt? EEEE. You NEVER want to get nailed by one where the sun don't shine - trust me on this. When I see those mega-scorpions in DMODs, I'm one of the few Dinkers who can really RELATE. I know an 85-year-old woman down here who's been bit 8 times! But she's not a Dinker...
So, okay, promise me you'll fix the hardness errors that have me moving into totally different scenes of the DMOD, helpless to take any action, or stuck between a fence and a tree or something, so I have to reboot. For those of you who heed this, I'd like to present you with cookies and milk; for those who sneer at it and do nothing, I'll have thoughts of you regarding asses and alacranes. You have been warned!
IMPORTANT NOTE: You should know that there are some antivirus programs (like Avast!) that will often identify your map files while in zipped form as "decompression bombs." I became alarmed at first, thinking some Dinker was throwing death and destruction at our PCs, until I realized how many of these were being found - and all involving map files. One malicious Dinker I can handle, dozens, no. So I checked into it a bit.
I don't claim to know what a "decompression bomb" is, but I do know that some can be devastating. Please inform people in your readme or .diz files that anything identified as a decompression bomb by an antivirus program is NOT harmful - it's just a zipped map file that would take up more than the full screen if opened. Better still, maybe some of you might want to alert malware programmers about this so they can find a way to identify the genuine decompression bombs and avoid terrorizing us innocent Dinkers who aren't geeks.
It would be a good idea to get together and compose a "sticky" for all Dinkers, old and new, to read regarding this subject, to inform them and to set their worries aside.
Keep makin' dem DMODs, dudes and dudesses!
Those of you who make DMODs - first of all, thanks! If not for your DMODs, the original Dink game would have become sameold-sameold rapidly. I have an extremely high intelligence, yet what you people do is something that boggles my mind. I guess I'm not geared to programming stuff the way I am to plain old English. What amazes me is how you can do all that hard, brain-frying programming LABOR without losing your creative focus in the morass of symbols, .d files, .c files, and other geeky yippledung.
I would DEARLY love to see somebody find whatever it is that makes the music in Dink games simply stop. Nothing starts it again except saving the game, exiting and restarting it. The problem is likely in the original Dink engine. Maybe it only affects piece-of-caca sound cards like mine, too. (I have a Sound Blaster AudioPCI126 or 128 - it's NOT a true SB, but an Ensoniq that only synthesizes SB sound and registers itself at IO7 and IRQ7, making it invisible to certain DOS-based games - and sometimes .wav files do extremely ODD - often screechy - things. Sometimes, though the music is playing fine, something happens to make the upper and lower registers play in VERY different key signatures - painful to listen to, to say the least. Like I said, it's a piece of...) The music in ANY Dink game will go off after I've been playing it a while. I don't have a problem with the music stopping, getting shrieky, or playing in different key signatures in any other game - only Dink games. Yeah, I know, "get a new sound card." But still, a problem with the engine is still a problem...
Can someone check this out? And maybe devise a kind of "patch" that'll stop it? That'd be really great.
What NOT to do:
Some people try to play out their fantasies in a mod, and those tend to get cloying or just plain boring. Going for the maximum sex and/or grossout is NOT the way to make a good DMOD; it only makes people think you're a sophomoric fool. An occasional touch of either, even if it's a big touch, isn't bad if it doesn't overshadow the whole thing. Think, instead, of "story, story, story" when you're making one. The sex - and any gross stuff - should be the salt and pepper, not the meat.
Some say to themselves, "I'm gonna make this REAL HARD!" and that will kill people's interest real fast if you do. Get other people to try out your tough spots and tell you if maybe they're just a little too tough.
What TO do:
The best ones are, first and foremost, extremely playable - and get you engrossed. Next best criteria is a really good story line, with good text (I love it when there's text associated with almost everything you hit or touch, especially if it's cute, funny, informative or clever - or you occasionally find something neat by surprise). Please note, too, that humor does not always have to be dirty. One of the best for funny stuff is Quest for Cheese - and I can't recall any dirty stuff. May we see many more like it. Even though I've been through it many times, it's still able to make me giggle.
Others - the best of them - show a masterful orchestration of interesting, engrossing story line, a "quest" (or more than one) that "grabs" the player by the short hairs and won't let him go, a nice sprinkling of humor, a bit 'o the bawdy, music that is particularly suited to the situations you're in, and tying it all together with unique maps (or variations on old ones), hidden places and things (absolutely EVERYBODY loves finding secrets - just don't make them too hard to find), an occasional puzzle or two, and any other kind of surprises you can think of. Oh, and if you've just GOTTA have a dungeon or underground scene, consider giving the player the option to get rid of the darkness. It's been done before, in other games, like Shadow Flare.
Everybody needs their daily giggle, so lace those DMODs with good stuff. It's therapeutic, you know, for whatever ails you. Sprinkling it here and there makes it more effective than if you're obviously hell-bent on being hysterically funny. Like in Pilgrim, where he encounters the dolmen who tells them of having his rocks separated - it's funnier simply because it's so unexpected.
Be EXTREMELY careful about avoiding people getting stuck in the scenery. I think you call this a "hardness bug." For people like me, who just play the games, it's more like a scorpion (alacran) than a garden variety bug. And I ought to know, because I live in Mexico, and got bit by one two years ago - zapped me in my bed, too. Que huevos! He knew my wrath, I can tell you. Hurt? EEEE. You NEVER want to get nailed by one where the sun don't shine - trust me on this. When I see those mega-scorpions in DMODs, I'm one of the few Dinkers who can really RELATE. I know an 85-year-old woman down here who's been bit 8 times! But she's not a Dinker...
So, okay, promise me you'll fix the hardness errors that have me moving into totally different scenes of the DMOD, helpless to take any action, or stuck between a fence and a tree or something, so I have to reboot. For those of you who heed this, I'd like to present you with cookies and milk; for those who sneer at it and do nothing, I'll have thoughts of you regarding asses and alacranes. You have been warned!
IMPORTANT NOTE: You should know that there are some antivirus programs (like Avast!) that will often identify your map files while in zipped form as "decompression bombs." I became alarmed at first, thinking some Dinker was throwing death and destruction at our PCs, until I realized how many of these were being found - and all involving map files. One malicious Dinker I can handle, dozens, no. So I checked into it a bit.
I don't claim to know what a "decompression bomb" is, but I do know that some can be devastating. Please inform people in your readme or .diz files that anything identified as a decompression bomb by an antivirus program is NOT harmful - it's just a zipped map file that would take up more than the full screen if opened. Better still, maybe some of you might want to alert malware programmers about this so they can find a way to identify the genuine decompression bombs and avoid terrorizing us innocent Dinkers who aren't geeks.
It would be a good idea to get together and compose a "sticky" for all Dinkers, old and new, to read regarding this subject, to inform them and to set their worries aside.
Keep makin' dem DMODs, dudes and dudesses!
i didn't even bother read all that...
hey FB5 dont piss on our fans. this GIRL is Actually giving a nice idea.. about that patch thing. i wish some one who is REALLY good at programing like redink1 would see this and realy think about this..
EDIT : I am sorry for the guy thingy.
EDIT : I am sorry for the guy thingy.
Maybe you use the word "guy" for both genders, I don't know. But it really seems to me like this fan of ours is female, and so calling her a "guy" might be pissing on our fan anyway, see?
I'm not sure the anti-malware people would care very much about our little niche game. I've never heard of a decompression bomb until you mentioned it today, and after looking around a little online, it seems to me like your anti-virus software identifies something as one when it's not. Maybe it's a bug in Avast.
Maybe with a command which will play the midi again every #### seconds (in DMODs).
Heh, the old Ensoniq line of Soundblasters actually have a special place in my heart, I guess simply because did such a good job at midi playback quality (IMO), even if Dink would sometimes mess up with it. With that card, I remember that bug with the midi no longer playing only occurred if I Alt+Tabbed out of Dink.
Though it is highly unlikely that I'll ever make any more d-mods, your thanks is appreciated.
Though it is highly unlikely that I'll ever make any more d-mods, your thanks is appreciated.
It's nice to be appreciated.
I think I've got one d-mod left in me. A pity, perhaps, that it won't be Cloud Castle 3.
I think I've got one d-mod left in me. A pity, perhaps, that it won't be Cloud Castle 3.
You mean you're not making CC3 after all?I think I've got one d-mod left in me. A pity, perhaps, that it won't be Cloud Castle 3.
Mein Got! Get a rope!...
