Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim Plays all the DMODs of 2003
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164: Victim of Life Author: Glenn Ergo Release Date: July 15, 2003
"My friend has been kidnapped but nothing big"
Once again, I forgot to run my screenshot grabber when playing this one. Sorry, folks. I didn't replay Cloud Castle for shots, I'm sure as heck not replaying this.
"Victim of Life" (what a nonsensical title) is a pretty unremarkable mod where a friend of Dink is kidnapped and Dink must save him. It's pretty bare bones, but the mapping is decent. It'd easily be Glenn's best mod so far if it could be finished.
The interesting thing about this one is that someone attempted to fix it. A user called GOKUSSJ6 (Come on, 6? Even Dragon Ball GT only got to 4) released a patch on June 20, 2009. This patch is a bizarre little artifact for several reasons.
1) This is quite a rare occurrence. I think this is the only time anybody other than Ted Shutes patched somebody else's DMOD.
2) Of all the DMODs out there that could use fixing, why this one?
3) Nearly six years had passed!
4) The attempt made to fix "Victim of Life" is a failure.
Trying to fix the DMODs out there is a noble goal - I might do it myself if I thought there were more of an audience for old DMODs - but sadly, Mr. Goku is no Ted Shutes.
For one thing, although the text file included with the patch lists "grammar fixes" as one of the improvements, the state of the text still leaves much to be desired. It is improved over the original DMOD, but it's still quite sloppy, with many punctuation errors and several spelling errors left intact. One change I found amusing was the name of Dink's kidnapped friend. A review complained at length about the strange original name of "per," so the patch changes it to David. Okay.
The big problem with the patch is that the patched mod is impossible to finish, whereas I think the original may have been finishable. This, ironically, is not due to a bug that's been introduced, but due to one that's been fixed. The unpatched DMOD has a huge bug where it starts you near the end of the DMOD. The patch fixes this bug, but fails to fix another one that prevents you from getting past a certain point without cheating. It absolutely blows my mind that someone could set out to fix a nearly six-year-old DMOD and not notice this.
Some players probably never got to the area where the problem occurs. There's a tricky puzzle first where a guy named Kyle tells you to find his axe, which has been stolen by a bonca. You have to find and push on a certain rock. This is tricky, but not unreasonable, as he tells you he had just been using it for logging when it was stolen, and the rock is on a screen with several tree stumps and fallen trunks.
When you find Kyle's axe, he agrees to fix a bridge (that old standby; it's even in "Malachi the Jerk") for you. When you return to the bridge, it appears to be fixed, but you can't cross. I cheated my way across and won shortly afterward. Dink's friend thanks him for the rescue, and the DMOD is just over. Like I said, the bizarre patch situation is the only interesting thing about this one.
--The Dink Smallwood Source Code--
Ever since Dink went freeware in late 1999, people had been asking Seth to release the game's source code. As much freedom as DinkC gave DMOD authors, people still felt the clear limitations, and knew that the only way they could escape them was to reprogram the game. Seth kept declining, saying that the code was too big of a mess. Well, on July 17, 2003, he finally released the code.
Here are a few of the reactions people had at the time:
"Coding that bad should not exist." -jothki
"Maybe Seth was just joking... maybe this isn't the real source code. Can't you guys compile it and check?" - [Alphabet] guy
"I wonder how it even runs." - WC
WC was tons of fun. Here are a couple more WC quotes from the source discussion:
"I have seen segments of this code (a few pages worth), and I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot poll with a condom on it."
"You are all fudgetards."
Ah, what fun.
Despite the apparently appalling state of the code, some people still dreamt big. They wanted to bust Dink wide open, to make anything possible. The major problem with such ambitions (apart from the code being so difficult to work with) was that such sweeping changes couldn't help but break compatibility with older DMODs, and new DMODs made to work with such a project wouldn't work with other versions of Dink either. My favorite out-there suggestion that came out of the initial discussion was a Nintendo Gamecube port.
The two biggest things to happen to Dink since the release of the source code release are Dink version 1.08 (2006) and GNU-FreeDink (2008, although there was an earlier attempt in 2004). Beuc also ported GNU-FreeDink to the PSP in 2011, which is very cool. These are big and important steps forward for Dink, but a lot of the potential that people spoke of before and after the release of the source remains unrealized. Then again, a couple of Dinkers still have ambitious projects in the works, so who knows?
"My friend has been kidnapped but nothing big"
Once again, I forgot to run my screenshot grabber when playing this one. Sorry, folks. I didn't replay Cloud Castle for shots, I'm sure as heck not replaying this.
"Victim of Life" (what a nonsensical title) is a pretty unremarkable mod where a friend of Dink is kidnapped and Dink must save him. It's pretty bare bones, but the mapping is decent. It'd easily be Glenn's best mod so far if it could be finished.
The interesting thing about this one is that someone attempted to fix it. A user called GOKUSSJ6 (Come on, 6? Even Dragon Ball GT only got to 4) released a patch on June 20, 2009. This patch is a bizarre little artifact for several reasons.
1) This is quite a rare occurrence. I think this is the only time anybody other than Ted Shutes patched somebody else's DMOD.
2) Of all the DMODs out there that could use fixing, why this one?
3) Nearly six years had passed!
4) The attempt made to fix "Victim of Life" is a failure.
Trying to fix the DMODs out there is a noble goal - I might do it myself if I thought there were more of an audience for old DMODs - but sadly, Mr. Goku is no Ted Shutes.
For one thing, although the text file included with the patch lists "grammar fixes" as one of the improvements, the state of the text still leaves much to be desired. It is improved over the original DMOD, but it's still quite sloppy, with many punctuation errors and several spelling errors left intact. One change I found amusing was the name of Dink's kidnapped friend. A review complained at length about the strange original name of "per," so the patch changes it to David. Okay.
The big problem with the patch is that the patched mod is impossible to finish, whereas I think the original may have been finishable. This, ironically, is not due to a bug that's been introduced, but due to one that's been fixed. The unpatched DMOD has a huge bug where it starts you near the end of the DMOD. The patch fixes this bug, but fails to fix another one that prevents you from getting past a certain point without cheating. It absolutely blows my mind that someone could set out to fix a nearly six-year-old DMOD and not notice this.
Some players probably never got to the area where the problem occurs. There's a tricky puzzle first where a guy named Kyle tells you to find his axe, which has been stolen by a bonca. You have to find and push on a certain rock. This is tricky, but not unreasonable, as he tells you he had just been using it for logging when it was stolen, and the rock is on a screen with several tree stumps and fallen trunks.
When you find Kyle's axe, he agrees to fix a bridge (that old standby; it's even in "Malachi the Jerk") for you. When you return to the bridge, it appears to be fixed, but you can't cross. I cheated my way across and won shortly afterward. Dink's friend thanks him for the rescue, and the DMOD is just over. Like I said, the bizarre patch situation is the only interesting thing about this one.
--The Dink Smallwood Source Code--
Ever since Dink went freeware in late 1999, people had been asking Seth to release the game's source code. As much freedom as DinkC gave DMOD authors, people still felt the clear limitations, and knew that the only way they could escape them was to reprogram the game. Seth kept declining, saying that the code was too big of a mess. Well, on July 17, 2003, he finally released the code.
Here are a few of the reactions people had at the time:
"Coding that bad should not exist." -jothki
"Maybe Seth was just joking... maybe this isn't the real source code. Can't you guys compile it and check?" - [Alphabet] guy
"I wonder how it even runs." - WC
WC was tons of fun. Here are a couple more WC quotes from the source discussion:
"I have seen segments of this code (a few pages worth), and I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot poll with a condom on it."
"You are all fudgetards."
Ah, what fun.
Despite the apparently appalling state of the code, some people still dreamt big. They wanted to bust Dink wide open, to make anything possible. The major problem with such ambitions (apart from the code being so difficult to work with) was that such sweeping changes couldn't help but break compatibility with older DMODs, and new DMODs made to work with such a project wouldn't work with other versions of Dink either. My favorite out-there suggestion that came out of the initial discussion was a Nintendo Gamecube port.
The two biggest things to happen to Dink since the release of the source code release are Dink version 1.08 (2006) and GNU-FreeDink (2008, although there was an earlier attempt in 2004). Beuc also ported GNU-FreeDink to the PSP in 2011, which is very cool. These are big and important steps forward for Dink, but a lot of the potential that people spoke of before and after the release of the source remains unrealized. Then again, a couple of Dinkers still have ambitious projects in the works, so who knows?
