The Dink Network

Archive - December 2001

First Post

Posted by redink1 on Sunday December 2nd, at 06:23 PM

Welcome to The Dink Network G6. Nearly everything has been overhauled. The most exciting feature, however, is the Account system. Just visit http://account.dinksmallwood.net to get an account, and you can use it in nearly all areas of The Dink Network.

This account system also allows you to personalize an icon, using graphics from the original game. Really like ducks? Show everyone. There are 350 different combinations so far, with more to come.

A Reviews system has also been implemented. All Dink Network Users can submit reviews for any file in the entire database. Really like a little D-Mod? Tell us why. Find an add-on absolutely worthless? Submit it.

You'll also notice the new header above. This appears on almost all of the sections of The Dink Network, making navigation simple.

However, everything isn't done just yet. The following are still to be completed:

Latest Downloads - not implemented

Awards - convert to database

Timeline and Upcoming D-Mods- move and convert

Account/Reviews - Recognize Comments cookie

Guestbook - Change design

Chat - Change to jIRC

Board - Add header

Story - fix header, update

However, I really don't know when I'll have time to finish these. I have a huge paper due Friday, and the original goal was to get the design done Friday night so I could do my paper over the weekend... which didn't happen.

If you find any problems (such as you can't post comments), please post a comment to this message ;-) The same goes if you find any bugs, please post them either in this message or on the board.

New D-Mod: Doomsday Beta 1

Posted by redink1 on Sunday December 2nd, at 07:25 PM

Kbot man has just released Doomsday Beta 1, which he describes as "You're a ghost. So simple. So boring." So it seems you are a ghost...

I just realized that I had this file a while, and had asked the D-Mod author if he wanted it posted. Then I confused it with Scratcher's The Dungeon, and posted it here. Oh well.

New D-Mod: True of Life

Posted by redink1 on Sunday December 2nd, at 07:29 PM

Timo Jyrisoo has released True of Life, his first D-Mod. There wasn't a description in the readme, so I have no idea what it is about.

New D-Mod: The Dungeon

Posted by redink1 on Sunday December 2nd, at 08:48 PM

Scratcher has released The Dungeon v1.00. I haven't played it, and there wasn't too many details in the documentation.

Excite @Home Email Gone

Posted by redink1 on Monday December 3rd, at 09:21 PM

Christopher McNeely, author of The Legend of the Duck, would like to inform everyone that Excite @Home (a large cable provider) died last Saturday along with all of the e-mail accounts directed there. If you know somebody who had an Excite @Home e-mail address, e-mailing it to attbi.com instead of the old server might get your e-mail to that person.

Chistopher also says to expect a D-Mod demo before the year ends.

File Mirror!

Posted by redink1 on Tuesday December 4th, at 10:09 AM

Beuc has uploaded many D-Mods, as well as the full version of Dink Smallwood, to his File Mirror. Yay.

Updated D-Mod: True of Life v1.1

Posted by redink1 on Tuesday December 4th, at 01:33 PM

Timo Jyrisoo updated his D-Mod True of Life to version 1.1. This new version fixes some bugs.

Dink Smallwood Upgrade

Posted by WC on Thursday December 6th, at 05:37 PM

Rtsoft just released the Dink Smallwood Upgrade that upgrades the version of Dink to 1.07 Have fun!

Recondite One: Wonders

Posted by redink1 on Monday December 10th, at 12:24 AM

Recondite is basically a rant on everything and anything (past Dink Network polls, past week in review, misc. links, and of course ranting about redink1). If you'd like to read it, view the comments page.

( Read More )

Site Updates: Tons Of New Icons

Posted by redink1 on Monday December 10th, at 09:30 AM

I decided to get out the ol' Photoshop and start making some new icons to choose from (for those who have accounts). There are now 47 character icons and 30 tiles icons to choose from (for a total of 1410 possible combinations).

New D-Mod: FIAT v0.99

Posted by redink1 on Tuesday December 11th, at 03:50 PM

Man, my arms are getting all jittery typing this

Yes, my D-Mod FIAT has been released about two years after it was first started.

The description: On the 9th anniversary of Seth's death, Dink goes back to his aunt's house in preparation for a party. But then some events happen down on the Magik Isles, and Dink has to leave and settle them.

For more, view the comments.

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Updated D-Mod: True of Life v1.2 Final

Posted by redink1 on Thursday December 13th, at 08:25 AM

Timo Jyrisoo updated his D-Mod True of Life to version 1.2 Final. This new version fixes some more bugs.

Update Madness

Posted by redink1 on Thursday December 13th, at 08:35 AM

Ted Shutes has been busy, and has made:

Ted penned the Isle of Croth walkthrough before realizing Simon had already made one. The Expanded Stone of Balance walkthrough details every secret and solution he could find. The Annotated DinkC.txt is the regular ol' dinkc.txt, except with bracketed inserts that might help you in understanding the file. The Birth of an Empire bug fix fixes a lot of little (and not so little) bugs in Birth of an Empire.

New Patch: FIAT v0.99a

Posted by redink1 on Friday December 14th, at 12:15 PM

Thanks to PureEvil, Paul, mimifish, and others for finding some rather serious bugs in FIAT. The bugs fixed in v0.99a are:

Fixed bug with Dink gliding after coming out of water. Thanks PureEvil and Paul.
Fixed bug with Dink not having to rescue Mayor's Daughter, and freezing when tried to. Thanks PureEvil and Paul.
Possible fix for Buttstomping not working properly. Thanks mimifish and a bunch of others.

Download it here.

New Patch: FIAT v0.99b

Posted by redink1 on Sunday December 16th, at 06:22 PM

I just made some fixes with the 223 kb FIAT v0.99b patch. A ton of new fixes.

Tware - Fixed bug where Dink glides when not entering or exiting water (on same screen though).
All - Buttstomping can only be done when a Fist is equipped. Thanks complainers.
All - Can no longer be hyper without having boots on. Thanks complainers.
Tware - hardness bug fixed near log cabin. Thanks somebody on the board (I can't find the message right now)
Rai - hardness bug fixed near Rai Dungeon entrance, can no longer skip Hyper Boots quest. Thanks mimifish and Striker.
Rai - Hyper Boots guy will now chat. Thanks Chrispy.
Rife - Lonely guy in log cabin will now chat. Thanks Paul and Chrispy.
Rife - Can no longer blow up rocks with bomb. Thanks Paul and his many requests for help
All - Pigs and Ducks can now be slaughtered. Thanks everybody.
Rife Dungeon - Possible fix for 'infinite strength' bug. Thanks Tal (A MONTH LATE!)

There are still a couple issues... the dead duck animation glides, and new status bars have very annoying black dots. If you find any more bugs, please post them as a comment to this post.

New Patch: FIAT v0.99c

Posted by redink1 on Tuesday December 18th, at 02:10 PM

Some more fixes arrive for FIAT in the form of this 230 KB Patch. Thanks to Dink World for storing it.

Medlid - Can no longer get stuck in a cave area from burning down a tree. Thanks Chrispy and Paul.
Rife Dungeon - Better fix for 'infinite strength' bug. Thanks Paul.
Tware - When entering water as a duck, no longer turn into Dink. Thanks denmark.
Rai - Pheonix's assistant can now make Void weapons. Thanks Megan.
Tware - More water spikes have been added, to make 'kill 20 Water Spikes' easier. Thanks Tal.
Gladiator - Ending now visible. Thanks denmark.
All - Buttstomping may have been 'broke' in Patch B when using regular fist, fixed now.
Drognu Dungeon - Patch B made it so Dynamite did not blow up rocks, fixed. Thanks mimifish.

This patch also includes all fixes from previous patches.

New Patch: FIAT v0.99d

Posted by redink1 on Wednesday December 19th, at 08:25 AM

It seems I totally screwed up Patch C, as it included a faulty dink.dat file (how it ended up in the zip, I don't know). Patch D fixes this. Thanks to everyone in the comments and on the board for pointing this out. Sorry about that...

New Patch: FIAT v0.99e

Posted by redink1 on Friday December 21st, at 05:10 PM

Another couple days, another patch. *Yawn* You know, if you people stopped finding bugs, I'd be able to enjoy my vacation by doing nothing

Though most of the fixes below weren't suggested by other people. Patch E includes all previous patches and fixes:

All - If buttstomping stops working, walk by a save machine. It should work again
Menu - Re-spaced cheat buttons
Disco - Improved
Tware - Now you must destroy the statue to use the rain machine
Odvi - Barrier to boss now unlocks right away instead of having to exit/re-enter screen (though mimifish says it doesn't, I'll check into it)
Readme - Modified a tiny bit
Rai - Pheonix's assistant now gives hints on where the secret weapons are
Tware - Can now sell Duck Whistle after the Water Knight is dead (to save inventory space)
Tware - Duck whistle will now say when it is full
Tware - Dink now gets his $ reward for rescuing the Mayor's Daughter
Tware - Fixed messed-up bomb buying bug

New 'Patch': Friends Beyond 2 Rewrite

Posted by redink1 on Friday December 21st, at 05:20 PM

Ted Shutes has released his Friends Beyond 2 Rewrite. What is it? Any explanation I would make would probably unwittingly decieve you, so here is an excerpt from the readme:

... there were some *good* adventures in the bad-end lines (out of the 4 original ways to play FB2). So what I have done is re-connected all of the original game's episodes into two major story lines, either one of which represents an equally valid way to win the game. If you have played this dmod before, before, play it again! I think you will like it. You will recognize many of the original story line elements, but they have now been debugged and restrung into two different stories. Either one preserves the integrity of the "Friend Beyond" trilogy; but Dink can now become either a hardened fighter or a powerful magician and win just as surely either way. I hope you will want to play both versions.

Sounds pretty dang cool.

Recondite Two: My FIAT Impressions

Posted by redink1 on Sunday December 23rd, at 06:38 PM

Because I've been at home for the past week (and with a slow dial-up connection), I haven't found any good links or anything cool to put in Recondite. So I decided to devote this week's to my impressions of FIAT. Be warned: these aren't in any good order, and they were wrote while I was tired. View the comments to read it:

( Read More )

New Patch: FIAT v0.99f (And Merry Christmas!)

Posted by redink1 on Tuesday December 25th, at 10:33 AM

Just in case nobody got anything good for Christmas, Patch F (which includes all previous patches) zooms to the rescue. Several... ahem... *annoying* bugs have been fixed (secret weapons mainly, I still haven't figured out the crashing yet). The new changes are:

Odvi - New and improved Boneworm graphics
Odvi - More Boneworms have been added
Odvi - Barrier to boss should disappear really right away when using Pendant (hopefully). Thanks mimifish.
Medlid - Where there was half-a-tree near the 'castle' there is now a full tree. Thanks joshriot.
Rife - Ducks now move/killable. Thanks joshriot.
Rife - Fixed small depth problem with entrance to the tunnel. Thanks joshriot.
Rife - Man in tunnel gives hint after water spike quest on what to do next.
All - Fixed bug that caused Spikes to never drop anything good.
All - Fixed bug that caused Extra Large monsters and wells to never drop any weapons (oops!).
All - Tweaked wells.
All - No more selling the duck whistle, I forgot the guy on Rife takes it from you.
Tware - Better fix for Mayor's Daughter, still have to save her if somebody patches after getting bow. Note: Do not attempt to save daughter after you've already been to the southern half of Rife. This can cause several problems. Will be fixed in Patch G release on 12/27.

The new animated boneworm graphics are pretty good, except the skull part 'grows' when it moves diagnolly. And sorry about the secret weapons bug... see, Dink supports something like this:

if (&story == 45) sp_nohit(1,1);

But NOT:

if (&story == 45) &story = 46;

When messing with variables, there must be the brackets around it. I forgot about this, and so it would never give the player anything except a Mega Potion.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

Speaking of patches

Posted by WC on Thursday December 27th, at 12:21 PM

Well, here is another patch to a beta, it's beta 3 of the Dink 1.07 engine and you can pick it up here. Now download this and go play FIAT!

Changes in v1.07 beta 3:

If the parm "-noini" is used from the command line it won't try to write the dinksmallwood.ini in the windows root dir. Caused problems with NT security for someone.
Typing dink.exe from the DOS prompt now works under Windows 2000
Dinkedit now runs under Win2000
Made Mog easier to kill
Fixed problem where loaded scripts could stay in memory after quitting the game
Changed fast file cleanup to happen on shutdown, not after each file was closed
Added new Mog and End Boss scripts that should fix game freezes if he got hit again after being dead - thanks to Michael Braecklein for the fix (even though it was wrong.. )
Font object is now released properly on exit
Alt-D (debug mode) now shows two lines instead of 1, makes it easier to see what's going on
Error messages from Dink and Dinkedit like "you entered a bad -game dir" are handled a bit different, I think I was causing weird problems before with the order that I was shutting stuff down in. Hard to say.
Fixed some sound problems.

New Patches: FIAT v0.99g and Alpha Crash Patch

Posted by redink1 on Thursday December 27th, at 07:35 PM

FIAT v0.99g includes all previous patches, plus these few changes (that I wanted to get out because of the pretty bad Mayor's Daughter bug):

Medlid - A sign on the island said the Village and Church were in opposite directions. It also referred to Medlid as Demlid. Thanks ttdz2.
Tware - Fixed bug in Patch F where saving daughter after you were supposed to get past that part screwed the game up (quite bad). Thanks Sophokles.
Rife Dungeon - No more Tenth Pig. Thanks Mimifish.
Rife - Pushing bed was broke in a previous patch, fixed now

FIAT Alpha Crash Patch is an attempt to fix some of the crashes people have experienced (it removes elemental fireball effects from weapon attacks, and adding hitpoints to monsters with same element). I have no idea if it will work, but those who have crashes try it and post a comment about it.

New Mini-Patch: FIAT v0.99h

Posted by redink1 on Saturday December 29th, at 10:15 AM

Just one little change in FIAT v0.99h (which includes all previous patches):