The Dink Network

If you're at all like me, you almost definitely have numerous DMODs strewn around various hard drives in your PC that you'd either like to play or perhaps edit. To do this you typically use a front end such as DFarc 3. Unfortunately DFarc only allows you to select one alternate path to search for D-mods in. This means you either have to keep changing it in the settings, or otherwise forego it entirely and use the command line. In the case of PlayThis, it advertises the ability for someone to double click on a dmod.diz file and either launch the game or the editor. Upon reading this I decided to finally give it a chance after passing over it for all these years.

In the last ten years or so, we've found ourselves beleaguered by a multitude of engine variants and versions. We have the choice nowadays not just of Dink 1.08, or 1.09, or 1.10, but also various releases of FreeDink and FreeDinkEdit. While reading the file description, I thought I had finally found something that could tie all of this together and allow me to change launch settings on the fly. I immediately installed it with the appropriate file association and attempted to click on a few dmod.diz files. By setting FreeDink as my default game exe I found myself continually presented with "could not find path" after which it would quit. I then attempted to set the default exe to Dink 1.08 but that ended with it complaining that it couldn't find whichever D-mod was being launched. Afterwards I then went on to attempt to use it with Dink 1.10 which nowadays supports the "-game" parameter only for it to tell me that every Dmod I tried to run it with was supposedly damaged and couldn't be run.

After this rather dismal affair, I found out that the program works by associating itself with all .diz files and then passes every other non-Dmod diz file through to Notepad. As I use iNFekt NFO viewer to view my diz files, this was of no practicality to me and I had to go into Windows File Associations and manually change it back as I could find no way to change this behaviour. I did attempt to use the alternate launch parameter feature that requires you to right-click on the particular button, however I still couldn't get it to work even after consulting the Readme file numerous times. I'm sure that I could have gotten it to work if I had tried a few more combinations of dollar signs and asterisks in the run path, but by this point I had just had enough.

I rather wanted to get PlayThis working, as it very easily would have surpassed DFarc 3 had it done what I expected it to do. Unfortunately it seems I shall be using my personal command line invocations for a while yet.