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.

This is a front end to play any D-mod.

It seems an awful lot of work to just get a front end up and running: you have to unzip the file and then shift-click a dmod.diz of any D-mod, in order to get the 'open with...' option. Then you have to select 'other', and find and select PlayThis.exe. The front end however, did not work. I got an error indicating that I needed visual basic runtime files, so I had to download those from the Microsoft site. And then the file still would not run. At that time I just could not be bothered to try again or to try find out what was wrong.

There are front ends available that you can easily install with only one click and then the work is done and you can play your D-mod. This file is not exactly user friendly.

I am willing to believe that this is a good front end since it won both a DOTM and DOTY, and therefore the score is a bit higher, but this one does not work for me.

PlayThis is a frontend associated with dmod.diz files. It has all the important functions DinkFrontEnd has, and you can easily edit the .diz files with PlayThis too. You can also open dmods with WinDinkEdit, a function DinkFrontEnd doesn't have.

For me this program was extremely easy to install, although, someone not familiar with editing file types might find it difficult to modify the file assocciations. Modifying the file assocciations isn't necessary but it makes using the program a little faster, and faster is what PlayThis was made to do in the first place.

It isn't a useful frontend for those who just play Dink, but it's very useful when editing dmods, since using PlayThis to play and edit dmods directly from the dmod's folder is faster than through DinkFrontEnd.

playthis is a small .exe file that allows .diz files (there is one in most dmod's folders) to launch the dmod. this is good if you want to open a dmod easily, instead of searching through the list in a frontend. just open the dmod right from its folder. also, verson 2.1 has the ability to edit, view info, and other features. this is a nice feature to have, the only problem (and i dont know why) is that the 'prompt' box pops up halfway off the screen. i can hit the play button, but to read the rest of the features, i need to drag it onto the screen.