The Dink Network

The author claimed this file to be an updated Mike Snyder's Skeleton B and the file includes nifty tutorials that will help in game design and all. Well, it is NOT true for either the Skeleton itself or the tutorial.

As for the Skeleton itself, basically it is exactly the same as Mike Snyder's Skeleton B, except for a few terrible modifications. The author simply robbed Mike Snyder's ts39.bmp without changing anything without giving any credit to him. Hmmm, I still remembered this same author accused me to use and modify 4% of his tile file without ASKING him. (Even though I did give him proper credit for that matter.) Talking about double standard...

The new graphics files that were added for this Skeleton X were basically useless! In Skeleton B, Mike Snyder gave you a choice for using his nice start buttoms and even the title screen can be simply modified if you do not have a fancy 2D photo/image program. But here, the author simply put in bad MSPaint single color graphics. I'd rather use the original buttoms from the original Dink! Besides the stealing ts39 from Mike Snyder, both Esplash and splash are as bad. Thank god, they are at least in Dink palette, aren't they? I don't really think anybody would prefer to see such a splash or esplash instead of the original ones. And here you add two useless files which took a few hundreds of KB of your HD space. Talk about HD space, it looks very strange that esplash.bmp is extremely small (14.5 KB) while splash.bmp is 302 KB. Weird?!

The bad things about this Skeleton did not just stop here. What else can he mess with the original Skeleton B? Well, he changed something in some of the few scripts. Many of the changes seemed to be harmless but bad (for example in start-1, &strength = 50 &defense = 50 &magic = 50). But in fact, he did not use ";", and therefore you might have some trouble here. And the author delete &update_status = 1; and draw_status(); without further explanation, the status bar will NOT show at the beginning of the game! The commented out &level = 50 is just plain crazy. If a newbie does uncomment it, it would crash the game right at the beginning! Dink can only have up to level 32 for Seth's sake!

Skeleton B is not perfect, but this file did not fix any of the problems of Skeleton B. I believe the author might not know a lot about tile hardness editing at that time, some of little fixes (not the whole rewriting) can at least be done. Dink.ini file is as messy as the original one. Some basic sorting or cleanup or adding some more sprite_info for undefined ones should be the basic "update" you should have. But no. The mainly update in the view of the author is the nifty tutorial he included with this Skeleton.

First of all, why on earth to put a tutorial in a Skeleton!? A skeleton is simply a starting element for anybody to begin with their dmod. Who wants to release a game with some crappy tutorial in it? If the tutorial is good in its own right, simply release it separately. Adding any extra things that has nothing to do with a dmod is just plain bad.

Now let's take a look at this so-called nifty tutorial, the major part of the update. One word: horrible! There appear to be 6 sections, written in plain texts separated by a lot of ANNOYING CAPITAL LETTERS. I guess Jamie, the author, really like SHOUTING. The first section... I don't even want to go there. Now go to Section 2... OK, there are some words in section 2. But the examples are simply bad bad bad! You cannot use sequence 1 in Dink. How on earth he choose this rediculous number!? The explanations were confusing at the best. So if you do want to learn this part of thing, go download SimonK's Creating Enemy Sprites, which this author only gave it a so-so 7.1 score. (My goodness.) Section 3, besides a link, you cannot learn any thing here. Move to Section 4, scripting. OK, only very basic stuff with tons of errors! I don't believe the author ever tried this script by himself. Missing ";" everywhere. freeze() won't do anything! I can't believe the author can deliver such a horrible file to HELP beginners. Then again in Section 5, nothing. Move to the final section 6. The author is trying to be funny, and he did fall into one of his NOT-to-do list! 6 points in his NOT-TO-DO list, the first one: No bug. Everyone knows that, yet the script example provided in this "tutorial" is fuul of bugs! Second, too many midi's. In a sense it is true, but it really depends on the game itself. Sometimes you do need a lot of different midi's to reflect different themes in the game. Third, storyline not in DinkUniverse. FALSE, as long as you have a great game. Most of the people did not really bother if it is Dink or not. For example, almost everybody was eager to expecting Silencer's BTS, which is nothing to do with Dink. Fourth, odd graphics and tiles... I'm thinking of Spare Tiles. (Bad bad fish...) Fifth, too much non-funny humor. (You know what I would have said.) Sixth, all original Dink graphics and sound. FALSE! Quest for Cheese is one of the all-time best dmods that were ever released, yet it did not have any real new graphics in the game. A good gameplay is much more important than new graphics, especially not-so-good ones! So overall Section 6 is purely Jamie's personal opinions and most of them aparently are NOT the majority thoughts as I have the obvious facts to oppose them.

I am doing a rewrite of Skeleton, mainly focusing on the tile hardness and Dink.ini file. So if you cannot wait until the end of this month (or the beginning of the next month), you'd better download Mike Snyder's old Skeleton B for your new project. This Skeleton X only makes it worse with some crappy useless so-called tutorial.

I really can't find anything to reward points to this file. My head hurts... How about 0.5 point?

At the time of writing, nobody has reviewed my skeleton x v1.2 dev file, so I have decided to give an honest opinion on it and it's history...

---THE HISTORY---

I was getting a bit bored doing my New Beginnings Series with the rest of my team, and decided to do something small, for a small while. Here it is! I took Mikes Skeleton B and, updated it. I then also added some nifty tutorials to help the newbies.

Also - After releasing Skeleton B, I decided to make a small D-MOD before I go back to the development of New Beginnings. This small D-MOD is a good laugh, and is called.... here we go...

"A walk through my place" Version 1.1

Version 1.0 WAS my first D-MOD but I have now completely redone it to be 1.1!

Okay, that's the history over and done with

---REVIEW---

Briefs - I don't know what everybody else thinks but I think using Skeleton B died down. Read the history section... so I released Skeleton X v1.2

Weaknesses - Well, the actual skeleton part of it, is still very similar to Mikes Skeleton B, however, some MINOR changes have been made...

Strengths - Has to be the tutorials. Although they took the small parts of two days, I beleive that an newbies looking for some new tutorials should read this. It also includes handy resources. The skeleton itslef has been redone to improve it, so I guess I could call that a strength. However, once again it's main strength is the tutorials. Another strength is the size, un-compressed it is 3.03 MB but compressed it is 142KB, which really helps those with SLOW connections or modems. The tutorials have been fitted into one file, to help this size stay down.

Overall - Download Skeleton X and see what you think. Thanks

ALSO!!! Think skeleton x can be improved? E-mail OnlineGamingGod@hotmail.com saying how it can be improved and have your name as part of Skeleton X Version 1.5

Thankyou for reading
Jamie Shepherd
imacrazyguy

I give it a 7.2, with help from the tuts

This is not great, but it does have good points. I found the tutorial poor, and it surely cannot benefit anyone, especially n00b's
The main problem that I found with it is that it is essentially made by Mike Snyder! It is almost exactly the same as skeleton B but with a terrible tutorial. It does not get a great mark because it is not hiss own work for the most part, and the credit should go to the great Mike Snyder.

I agree with mimifish and think he said about all that can be said about this file.

This file is basically the same as Skeleton B, made by Mike Snyder. The author however, did not give Mike Snyder any credit. He just mentions that this is an updated version of Skeleton B.

The extra’s that are in this file, do not belong in a skeleton, and they are not that good. The author mostly refers to other tutorials. And the titles of the chapters take up more space then the actual tutorial.

Download skeleton B by Mike Snyder if you want a decent skeleton, not this one.

This file is ok, but it needs to have more in it. It doesn't include all the info I need, and the amount of info it puts in for each subject is poor.

I mean, for me, I didn't get all the info I required. It didn't give much help on the subject. I think that it could at least have had a part on the character. In my dmod, the character keeps turning up as a duck, which I can't fix. So I thought I would see if it had any help. It didn't, and I was ok on that.
But then, I was just starting to get somewhere, and there was something I needed to do, to make my game work, and it had skipped that part out totally.

There was also the fact that it wasted my time by making me scroll down for ages before I could read two sentences on the next chapter.

So, overall, I don't recommend this to anyone, if they actually want to make a decent dmod.