The Dink Network

SuperWolfman's Button Pack

July 17th, 2002
v1.00
Score : 7.5 good
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This is a pack of start, load, and quit buttons to replace the original Dink's buttons or Mike Snyder's Skeleton's. There are 5 different designs and each design has six different colors to choose from.

Overall, this is a pretty decent file that contains some of the buttons that you can definitely use in your dmod if you don't want to (or can't) make them by yourself. Depending on the overall color of your title screen, you can do some good matching with your title screen. All buttons have the same dimension 150 x 40, the same as Mike Snyder's buttons in his Skeleton B. So in principle, you don't need to worry about the depth dot in dink.ini if you used Skeleton B, although it would be still better if the author can mention the correct dink.ini setup, because it would be handy for people who use other Skeletons or do not use Skeletons at all.

Most of the designs in this file are very simple. Simple designs usually won't go wrong, but some of them are very similar to each other. For example, design 1 and design 3.

Now I'm going to go through each design and maybe some of the colors:

Button1: The words on the button would be magnified while being touched by mouse. The size of the texts in the untouched buttons is relatively small (about 1/6 of the whole area of the button). Also it looks blurry. (Probably I should get a new pair of glasses. ) The design is OK, but I only like the blue, purple, and green ones. Unless your title screen is full of bright red or yellow or orange, I don't think the red or orange buttons can be fit into your title screen well.

Button2: The basic design of this button is nice. The text would catch fire while being touched. The texts have nice kinky boundary that resemble fire. However this is the design that I least like. Why? Because when the texts are on fire, the shape of the texts is more blury. I really don't like the look of the texts. Although it resembles fire quite well, I think in a way it destroys the buttons. And when the texts are on fire, the background remains the same. That makes it even more unrealistic, especially for the backgrounds that are not red and orange.

Button3: The basic design of this one is similar to No. 1. However, this one always has the gray/silver background. This pack of button is best suited for the dmods that are NOT in the dink universe. It might be better to be used in a flight simulation or star war scene dmod. I guess Jamie's Beyond the Galaxy dmod might be better to use this pack instead of his own. But, again, the background is not matching well to the touched buttons. They do not look very good.

Button4: This is the best design in my opinion of all 5 designs. Unlike the previous 3 designs, the buttons do not have an oval like box as a background. Unfortunately, I still have 2 negative comments about this set. First,half of the colors (blue, green, and purple) in this set seem to be too dark to be seen. Second, the thickness of the texts and the curves is too thin. They might look better if they are BOLD or something similar to bold.

Button5: Basically they are just plain text without any decoration or background. The type and the size of the font are nicely chosen. The color of the texts in the touched buttons has some shadow in it. They are not simply single-color MSPaint products. However, as many of the whole pack, the untouched buttons are blury, (Oh, I really have to get a new pair of glasses, don't I?) but the touched ones are excellent! They have light grey outline to make the texts clear and highlighted. But that makes the blury untouched ones look even worse.

I did not talk about the silver ones in my previous paragraphs. They are strange! All texts or background that are NOT colored are "grey". So in principle, the silver buttons in all designs are pretty much in grey scale. Unless you have very special needs, I found the silver ones are not as good as it "sounds".

For all the first three designs that have background, it is kind of disappointed to see that the author did not do anything for the background when the color of the texts changes.

In short, you have 30 different sets of buttons to choose from for your dmod's title screen. However, most of them are not very satisfactory. Either the untouched or touched buttons have some problems. Overall, this is a useful file and the quality of the buttons is fine, but in my opinion, they can be improved a lot. And unless you cannot make your own button of good quality, it might be better for dmod author to make their own buttons. I might be a little harsh here, but I think a 7.5 score is a reasonable score.