The Dink Network

WinDinkEdit Plus attempts to improve upon the original WinDinkEdit by fixing bugs and adding new features, such as a snap-to grid and a built-in script editor.

*Best download of january 2006*

Here is the ever popular replacement to DinkEdit, and supposedly WinDinkEdit: WDE Plus. This builds on the original by adding features such as "Auto-script" and snap-to-grid. Despite the claims that it "fixes bugs" this is a total crock.

First of all, in the newest version the file required for auto scripting is not included. The downloader must get the older version with bscripts.ini in it for that feature to work. Once this major hurdle is overcome it can make placing hearts and stat potions quite simple. Which is nice. The personal Sprite Library is also very useful.

The snap to grid feature only seems to work properly when using the S key to stamp sprites. Otherwise, when placing a sprite with a mouse click, it seems to position itself a bit off of the "grid" which is utter crap, and makes placing Inn tiles and walls a whole other chore particularly. If you have a steady hand, it's often better to just place them yourself, as the results can come out looking quite unnatural otherwise. This is probably useful to some, but I don't think it's worth it.

The other "cool" feature of this is the "Hardness Polygon" which allows you to draw a shape of hardness through holding shift and clicking a few times. This may seem great at first, but it crashes ALL THE TIME!Which means you have to save first, then proceed with caution, and then possibly relaunch and start over.

On the sprite edit page, clicking the "Auto Base Walk" button automatically reverts any changes you have made on the page since last saving, which means that if you set all the other values first, then click "Auto base walk", they get changed to their original value. This is an utter pain, and a major oversight.

Strange quirks can also occur whilst accidentally holding buttons such as shift, ctrl and then clicking on things. Often the program will fail to respond after that, and must be relaunched. This is utter bollocks, and grows tiresome. Graphical glitches such as screens not appearing in map preview and whatnot also occur causing you to have to restart. Often I try to save and tells me I "don't have permission!".

When I save using CTRL + S, if I have a tile saved on the clipboard, it interprets this as the S key which as well as saving, stamps a tile as well which is stupid.

The inbuilt "Launch DMOD" function doesn't work. Though nobody uses it anyway.

The program uses dinksmallwood.ini (or something like that) in a Windows System folder to determine where to look for the original program. GNU Freedink seems to delete this file upon launch and it sucks, though this is Freedink's fault, it would be better if it didn't do this as it screws up everything. You have to specify where it should look, which doesn't work for more than one launch.

What I am trying to say is that this program is absolutely full of bugs, and to claim that they don't exist is a travesty. Someone should get the source code and fix it up (a programmer who knows Win32 API or VB .NET or whatever it's programmed in.) Or better yet, start from scratch, and make it cross-platform.

Despite this, it is fairly usable for a lot of things. It's just a shame that one of the only editors out there for this game is for a single platform and is buggy as an entomologists house.