The Dink Network

WinDinkedit Plus 2

Here we have leprochaun in his natural habitat. He has quickly adopted WDE+2 as his go to editor. As you can see here he is currently detailing a map of some (as of posting) unreleased dmod.
March 14th, 2019
2.1
Score : 6.7 fair
peasantmb.gif
yeoldetoast
Peasant They/Them Australia
LOOK UPON MY DEFORMED FACE! 
Every once in a while you hear of something wonderful that sounds too good to be true and hope to yourself that it eventuates as well as you're capable of imagining. Unfortunately in WinDinkEdit's case, Plus 2 falls incredibly far short of that and feels like being gifted some sort of unpleasant-looking home-made garment for Christmas instead of those fancy expensive black and white shoes you asked for. This editor was released about the time when everyone was clamouring to see what GameHampe's "HJEdit" vaporware would consist of. There were at least a few other proposals around this time in terms of Dink editor developments that went absolutely nowhere, and in usual Dink style made incredibly bold claims that never eventuated. Dink modders did eventually get an editor in the form of WDE2Plus but it's not really anything to celebrate.

Upon starting it up, you'll realise that you've ended up with basically the same sort of thing as the previous versions of WinDinkEdit, complete with useless sidebar and cryptic interface that follows no human interface guidelines known to mankind, except now if you're using Vista or above, your screen won't screw up. However you're still forced into loading things from folders that you have little decision over, and overall are given very little control in regards to just about any of the settings. Want to use a different Dink.exe to test your map with such as Dink 1.09? Eat shit! What's that? You want to load a DMOD you installed with DFarc3? Nope, too bad! Maybe you can attempt to use alternate paths with the "Dink installation folder" selector however I couldn't seem to get this to work at all.

Instead, the new features seem to consist of largely irrelevant and useless functions such as a FastFile unpacker/repacker as well as a .d file decompressor/compressor that nobody really needed nor asked for and make it feel like this was nothing more than a test of the author's skills in file decompression. If you're feeling nostalgic, however, all of your favourite random bugs from previous releases of WinDinkEdit are still present. You want a sudden crash that erases dink.dat as well? Coming right up sir! How about a random freeze while using the collision triangle maker that completely erases your screen that you took two hours to neatly arrange sprites on? Certainly!

Better yet, the author seems to have refused to release the source of this steaming mess meaning people can't really go in and fix the bugs or attempt to port to another platform. Maybe it's for the best though. Painting your rickety old shed solid gold still leaves you with a crappy gold-coloured shack with a leaking roof that really ought to be demolished. Unfortunately as there's really no other viable Dink editor out there other than FreeDinkedit, it feels like you're forced to wear the ugly knitted wool jumper by your family out in front of your friends who all received Nike Airmaxes who you hope won't notice you in case they all start bullying you together.

Unfortunately your options (at the time of writing) in regards to Dink mapping are very limited. You may either stick with tradition and use (Free)DinkEdit with its funky modes and keyboard hotkeys or else try out one of Shevek's rather convoluted editors that might launch properly if you pray in the right direction at the proper time of day and moon phase. At this point you're better off just using a hex editor to manually edit MAP.DAT and DINK.DAT yourself. At least a hex editor isn't going to crash.