The Dink Network

IS there anyone actually interested in such a thing? I hear many people say that they want such a thing, but would anyone actually play it?

It certainly sounds like a fun concept, and I would play it for awhile; but it ultimately depends on how well it's pulled off as to if I'd play it for the long run.

I doubt it. We barely have enough people to chat, it's hard to see how a game would have anyone in it after the novelty passes out.

Sorry to be so depressing, it would be fun to see... but I don't think it'd work out, even if the game was pretty awesome.

That's what I feared. If such a thing were to be made, it would need something to keep players hooked.

I think people would play it but to be successful, it can't be a simple port of Dink to an online version. The best days of the Dink community are in the past and to let the community grow again, I think there should be some incentive to join. Looking back on it, the main reason of Dink's success is the ability to shape your own adventures and share them with others. This is also the reason why the current community is alive but not thriving: there are no cutting edge D-Mods coming out that everyone talks about.

Although people have been very creative, the Dink engine is very limited and in these days, anyone who wants to create a game fiddles with things like Game Maker or PHP to create a web game. Flash is popular too.

If we could develop a solid sequel, like Dink 2 or Dink Online, which retains the Dink feeling but perhaps more appealing to the aspiring game developers, we could promote the game as a platform for creating RPG adventures. In terms of technical abilities, the scripting abilities should match those of real scripting languages, like Lua or JavaScript. Many good D-Mods were made by teenagers with lots of time on their hands and it's a nice introduction to programming in general because when it works, you see it happening on the screen - it's not moving bytes around in memory.

I think it would be great if you could submit your adventure (D-Mod) to a website, people could login and simply play your adventure. An easy way to keep people hooked would be to add achievements for completing D-Mods or certain quests and giving everyone a pretty profile to display them.

Wouldn't multiplayer require a rewite of the Dink C language and engine totally? Besides that I am all for it, as long as there are 999 Levels! LOL

Multiplayer is a tricky thing and difficult to add later into your game engine when nobody planned for it. Many commercial games that have multiplayer were created as multiplayer game and they simulate singleplayer by starting a local multiplayer game with just one player (take FPS and RTS games for example). Throwing code away is rarely a good idea so perhaps we could rewrite it gradually but it's also appealing to create it from scratch (like FreeDink did as the Dink Smallwood code is a mess). We could still use the same DinkC scripting language but I wouldn't recommend that if you want to attract people these days.

Hehe, I was pretty dissapointed when I found out Dink only let me get to level 32 or something...

What I meant by the whole thing is a stand-alone application that you can run on your computer that connects to a remote server that connects you to other dinkers, allowing you to battle it out in arena deathmatches. There could be a leveling system in place - although with a lack of dinkers, if your stats increase with levels, then we will have some powerful characters and some not so powerful characters, and since it would be unlikely many players of your level would be online, you could get massively pwned by someone ten times your level!

This is not so much a re-write of DinkC, as much as programming the whole thing from scratch.

@Fireball5: yeah, we could create that but I think it needs more to keep people hooked.

Well a good start would be while playing Dink singleplay have a chat it connects to where every one can chat with each other while playing... that would be an awsome start! then go from there!

I was planning to create an online Dink game using Game Maker. (It wouldn't be exactly the same as Dink but it's easy to make it very similar.) I already started making an online version of Magical Mayhem and it seems to work. I just need a lot of time to finish it and right now I try spending all of my spare time on Day of the Carcass.

Folks, it doesn't exactly have to be massive multiplayer style. Heck, two players or more could maybe be enough, having special DMods that should (preferably) be played with that amount of players, using a special server/client system to show what Dmods are currently being played and a quick download/join for them.

You could have things like competitions (in the Dmod that is, competing against eachother), or free roaming for all players with the occasional meetup, or having to work together to achieve a goal (think 4 Swords), etcetera. As long as it's executed well with the above concept it should work.

Dink Smallwood capture-the-alk-nut, anyone?

Wow schnaps, that is the best idea I have heard all day! No, seriously. As well as some of DaVince's ideas, this could be alright.

I have been working on a server capable of handling clients and just wanted to see if it is worth it. Blackguard (Anyone remember him?) will probably be hosting the server for me, and if a client ever gets made it will be released for download.

Right now the features I am planning on are:
- Two player deathmatches
- Leveling/Ranks
- Chat (maybe)
- Registration (for profiles and stuff)
- Possibly, a web page (If I can persuade Blackguard into installing Apache + php)
- I might have varied game play modes (Like team deathmatch or capture the flag)

Any suggestions are welcome

Which source code will you be using as the base (if you're starting from actual Dink, that is)? Starting from FreeDink would give you cross-platform + a quick adoption of SDL_net (since SDL is already loaded).

Chat seems really important to me. I think the text appearing above the users' heads classic Dink style as well as in a special dock would look nice.

There will be a server involved, so I am writting the server completely from scratch. As for the client, I may be writting that too.

I am using PureBasic for all my programming, so it will be cross-platform compatible (All I need is a Mac to compile it on though - I have Windows and can easily get Ubuntu)

Kudos for your' efforts, Fireball.

I'm not so sure about using PureBasic for this project.. it doesn't appear to be a freely available language so the number of developers will necessarily be small and it'll be difficult to find maintainers when you'll no longer work on it.

PureBasic is paid software, yes. But it does allow you to write and compile programs with a line limit of roughly 600 lines (even though it states 800). The demo is freely downloadable, and I will be using that until I can convince myself to buy the full version. It is also mostly crossplatform compatible, and can be installed on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh (there even used to be an Amiga version, but it was discontinued)

Most PureBasic applications can be ported just by installing the compiler on another OS and compiling the same source code.

I know I should use a more freely available software, but I've used PB for so long now that I've grown accustomed to it, and the MS Visual Suite now only comes in trials, so I can't use them.

As far as I am concerned, the server will continue to be written in PureBasic, the client hasn't been written yet. If anyone wants to pitch in and help, that would be great, I can send over source codes and specifications if neccesary. I will probably design a mock-protocol to see what I will need in both server and client.

You might want to pick up Ruby or Python one day. Both are simple languages that are VERY extendable and cross-platform (depending on the available of the libraries you pick).

wow!online,multiplayer dink seems a good fun idea!!

but we need some advertising though,thanks to the lack of people..

I'm thinking that the advantages that PureBasic has are outweighed by the disadvantages in the long run. Learning another language is not the problem but for all the effort that's needed, I personally wouldn't want to depend on a language/compiler for which it is unclear what the future will hold. If the company decides not to distribute a free version anymore or the company itself ceases to exist, the language is basically discontinued (from our perspective). It's currently your project after all but I think it's important to think this through before a lot of time is invested into it.

December 1st, 2009:
PureBasic 4.40 (Major Release)

There is still ongoing support for PureBasic, and a lively community on their forums (I think) and rumors of yet another major update (4.50) so the immediate future looks good, though in the long run, yes I will definitely learn another language, it's just a matter of which one(s) and when, but the 'when' isn't now, I'm only fourteen so I have assignments to do, personal projects to write, keep in touch with people. I tried to learn Visual Basic (2005 edition), but I got as far as declaring variables and making a message box appear. (I don't like visual languages anyway, takes the flexible coding away from a programmer. Quite frankly, I'd consider today's computer users lazy, most people my age can't even remember URLs, going on google every time they need the same site instead)

How about kepler? It seems to be based on Lua, which is also the language used in Robinson Techs' Novashell engine.

huh, a web-based Lua... this is relevant to my interests...

If you're going to learn a different language, don't go for another non-free, non-cross-platform variant of BASIC at least.

At least PureBasic is cross-platform

After consulting Blackguard, we decided to make this into a MMORPG-esque type game, though without the 'massive', and probably without the 'roleplaying' as well... but it will still be multiplayer, online, and a game...

I'll just check if it qualifies as a RPG.

MOA: multiplayer online adventure
MOO: multiplayer online olympics
MOG: multiplayer online game
MOD: multiplayer online dink

Yeah, but Visual Basic isn't.

;(