The Dink Network

I contributed a file 3 days ago, a cheat/addon for Pilgrim's Quest which is a modified version of Ultimate Cheat 3.1 that fixes all of its problems when used with the DMOD Pilgrim's Quest:
1) the taxman leaves you alone, so you can cheat freely without punishment
2) you can edit your Agility, Honour, and Luck stats just like all the others
3) the fireballs from the cheat that burn everything can burn down snowy trees

So I contributed this file, which I called Pilgrim's Quest Cheat 1.0, back on November 21, now it's November 24, 3 days later, and it still isn't showing up. I looked at the most recently updated files and the most recently updated one is still October 30 (see http://www.dinknetwork.com/files/category_all/sort_date-desc/). I'm just wondering what the process is to get files reviewed here. I'm new to actually having an account here (although I've played Dink Smallwood for years) and actually when I signed up for an account earlier this month the email I got to activate my account got put into my spam folder in Yahoo! Mail and I get a TON of spam email so it took forever to find the email and activate my account since I had to go through all the spam to find it. Anyway how long does it usually take for a file to get approved after it's uploaded to the site? I'm just kinda impatient I guess. Oh and this is my first post here so hi everybody, a lot of you have made some really great DMODs, and then there are some not-so-good DMODs, but we don't need to get into that... I like to cheat when I play video games so I usually use Ultimate Cheat 3.1 with most DMODs, but on that DMOD Pilgrim's Quest it didn't work right so I fixed it, I hope you like the cheat I made, it comes with a nice readme file. I can look at my contributions and it says "Pending", so I guess it got uploaded but nobody's approved it yet. When I upload stuff to another site like YouTube, it gets approved immediately so this is just kind of frustrating I guess.

Also why is the Dink-Aural+ build of 1.08 not on any of the downloads pages, just here in the forums? It should be at http://www.dinknetwork.com/files/category_dinkexe/ so that people can find it there, at least that's what I think. Dink-Aural+ is what I use to play. I also have a Yamaha S-YXG50 soft synth installed as my MIDI driver so the MIDI music from Dink Smallwood sounds way more awesome than the MIDI driver that comes with Windows (the Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth which is vastly inferior to the Yamaha S-YXG50). Of course, the S-YXG50 was discontinued about a decade ago but anyone who is serious about having an improved MIDI music experience can figure out how to download it... but it doesn't work on Windows Vista or newer, it only works on Windows XP and earlier versions of Windows. If you're wondering what the Yamaha S-YXG50 is, it's a piece of abandonware for Windows XP and earlier that you install as a MIDI driver and it handles MIDI music in Windows and it sounds much better than anything else, with amazingly good sound quality, but I suppose Yamaha spent more money developing it than they got selling it or something like that, so they discontinued it. Dink Smallwood's music is MIDI so it makes this game sound MUCH better.

It's either that the staff have been too busy, or your file wasn't accepted for some reason. You can check your contributions here: http://www.dinknetwork.com/contribute/page_1/

Welcome to the DN
As Skull said, I haven't seen the staff around lately, so it could be that they just haven't got around to accepting it. Follow his link to check if it is still pending or if it was rejected for some reason.

Oh it's still pending. I'm just impatient I guess.

Welcome!

You have every right to be impatient when contributing something. A contribution is a perfect way to launch your stay here^^ The staff will get to it soon I'm sure, you can always PM them if you feel they might have overlooked it.

When things were really slow here, it took close to three months to have your files accepted, so patience is the number one thing to have on this site.

Welcome to the site. And I used to use the S-YXG50 too.

I'm a bit slow this week

Will have more time Saturday night/Sunday...

And welcome, by the way

Welcome
Anyway, I think it's Sparrowhawk that does the files, so it'll get accepted when he or a Noble like SabreTrout saunters in.

Oh I don't know who the staff is. I guess none of you are the staff huh? Judging by the front page of this site, Sparrowhawk and Striker seem to be the people who actively post updates to the front page, so I guess they must be staff. Anyway, I guess I'll just wait for them to approve it, no need to PM anyone, they'll probably approve it in a few days or weeks or within a month or something. Basically what I uploaded, a modified version of Ultimate Cheat 3.1 for Pilgrim's Quest, just has those 3 things fixed, namely the taxman doesn't show up when you cheat for money anymore, you can modify the 3 extra stats that this DMOD has (Luck, Honour, and Agility), and when you use the cheat to do a fireball that can destroy trees, it burns down snowy trees just like the regular ones. It was actually quite fun developing it, since I tested it by playing. And I actually learned a little bit of DinkC, but not that much! I just modified an existing cheat because I guess DinkC is pretty complicated... I know how complicated DinkC has from playing another DMOD, World of DinkC. I tested the cheat very thoroughly. There was one thing I wanted to do in the cheat that I couldn't figure out since my DinkC skills aren't quite good enough... I wanted to figure out how to have the script that burns down trees also check for any of Pilgrim Quest's fire trees and put out their fires. In that DMOD you get a water spell that you can use to put out fire trees, but I couldn't figure out how to put out all the fire trees on the screen at once. I tried different techniques but they either crashed the game or did nothing so I just gave up on trying to add that feature and went with the 3 features that I knew worked. There seems to be a counter in the DMOD for the number of fire trees and it's all very complicated, they don't just function independently, plus the ring of fire trees in the lower left corner of the forest of fire trees is scripted differently, and my cheat is just something that is an add-on for Pilgrim's Quest and I didn't want to actually modify any of the code for Pilgrim's Quest itself, since that would be too messy if it involved overwriting files instead of just adding new files. And that would make it harder to uninstall the cheat too, since you couldn't just delete its files, if it overwrote files in the DMOD. So I just kept things simple and didn't change them very much from Ultimate Cheat 3.1. Ultimate Cheat 3.1 has 12 different DinkC files that are interdependent, and I only modified 3 of them; the other 9 are all unchanged. So if you install my cheat and don't like it, you can just delete all the cheat's files and then it's gone again with no harm done to the DMOD, which I couldn't have accomplished if I actually modified the code of the DMOD itself. Now I did leave out the older version of Ultimate Cheat (2.01 I think) that comes packaged with Ultimate Cheat 3.1 when you download it. That's because all of its features are included in the newer version and it would be redundant, plus it would be twice as much work to also make it compatible with this DMOD too, and the only reason the older version of Ultimate Cheat is bundled with the newer one is in case the newer one doesn't work on certain DMODs, which I know isn't an issue here. Anyway I hope people will like my cheat for Pilgrim's Quest, I know Pilgrim's Quest is a very popular DMOD and I like it a lot and I made this because I was disappointed that the existing cheats didn't work with it and figured that it would only require a very minimal amount of coding to make them work with it. Maybe someday I might make a DMOD myself, although that is a LOT more work than just writing a few lines of script to modify an existing cheat like I did here. I think more likely, I might make cheats specific to other DMODs that I like. I hope the authors of those DMODs don't get upset if I do that. Then again, if they do get upset, they know DinkC better than I do so they can probably write something that is impossible for me to figure out into their DMODs to make it impossible to cheat, although I don't know why anyone would do that. It only makes sense to crack down on cheating in a game if the game is a multiplayer game like World of DinkCraft or The Dinks Online, IMHO.

Oh and I've looked up more stuff about software similar to the Yamaha S-YXG50 that actually works on Windows Vista and Windows 7 (and actually one of the ones I found is cross-platform so it runs on Linux stuff too). One that I found was called Timidity++ Windows Synthesizer (TWSYNTH) and the other is called BASSMIDI. I have tried both of them out and they both use SoundFonts (SF2 files). BASSMIDI crashes programs such as Dink Smallwood when I have it set up as the MIDI driver, but Timidity++ actually works, plus Timidity++'s driver comes pre-installed with 2 soundfonts and is ready to use, while BASSMIDI requires you to download a separate soundfont, and even then it crashes all the time. So I'd recommend Timidity++ to anyone not using the Yamaha S-YXG50 as their MIDI driver, although the Yamaha S-YXG50 is much easier to install and produces better sound quality than these other programs. The problem with Yamaha S-YXG50, of course, is that it doesn't work on anything newer than Windows XP, but these newer MIDI soft synth drivers actually do work with Vista and Windows 7, plus Timidity++ is cross-platform and also works on Linux, Mac OS X, and even OS/2. Timidity++ is a Japanese program though, so some of the download pages and help files about it are in Japanese instead of English, but the program is also available in English luckily. The cool thing about it is it lets you use any soundfont or combination of soundfonts so you can choose your favorite one for MIDI playback. Still, the Yamaha S-YXG50 sounds better though, and the driver itself is a free download from Microsoft now. However there are other parts of the Yamaha S-YXG50 like the XGplayer, a collection of XG MIDI files, and help files that only get installed if you install a full version of it, and then you can use that update from Microsoft to update it, but really all you need is the driver and you can get that part for free from Microsoft. I've been experimenting with soundfonts and trying to find a really good one to use with Timidity++ but haven't found anything I really like the sound of yet. The default ones that come with it are OK but not great. I think there are probably other MIDI soft synth drivers out there too that I haven't found yet, those are just the ones I've found so far. Oh... I just thought of something! Maybe the reason BASSMIDI crashes the computer is, I haven't restarted the computer since I installed it. I might give BASSMIDI a second chance. Anyway, have fun everyone! Cheers!

A post without smileys?

Um, nice, looks great.

Christ, I'm not reading all that if it has no emotion.

Interesting, I didn't know about BASSMIDI or that you could get the Yamaha driver from Microsoft. I'll have to try that. I also didn't know you could use the Timidity++ driver apart from the player.

You should add some more paragraph breaks to your posts. It would make them easier to read. On the Internet, very short paragraphs are the best.

What is it with you people and wanting to have your silly emoticons? You happy now? Shmeesh!

Oh and dinkulum, thanks for the feedback . Sorry about long paragraphs, it is a bad habit of mine . You should see my blog! That was sarcasm. My blog is terrible, all the posts have ridiculously long paragraphs and I haven't posted anything to it in years, and it has nothing of any interest whatsoever. I can honestly say my blog is the worst blog on the entire Internet, and no, I am not providing a link to it, because it is THAT BAD .

I just discovered a way to install the S-YXG50 on Windows Vista and Windows 7. It tells how to do it here. It requires the VSTi MIDI Driver (this one is my newest discovery) and the Yamaha S-YXG50 VST, both of which are from mudlord's website. Oh, and the VSTi MIDI Driver, like the BASSMIDI Driver, includes a configuration utility that allows you to change Windows' default MIDI driver, including on Windows Vista and Windows 7, and you also need to use that utility to set the S-YXG50 VST as the VST you are using. Needless to say, this is the awesomest thing EVAR, at least if you are a fan of the Yamaha S-YXG50 like me and, like me, don't have enough long-term memory to remember anything MOAR awesome. Also, apparently the regular Yamaha S-YXG50 driver for Windows XP has some problems on multi-core CPUs, but this VST version of it works perfectly on any CPU, so this VSTi Driver method is necessary not just for Windows Vista and Windows 7 but also for anyone with a multi-core CPU. It is still Windows-only, but I think it works under Linux if you use Wine. But getting it to work on Mac OS X would be pretty tough, since getting Wine to work on Mac OS X is pretty tough.

In case that paragraph was too long for you , I figured out how to get the music to sound really awesome in Dink Smallwood using something called the "S-YXG50" and it works on almost any computer and all you need is this thing and this thing and if you don't use Windows you also need this thing.

I've done more testing on soundfonts and STILL can't find any that sound even REMOTELY as good as the Yamaha S-YXG50... half of 'em sound worse than the built-in Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth in Windows, and the ones that are better are only slightly better (for instance, Timidity++'s default soundfonts are slightly better than the Microsoft synth). Supposedly the "Weeds General MIDI SoundFont v3.0" is the best one according to some people, but personally I don't like the way it sounds on any of the MIDIs I tested (I tested it by setting it as my MIDI soundfont with the Timidity++ driver and then playing some DMODs that have good music, and also tried it out in Winamp on some MIDI files too). It's weird though, since a bunch of other people on the Internet seem to think it's the best soundfont EVAR so maybe this is just my personal taste, so I dunno, maybe you folks might like the sound of it, I prefer the Yamaha S-YXG50 myself, although technically the S-YXG50 isn't a soundfont but is way more advanced than what soundfonts are capable of (for instance it supports XG and not just General MIDI).

In case that paragraph was too long for you , soundfonts suck and the S-YXG50 rules .

Also, smileys are stoopid .

Also, I know I'm a n00b, but why isn't this forum moderated at all? ThePunisher keeps spamming this forum with bloody awful rubbish but doesn't get banned. What is this, USENET or something? In USENET it's technically impossible to ban anyone, but on a web forum, using the almighty banhammer for PWNage of trollz is easier than Dink Smallwood's mom after getting her drunk off all the booze at Ethel's place.

Welcome!

"Oh I don't know who the staff is."

For your edification: The somewhat out of date staff page!
Minus Dukie, Merlin and SimonK. Probably josh too...