The Dink Network

Hi,

I don't picture myself putting a lot of time into GNU FreeDink again, so I figure it's time to pass the torch.
I'm notifying maintainers@gnu.org about this and they'll look for a maintainer.
I can suggest a name for consideration, if you'd like to take over maintenance let me know why you'd be a good candidate.

I'd just like to say many thanks for all your hard work over the years.

I thank you aswell!

Beuc you are a legend! Thank you for your important contributions!

Beuc, I too would like to add my heartfelt expressions of gratitude to those above. If it was not for freedink on Linux I "would not be here"(*).

(*)I don't mean that Beuc saved my life, at least not literally. I just mean that I would never have become an active member of the Dink Network here without /usr/games/freedink on Linux.

Thanks!

this is the true beginning of the end.

I must admit i am pretty stunned by this announcement , i doubt anyone else will have interest to take up what you are leaving , there are just about 10-12 people max interested to develop and maintain dink related stuff.

i doubt anyone else will have interest to take up what you are leaving

Both interest and knowledge...

there are virtually no options here. redink1 and shevek maybe?

dunno if there are any who'd be interested in maintaining it elsewhere but maybe we'll be seeing a new gnuboi here soon.

otherwise, we're DUCKED

Thanks for everything you've done so far, Beuc. You honestly don't get the shower of confetti and sexy ladies you deserve for everything you've done with Dink, but thanks all the same. May I ask why you're passing on the torch?

Skurn: I thought you hated FreeDink and are still using v1.07 or something.

no, i'm using 1.06

I appreciate all your heartfelt thanks, they mean a lot
Continuing or leaving a project is a delicate balance between the nice and not-so-nice parts of it, so I won't endlessly gloat over the former and bash the later.
Let's remind I officially started GNU FreeDink more than 15 years ago and a lot changed since.

Oh damn.
Thanks for everything Beuc, Freedink is the best and still has a lot of potential to become even better too, I hope someone picks it up.
Can't thank you enough for laying the foundations and keeping it going til now though.

@Beuc:

It may help the cause... if you would ... add some details of what it means to maintain freedink. If you give people an idea of what is involved, we might have more luck getting someone else to take over your role.

o How many operating systems do you have to maintain so you can compile on them?
o How much code have you changed (lines of code) over the time you have been responsible for freedink? Is that about 10% or 20% or 50% or even more?
o How often do you have to make changes to make certain that freedink is compatible with the latest releases of the operating systems you support?
o How many branches of freedink and dfarc are you currently maintaining?
o Is there anything else that you think might be helpful in giving people a grasp of the scope of this honor?
o What are the nice and not-so-nice parts you talked about above?

i would not be surprised to hear the beuc was working alone on this for a long time .

@SlipDink
I'm gonna give a few starting points but an important part of the maintainer's role is figuring out things by themselves:
- https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html#whatmeans
- clone the Git repo(s) from https://savannah.gnu.org/p/freedink
- run "gitk" to check the Git history/branches/etc.
- check the doc/ directory

@liquid141, yes and no:
https://www.gnu.org/software/freedink/credits

It was pretty much you , i hope you find someone with the passion to take over

Yes, thank you Beuc! FreeDink is definitely the most widely used and stable version of Dink available, and it is very impressive how you were able to tidy-up the existing code base.

I'm sad to see you go, but maybe you'll come back again

Just wanted to check up on this , free dink pretty important to us , i hope someone has taken over . Would seth or redink1 be interested ?

Looking at the webpage it still says beuc

What happens in the worst case no one can be found ?

What happens in the worst case no one can be found?

I think way back in 2009, there was a thread on this topic. Tal, and Redink1 actually wrote GNU FreeDink maintenance worst case scenario. The document was printed and given to Skurn for safekeeping, who at the time had an army of Pink Ponies. Since it was a top-secret, the content was classified and unreachable for the rest of the Dink community. Skurn of course, promptly sold the papers to the highest bidder, and the content of it lead to Arab spring in 2010. I don't recall exactly what the content was, except that there were two possible plans. Plan A had something to do with mass duck beheading, while Plan B involved Talporn

i made sure to write an "optional" plan c which, if whoever bought the documents decided they wanted to go through with a reformation, they had to agree to do with mine.

naturally, i won't share the details. you'll just have to wait and see.

OK joking aside, this is a serious matter. FreeDink is seriously important as it kept Dink Smallwood to be playable on modern PCs, but now it falls behind the HD version unless it gets some new features to have a reason to use (Besides being available on Linux and other systems)

Everything involves Talporn. Want to see an example?

@Tal

I'm amazed that no one responded to that yet. YES!!

This forum is better posted outside of the DN, or maybe on the GNU site or everywhere. Then we all be shouting Help! Help! GNU maintainer needed.

Bit late to the party, but thank you Beuc and others for the work done to keep Dink alive on modern platforms.

Hi, I'm also late to the party. I wanted to say thank you Beuc for maintaining this for so long! This game was one of the few PC titles I played constantly as a teenager. It was a period in my life where I kind of fell out of console games and only used the free and open source games that were in the Ubuntu repositories -- I was pretty lonely at the time and this game was one of only a few that kept me from feeling that too harshly.

It's also one of the first times I volunteered in the free software community. I'm the person who coded the current version of gnu.org/s/freedink back in 2012! (Under the name "Luiji".)

I'm sorry to see FreeDink go unmaintained, but I'm glad you're moving on at the same time. 15 years is a hell of a long time!

I am new to the GNU project community but I have a lot of software dev experience and loved playing Dink when I was a teenager. It was one of the first PC games I found. I would need to ramp up on how to compile, run, etc but I would love to help maintain the package and join the freeDink community.

@jlechem:
I am new to the GNU project community but I have a lot of software dev experience and loved playing Dink when I was a teenager. It was one of the first PC games I found. I would need to ramp up on how to compile, run, etc but I would love to help maintain the package and join the freeDink community.

Well, you could try reaching out to Beuc. He has a few ways to contact him on his profile page on the Dink Network. We'd certainly like your help.

If that does not work out, then scroll up to the message from Beuc himself in this thread dated at about [April 23rd 2019].

He tends to respond to his emails pretty quick, from my experience. So maybe try that.

This topic really should be fixed at the top.

Yeah, like a "Sticky Topic".
Wait a sec, how do you make a sticky topic?

Wait a sec, how do you make a sticky topic?

Admins dissolve unhealthy amounts of sugar in a little water, then take small sips and lick index screen on the position where they want to stick the thread.

Moving the thread itself is trivial, and I don't really see the need to explain the mechanics of it.

Any updates . were you able to get in touch with beuc?

Making this a sticky thread isn't the worst idea ever. I'll grant you this one wish. I don't think I've done anything productive here in... let's not talk about that actually. Boom.

Hey there. I'm DreamMaster, an active developer over at the ScummVM project. Given that the project has been looking for a maintainer, are there any objections to folding the code into ScummVM? Background is that the last several years during my yearly holidays I've been folding several previously completed/unmaintained projects in, and FreeDink seems like a good candidate to work on, bringing it to a wider audience and systems.

Real Life is interfering right now, so it's uncertain when my "should have been at Christmas" holiday will be, but it'll hopefully be at some point in the next few months.

Wow, this sounds like a great idea!

@ DreamMaster:

Great! Hooray! Thanks!

So, tell us, what would this "folding-in" look like? Would the ScummVM be able to run Dink Smallwood dmods "as is" or would the dmods require some special modifications?

Please let us know how things are going with this project.

Hi!
I think it only depends on the ability of playing D-Mods. If we can easily play them, I think basically everybody in the community would be welcoming this. FreeDink has been the go-to way to play Dink on modern systems for most people here. Being able to play more D-Mods properly is why it's considered superior to DinkHD. If it weren't able to play D-Mods, the intrest would be minimal ot non-existent. It would be great to finally have a maintainer again.

Basically, the FreeDink code would be ported to run as an engine under ScummVM. At it's simplest, it would simply be remapped to use the ScummVM core for portability rather than, for example, the SDL calls it currently makes. This means that any existing functionality, including all ability is has to run D-Mods would remain unaffected. Just like with the recent inclusion of AGS, we'd ideally need to prepare a detection list of all known D-Mods so that the ScummVM launcher front-end can recognise them. Though a "fallback detection" of unknown/new D-Mods is also possible.

Later on, there may also be further improvements FreeDink can utilize from ScummVM. Though the main thing still will be that under ScummVM it'll be available to run on more systems.

As for "Please let us know how things are going with this project.", this isn't something I've actually started yet; I haven't even looked at the Freedink code much at all. As I mentioned earlier, it's something I'll likely start either when my real-life work settles down a bit and I get my belated holidays, or in a month or so if it looks like my holidays will be delayed. I'm currently in the middle of implementing support for a game "Chewy Escape From F5" based on some sources we were kindly provided, so I'll likely start on Freedink after that's finished, holidays or not.

As a consequence of not being familiar with the codebase, I don't know how many GUI-based features Freedink has yet. But ScummVM does provide a GUI based keybinder, enhanced savegames support with thumbnails, play time etc, autosaves, and other such niceties. So as part of the integration process, FreeDink will likely get some cool new features.

@DreamMaster:
I was trying to ease into the same matters that RangerLord was talking about when he said, "I think it only depends on the ability of playing D-Mods. If we can easily play them, I think basically everybody in the community would be welcoming this.".

RangerLord is certainly right. Our community is too small to tolerate another version of the Dink Engine that is "mostly" compatible. In fact, one reason our community IS small is that later versions of the Dink Engine tend to cause problems for any new users. If WE ARE LUCKY, they then contact us in the forum and we try to guide the user to the highly dmod compatible FreeDink [version 1.08x]. If they don't get discouraged when we make this suggestion, they might stick around. But many do not.

You may find that the latest and greatest in the Git repository is not really the version we'd all prefer that you work on. A visit to https://www.dinknetwork.com/files/category_official/ may be the best way to get to the 1.08x version of FreeDink.

You should probably talk with Robj (author of this tool ---> [https://www.dinknetwork.com/file/version_checker/]) to help you get started with the "right" version.

As for your indication that you won't start right away, don't worry about that. We are happy to have you give it a try, but we will all want to see that your new version of things works nicely with the existing large library of Dmods before we really celebrate your efforts in earnest.

Good Luck! And be sure to keep in touch with us here to get any help you might need, especially with compatibility testing.

Thanks for the encouragement, and pointing me to the best official source to use. It'll save me time in the long-run to not accidentally work on an incorrect codebase.

And you're right. We can celebrate when I've actually had a chance to work on the codebase and produce some results.

This is good news. I think the latest FreeDink (109.6) does include some very useful fixes in terms of bugs and compatibility (such as sp_custom returning the correct value when a custom key isn't set, in line with vanilla 1.08). And it is highly compatible with every dmod, in fact some previously incompatible dmods on the earlier FreeDink version such as the scourger, are compatible in FreeDink 109.6. Only issue is I believe there is no direct linux port of 109.6. Only option is to try and emulate the 109.6 version on linux systems.

If linux support can somehow be added to 109.[x], I would defeinitely say this should be the way forward. If not, maybe a 108.[x] version of freedink might be best, so everyone can enjoy it, including linux users. By the sounds of what you are saying @DreamMaster, it sounds as though the work you would do on this would make it functional on several operating systems, if this is the case, I believe the latest 109.[x] is the way to go.

This is my opinion. Either way, this is good news.

I'll likely start either when my real-life work settles down a bit and I get my belated holidays, or in a month or so if it looks like my holidays will be delayed.

No worries. We're just glad to have Dink fixed Take as much time as you need. We will be here on the forum and the discord server if you need help with anything dink related!