The Dink Network

Dink Smallwood v1.08 Beta 2

November 5th 2005, 03:10 PM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
Full Install Beta 2 (15.2 MB)

Patch for v1.06, v1.07, or v1.08 Beta 2 (1.2 MB)

Fixes:
  • Added keyboard commands to the Dink Smallwood dmod.diz (Seth)
  • Added savebot to Stonebrook (Seth)
  • Added pickup sound to alk tree nuts (Tal)
  • Changed full-screen true-color mode to support 32, 24, or 16 bit color mode, and report the correct color depth on error (Carrie)
  • Fixed bug where scripts attached to sprite 1000 acted very funny, which prevented Pilgrim's Quest from working (SimonK)
  • dink.exe will terminate if a D-Mod is not found, before it stayed in memory)
  • Removed list of e-mail addresses from credits.txt (Seth)
  • Added "File-Download D-Mods" menu item to DFArc2 (Seth).
  • Reworded uninstall: "Uninstall Selected D-Mod".
  • Added "Edit-Browse Selected D-Mod Directory" menu item.
  • Added "Help-Walkthroughs and Guides" menu item, which goes to The Dink Solutions.
  • Added "Help-Forums" menu item, which goes to the forums.
  • Added introduction explaining the purpose of the frontend and what D-Mods are (Seth).
  • The Edit and Package buttons are hidden by default, and the user must check a checkbox in the options menu to display them.
  • Clicking the Edit button will prompt a warning until they go through with editing a D-Mod (Seth)
  • The Package dialog now warns that it should only be used if you are a developer (Seth)
  • An option is provided to close DFArc2 when playing a D-Mod (Tal).
  • Expanded status-bar text to show full-path of D-Mod.
  • The main game uninstall will allow you to save your save games (Seth).
  • Added uninstall icon to start menu (Seth).
  • Added credits icon to start menu (Seth).
  • Added option to create shortcut on desktop.
  • Will always use the 'Dink Smallwood' start menu folder.
  • Added some credits to whatsnew.txt (Seth).
  • Replaced intro.wav with one compatible with Dink (Striker).
Known problems:

Christiaan's D-Mod: graphical glitches

Alliance Command: in true-color mode, sprites that do not have the dink palette have white backgrounds.

Stone of Balance: some sprites have black backgrounds.

Stone of Balance: crash when talk to guy guarding the pigs.

Simeon: windowed mode will flash full-screen, then not work.

DaVince: doesn't work on Windows 98, closes.
November 5th 2005, 03:17 PM
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Glennglenn
Peasant He/Him Norway
GlennGlenn doesn't want a custom title. 
It says that the file cannot be found
November 5th 2005, 03:54 PM
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Simeon
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Any fool can use a computer. Many do. 
As a suggestion; I'd swap the positions of the Cancel and Okay/Install/Package buttons in DFArc2, to keep it similar (and familiar) with the Windows OS, I tend to automatically go to the left one after changing something.

The windowed problem's still there when I did the full install. When I started it in debug mode, the debug.txt file contained only 1 line: "Dink: Dir is now dink" so at some point after that it goes wrong. But then, it works fine with the dink108.exe release before the Beta 1 release so if nothing in the code has changed.. After it goes from fullscreen to windowed, the window doesn't really have the WinXP theme but more like, Win98-look.. and the cpu goes to 100% like as if it's stuck in a endless loop or something.
November 5th 2005, 04:07 PM
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Glennglenn
Peasant He/Him Norway
GlennGlenn doesn't want a custom title. 
I haven't played Victim Of Life for a long time, but I think it got messed up in v1.08, or maybe I just have an old version... Let me try to download a version here from DinkNetwork and check. edit: Yup... I think this is doing something to the D-Mod, non of my caracters are talking and it can't be a bug I have overseen when I released it
November 5th 2005, 04:32 PM
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
Sorry dude - it is SOB not PQ with black bg and crashing on script of pig man. I'll download Beta 2 and start using that now...

This is fun

EDIT well when the file can be found I'll continue...
November 5th 2005, 05:02 PM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
Pfft, pesky people wanting files in order to beta test. Anyway, yeah, I screwed up the link to the patch, it should work now
November 5th 2005, 05:04 PM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
Simeon:

I'll probably change the buttons around, thanks.

And.. odd, thanks for the detail. The code has changed since the alpha, but I don't recall any changes the startup phase. I plan on incorporating some sort of error-detection in the next beta, so we'll be able to figure out why this is happening. Or maybe I'll find something like

if ( username == "Simeon" )
{
crashorz();
}
November 5th 2005, 05:45 PM
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Simeon
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Any fool can use a computer. Many do. 
And also:

bool bWindowedOnlyWorksCorrectlyWithVeryEarlyVersion = true

But the error detection should be helpful, that way it can indicate at what point the DirectDraw startup goes wrong.

Now that I think about it, it looks like it first starts in fullscreen and then does the windowed again, it could be that it's now trying to flip surfaces in windowed mode, which is not possible because it's no longer a flippable one (aka, it tries to flip like in fullscreen, but then the while loop (the one with the three ddrval checks) kicks in which would always fail, could explain the CPU 100% part). That's my current guess, but the error checking/detection would be helpful.

Still odd because others don't have it so the code should work ok as it is.
November 5th 2005, 08:32 PM
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
Is there any chance you could incorporate the "Save Game Editor of Justice" avility to display information regarding variables as a hot key within the actual Dink Engine - mid game?

November 6th 2005, 03:02 AM
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
Moving through SOB and found the following:

Playing windowed mode I found sometimes that on loading a game the magic would not be loaded or displayed in the status bar. This was an old Dink Engine bug I believe.

Also in SOB Land 2 the warp sprite on map 32 isn't working in windowed mode but does work in engine ver 1.07.

Onwards...
November 6th 2005, 03:59 AM
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Glennglenn
Peasant He/Him Norway
GlennGlenn doesn't want a custom title. 
I tested Victim Of Life, and it worked perfectly in v1.07
November 6th 2005, 06:57 AM
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Simeon
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Any fool can use a computer. Many do. 
Victim Of Life works perfectly in v1.08 as well, the script just happens to be buggy. Apart from the fact that you have freezes and unfreezes in odd places, you use the following construction:

int &karl = &karl;

to let a sprite say something - like say("aa", &karl); - but &karl isn't declared in that script and it isn't a global either (it's declared in a script that's attached to the screen which spawns the character). If it worked in v1.07, it would probably not work consistently as you rely on things beyond your control (if it worked, it would probably set the local variable &karl to the &karl one from the other script which is still in memory but you can't rely on that).
November 6th 2005, 07:06 AM
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Glennglenn
Peasant He/Him Norway
GlennGlenn doesn't want a custom title. 
Yeah, I guess the sctips are alitlet bit messed up But I will fix this when I have time or when my laziness goes away
November 6th 2005, 01:18 PM
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Seth done work on it? That's surprising. Also interesting that Carrie, simonK and Striker did some work on it too.

Except for hiding the buttons all of these changes are cool. I'll test from the beginning and see if all of the problems I had still occur (including 1 or 2 ones).
November 6th 2005, 02:08 PM
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Tal
Noble He/Him United States
Super Sexy Tal Pal 
They made the suggestions. redink1's implementing pretty much everything at this point.
November 6th 2005, 02:39 PM
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metatarasal
Bard He/Him Netherlands
I object 
I thought The Dink Solutions was largly abandoned... What's the use of putting in a link then?
November 6th 2005, 03:20 PM
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Tal
Noble He/Him United States
Super Sexy Tal Pal 
It still exists, at least. Whenever Dukie resurfaces as someone active, or at least hands over some control to someone who can update regularly, then its beneficial nature will improve!
November 6th 2005, 05:46 PM
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Oh, okay.
November 8th 2005, 06:16 AM
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
Okay - I think the hardness sometimes disappears in windowed mode. This is why the warp sprite wasn't working for me one day, and then working the next. I just had the hardness disappear completely in the third land in SOB - shut down and fired up 1.07 and it was there. Went back to windowed mode and hardness was back. What's causing this I dunno... as I can't seem to repeat it except by accident at this stage.
November 8th 2005, 09:41 AM
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greg1459
Ghost They/Them
 
Is there any way yet to get past the pig man in SOB with this new beta? I am stuck there, and was just curious if there was a fix or if I should move on to another Dmod.

Thanks
November 8th 2005, 04:32 PM
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
You don't really need the pigman, unless you have used up all the green mushrooms that you can find in the vineyard. You need 6 green mushrooms to give to the big pig to get the skull from the guy in the bar, so you can give it to the goblin in the cave and get the Hammer of Truth.
November 8th 2005, 05:21 PM
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Greg1459
Ghost They/Them
 
Haha I never even tried to just talk to the pig I thought you had to go through that guy. Thanks for the help.
November 8th 2005, 08:02 PM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
SimonK (general reply to all of your posts):

Hmm... yeah, additional debug functionality would be very cool, and I think I'll add some way to view such information.

Right now I'm adding a mini-console. After triggering a DinkC command (like with a key-?.c script), you'll be able to type anything, and hitting enter will run that as a DinkC command. So you could type something like:

say_stop("&save_x &save_y", 1);

And Dink would say that.

I'll look into the no-magic-on-load bug too. Edit: wait, might this be a problem with draw_status, where the magic bar appears after you arm a weapon? You could fix that with adding draw_status to the savebot's main... but yeah, I guess it should be fixed in the engine as well.

Hardness disappearing... that's sort of odd. I did make a change so sp_move_nohard actually works... you didn't use that in any of the SOB scripts, did you?
November 8th 2005, 11:30 PM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
The console is starting to get extremely powerful. It can handle the common aspects of DinkC like local variables, global variables, functions, and assignments (except creating procedures, loops, if statments, or choice commands) in real-time. You could create a Dink Goes Boating-style D-Mod where the player could actually type in DinkC commands.
November 9th 2005, 02:36 AM
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Sounds interesting.

Also I would like to suggest that DFArc 2 have some way to allow the user to choose WinDinkedit instead of Dinkedit (perhaps a setting in options that makes the edit button open WinDinkedit instead).
November 9th 2005, 06:32 AM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
*kazzam*

Done. I completed that so fast its implementation went back in time.

The Options window allows you to choose which .exe file to use to run Dink or the editor. Just install Windinkedit in the Dink directory, and it appears as an option.
November 9th 2005, 07:44 PM
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Cool thanks.
November 10th 2005, 01:38 AM
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
Re sp_move_nohard() - no I don't recall using that at all in SOB... haven't had time to test much in Story 4 - but haven't come across anything new that is an engine bug yet - tweaking a couple of scripts to improve them... but that's just author bugs...

EDIT: Okay found something weird. Hardness on a tile has changed on the map. Somehow in Story 4 in the Forest of Wickedness the hardness of a vertical blue line has appeared on alternate green moss/grass tiles. This was certainly not there before. I've gone and fixed it on my map for the moment - but I'm wondering if the hardness tile indicies have been altered somehow in the 1.08 version?
November 11th 2005, 08:57 AM
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- When I enter fullscreen mode I get the screen flickering. Also Dink flickers when I play in fullscreen mode. Both sets of flickering are fast. This flickering does not occur in Window mode. I saw this bug in Beta 1 too.

- Also I found a fix for the bug with my dmod. Instead of using the Start-#.c files from the skeleton dmod with WinDinkedit I used the Start-#.c files from skeletom whatever. I advise that others who make a new dmod when they have 1.08 to do the same.
November 11th 2005, 02:34 PM
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DaVince
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Olde Time Dinkere 
Hm, beta 2 isn't out yet? Or am I missing something?
November 11th 2005, 06:42 PM
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Tal
Ghost They/Them
 
It's out and can be downloaded from the links in the start of this thread. The links are a tad misleading, though, as they say "Beta 1".. might've been copy-pasted.
November 11th 2005, 06:43 PM
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Tal
Noble He/Him United States
Super Sexy Tal Pal 
Smoop.
November 11th 2005, 07:02 PM
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
Okay that hardness tile error may be my doing - I've got a saftely backup of SOB which I've opened with WindDinkEdit and it is fine, have played a bit in the forest of Wickedness with ver 1.08 and all is fine with the map... So maybe I stuffed up the tile hardness somehow.
November 13th 2005, 04:34 AM
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None of the other bugs I saw in Beta 1 occured in this version.
November 17th 2005, 09:34 AM
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Arik
Peasant He/Him
 
Does installing the beta onto a computer do anything that would affect a d-mod running under a seperate 1.07 installation?
November 17th 2005, 10:30 AM
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metatarasal
Bard He/Him Netherlands
I object 
Well the only thing I noted was that it automaticly changes dinksmallwood.ini in the WINDOWS folder.
November 17th 2005, 07:59 PM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
SimonK: fixed the no-hardness issue. It happened if you used move or move_stop to move Dink off the screen. I'm guessing that happens in Story 4 sometime?
November 18th 2005, 01:34 AM
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metatarasal
Bard He/Him Netherlands
I object 
Hey, I got that bug in The Scourger too... (The Scourger is my new DMOD, I just uploaded). I fixed it by letting Dink move to the edge of a screen and then doing a scripted screenchange.

Glad to here it's solved. (Makes my updates a little redundant, but still )
November 19th 2005, 07:40 PM
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
Yeah, it happens a few times in SOB... I move Dink off for cuts scenes - or sometimes I create a fake Dink and free/no draw the real one. It various...
November 20th 2005, 07:46 AM
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Simeon
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Any fool can use a computer. Many do. 
I dunno if this has been mentioned but in case a sprite is on top of an animated tile, the engine shows the scene correctly when you enter the screen but when it changes the tiles, the sprite is "under" the tiles and as such, not visible or partially visible. I saw this in The Scourger on screen 756 using the current 1.08 version.
November 20th 2005, 11:53 AM
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metatarasal
Bard He/Him Netherlands
I object 
Oh... I forgot... I noticed that when playing thinking that I would change that in the future, but I didn't. (Screen 756 isn't the only screen with that bug...)

So yeah, if that could be fixed in 1.08 that'd be nice.
November 20th 2005, 12:10 PM
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Simeon
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Any fool can use a computer. Many do. 
I know, the screennumber is just a way to indicate a place where the error occurs
November 20th 2005, 12:13 PM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
Are you referring to background sprites? It has always been like that... background sprites are drawn to the background as a tile, and in the case of animated tiles, they disappear because it re-draws the tiles.

It would be nice to fix this, but it is a tad complicated.
November 20th 2005, 12:44 PM
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Simeon
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Any fool can use a computer. Many do. 
Hmm, they do happen to be background sprites. In that case, we shouldn't use background tiles near animated ones Or just use normal tiles all the time and set the depth que to -1 for the ones that shouldn't be on top of anything.
November 20th 2005, 12:51 PM
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It's known as the pillbug carnage by the river -bug... Really.
November 23rd 2005, 12:06 PM
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Christiaan
Bard They/Them Netherlands
Lazy bum 
In Cloud Castle 2, with Dink 1.08 beta 2, full screen/32 bit there are a LOT of these graphical glitches. white squares around plants, walls slightly moved, so they look out of place, etc.
November 23rd 2005, 04:01 PM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
The 'walls slightly moved' problem has been fixed... should have posted about it, d'oh.

I shall get to work on fixing the black/white backgrounds on sprites soon.
November 23rd 2005, 06:21 PM
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Christiaan
Bard They/Them Netherlands
Lazy bum 
have been fixed? in what version?
November 23rd 2005, 07:09 PM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
Not in any officially released version, just my current build.
November 23rd 2005, 07:10 PM
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And idea when will that version be available for release?
November 23rd 2005, 08:47 PM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
Probably this weekend.
November 23rd 2005, 08:50 PM
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Cool! Will it be another beta or the final release?
November 24th 2005, 07:35 AM
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Arik
Peasant He/Him
 
Phew! I thought I might have done something incredibly stupid with the depth dots.

Regarding the (excellent) text colour command - how would you change the colour of the default yellow text? Or is this impossible? I'd like to take this into account on my d-mod that I'm never going to finish.
November 24th 2005, 08:44 AM
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DaVince
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Olde Time Dinkere 
DraconicDink: I think there will be a LOT more betas until the errors stop flowing into this topic.

@Arik: Font colours are VERY basic and to be found in every DinkC tutorial. just put `number before the text in every say command. Like `1 `2 `3 etc..
say_stop("`4You put it like this.", 1);
November 24th 2005, 08:53 AM
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Simeon
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Any fool can use a computer. Many do. 
I think you've misunderstood the question DaVince I have no doubt Arik knows how to change the colour in Dink, I think he wants to know how to change the default color of yellow using the new command: set_font_color(int colorindex, int red, int green, int blue) which Dan has added in v1.08 (and let the game remember the default color)
November 24th 2005, 09:51 AM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
Arik, I believe the default yellow is color 14, so yeah, just do something like set_font_color(14, 255, 0, 0);

And Draconic: the release this weekend will definately be a Beta. After that, assuming things are going well, I might release a release candidate, and if that turns out perfect, it will be the final release.
November 24th 2005, 11:17 AM
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Tal
Noble He/Him United States
Super Sexy Tal Pal 
If you've read through the beta additions and/or played CC2, perhaps you would've known that he definitely was not wondering how you change font colors the old-fashioned way. Great job, DaVince...
November 24th 2005, 01:22 PM
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Okay, coll. Thank you for answering my question. good work on 1.08 so far. It's a hell of a lot better than 1.07. Windowed mode is my favourite part of it, followed by true colour mode. We have the potential for some much better looking dmods and graphics now. I just hope people will take advantage of that. I know I would if I knew how to make graphics on the computer that didn't look like a five year old had drawn them.
November 25th 2005, 02:33 AM
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SimonK
Peasant He/Him Australia
 
Font color is cool...

I finally got a nice red... nice dark blue all happening in "SOB - the special edition" ...