The Dink Network

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!