The Dink Network

I was in middle school when I discovered Dink in 2007. Those were exciting times. I had had my very own personal computer for about a year, having used my parents' ones since 1994. It was an old Pentium 3, a Dell, which served me quite well for some years. This was just before I started learning C programming. It was after me tinkering with old hardware quite a lot, and after getting my hands dirty scripting with MS-DOS batch files, too.

Those were also the times I began flirting with Linux, mostly in the form of Feather Linux, then Ubuntu and Fedora Core.

High school was a big, but more boring and bothersome than hard transition. Coming out of the closet publicly while being an introvert who was just learning to become more open toward the world made things bothersome -- some people seemed hell-bent on trying to annoy me and on attempting to exploit my naivety. The curriculum made things boring initially, forcing, among other things, Pascal programming down my throat -- which, given my already not-too-shabby knowledge of C, was more tedious than educational.

I dispelled my boredom by taking up C#, which introduced me to the object-oriented paradigm, and taught me some other very useful concepts, too. My happiness surged suddenly, when, at the end of a particularly depressive period, I realized that I can simply ignore the brainless riff-raff seeking to make me miserable -- and, even better, I can take my revenge by always smiling and being cheerful.

My ability to handle people slowly started to increase -- and seems to be increasing to this day.

I was in my senior year when I updated WinDinkEdit Plus to version 2 in 2012. That was the project that kick-started my journey into the lands of C++. I had been eyeing C++ for a long time -- since before I started with C#, even -- but was always too scared to start learning it. Exploring the 15000 lines-of-code source of WDE+ proved to be quite the handful in the beginning. I was still in my junior year when I started -- March 2011 --, but I got so annoyed with the thing that I abandoned it after about a month or two. I took a few more shots in June and July, and then really got into it in November, not stopping until I had released 4 major revisions, the last of them in March 2012.

Then college came.

The only one of my expectations about college that turned out to be true is that it was completely different from high school. The people turned out to be on the orders of magnitude more mature, sane and open-minded than the ones in high school. The curriculum was another story. Having to continuously study felt constraining, and drained my mental reserves. Working in the summertime and not having time to recharge also took a serious toll. Now I have an electrical engineering degree, with a final score of 98%. At the same time, I can't help feeling that the institution wasted an inexcusable amount of my time. And that is because during those four years I didn't have a single serious project of my own, and I played far fewer games than ever before.

Good things happened, too. I am overjoyed that I could meet the amazing people that I have. Having founded two real friendships is also a new record for me (my previous best being one true friendship in high school, zero before that). I switched to Linux full-time -- using Windows only for the occasional gaming session -- and learned its command line interface to an acceptable degree. I got to live in a foreign country for a few months, and I even got to attend CppCon once, taking my first trip to America!

What the future holds, no one knows. I can only hope to continue to be a happy gamer, to live up to my title of engineer, and to be able to advance my skillset to the point where I can contribute something useful to the world of programming.

P.S. Here are some arbitrary facts about me:
- I like cats;
- my distrust of dogs seems to be growing slowly but steadily with the passing of years;
- I like smart people;
- people who don't use their brains annoy me greatly;
- while the range of music you can find on my computer is quite diverse (pop, country, classical, rap, electronic, you name it), the only genre that I keep coming back to seems to be rock, mostly in its metal-containing variants;
- I like freedom;
- ideologies that strive to restrict freedom annoy me greatly (but, just as water is poisonous in large enough quantities, freedom can be, too);
- English is my third language, right after Hungarian and Romanian;
- I don't have a driver's license.

sk_RW@yahoo.com
Private Message

Whoops! This is what I get for not testing things properly.

The nohit bug will probably be an easy one to fix, but I wonder why the dragging is so slow. One thing I did was replace a function that loaded graphics from disk... hmm... I'll look into it. Oh, and 2.0 seems to do it much better.

Showing the sequence and frame in the status bar can be done easily enough.

I'm working on multi-sprite mode now, which could take a while to implement, so don't bet on 2.2 coming out tomorrow.

Oh, and just as an interesting fact: I started tinkering with this in June. I wasn't so good with C++ then, and the fact that the WDE+ source released here was actually that of a never-finished v1.3 (which made it awful) got on my nerves so much that I shelved the whole thing (after a month of work) until November! I was also discouraged by the fact that Chickenfist started working on his HJDinkEdit, and I thought that if he releases that before I release WDE+2, then I will never release WDE+2 and my work would have been for nothing. Then I got very bored one day in November, and HJDinkEdit seemed to be dead, so thought why not continue where I left off with my project! And as I'm getting to know C++, MFC and the source code better and better, features that would have seemed far-fetched a couple of months ago now actually look implementable.