The Dink Network

I must say, this is a huge improvement over the original hard.dat. Seth and the team did a horrible job when they wrote theirs. Dan has gone and fixed that by completely rewriting the hard.dat file. It took him quite a while, but it was worth it. Dan's version is much neater and easier to comprehende. The old hardness didn't reuse any of the hard tiles. This version does. Now that it reuses quite a few tiles, it leavs a lot more tiles for you to mess around with and to edit yourself.

It also contains a .bmp file showing all the hardness tiles but the colours used are a little weird and it's hard to tell one tile from another. It also contains special hard tiles that you can use for your houses. Dan made some special tiles for the hardness of your houses. It makes making hard houses much easier.

Another good thing about this file is that instead of just outlining the hardness, it fills it all in. With the old hardness, there were quite a few hardness cracks you could manage to slip through. Since Dan filled the inside of the hardness, you can't slip through any cracks. Though, since the water is all filled in as blue hardness, if you were wanting to be like Simon Klaebe and have boating or Dink walking on water, then this isn't really the way to go. Unless you're patient enough to just delete all the hardness of the water square by square.

So, if you're making a d-mod and you're sick of the horrible hardness and all, then download this file. You won't be dissapointed!

8.5 out of 10

Magnificient! A vast improvement over the original, which was complete crap. The hardness from the original game was poor at best, while the hardness from the rewrite is good.

Attempt: 7.0: It could do with a little improvement yet.

Concept: 9.0: A good idea.

Overall: 8.0: A large improvement over the original, which I would give 5.0, if that.

This file is a rewrite of the hardness quide that the tiles use. In many ways it is a huge improvement. As for installing, just unzip it into your main directory.

There are some things that can be improved: the hardness around the corners of the hills and the ocean to grass tiles doesn't line up smoothly. This is because the little island of green in the sea has straight edges while the little island of sea in the green has curved. But when you are mapping and doing corners you will need to combine these two areas often.

The demarcation between blue hardness and white hardness in the mountains is interesting but will mean any missile sprite fired from the top of the mountain will travel over the blue stuff and then impact on the join to the white hardness and thus never hit the bottom of the mountain.

If you make a DMOD that travels on what you will need to set the sprite (be it a boat or a swimming Dink) to flying mode as all the sea is blue hardness. Yet you may not want this option.

Those things aside it is a good file and far more workable and advantageous than the original.

8 out of 10

2 words. Hell yes. When Seth and crew wrote Dink Smallwood the wrote the hard.dat in a rush, and therefore left a bunch of crap, and poorly coded hardness in it. Redink has rewrote the hard.dat and optimized it so it's much prettier and better to use in your d-mods. In my personal opinion after looking over this, all d-mod makers should use this in their d-mods. It will make d-mods much neater, and possibly easier to make (as far as hardness).

Score 9.0 (I don't think the file could get any better, and it's a valueable reasource)