WinDinkedit
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- Author(s): Gary Hertel, WC
- Categories: Development, Utility
- Downloads: 237
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This is a very powerful editor for Dink. It has numerous advantages over DinkEdit and only looses out in a couple of areas.
Advantages: It is windows based, you can scroll between screens easily. You can copy, paste and more importantly delete screens easily. Sprite editing and placement has several advantages such as a properties screen that showcases standard information in once glance – I find this very useful in writing scripts – the ability to edit scripts while using the editor and thus you can have the screen/sprite the script applies to visible on one side while writing the script on the other.
You can toggle between default sprites being hard or non-hard. You can edit a sprites hardness faster in WinDinkEdit than in DinkEdit.
Hardness copying and pasting is a dream. The ability to multiple select tiles makes this so much faster than DinkEdit. And don’t forget to try the Hardness Polygon tool (press H for hardness mode and then hold down the SHIFT key and click four points to define the shape) – it used to crash WDE, but now doesn’t and is a great starting point for making hardness for large irregular sprites like houses etc.
Viewing tile sets is better as you can see more than one at a time.
If you unzip the whole package it includes a skeleton DMOD. This is then used as the basis to create new DMODs within the program.
The list goes on and on.
If you want to learn how to use it, read the readme file first – then if you still like to have screen prompts go to the options menu (under settings) and turn on the show help text and other info.
Low points:
The ability to place sprites at the edge of screen or off screen is not great. Accessing sprites that are under other sprites can be tricky. This is where DinkEdit’s cycle mode of selecting sprites (using keys) is good.
Doesn’t appear to have that may customisable options regarding saving and playing DMODs.
I have found this program to run really slow on huge epics - but the readme suggests using 16 bit mode instead of 32 bit mode to conteract this, and turning off the sprite info hover mode. I’ve tried this and it seems to help a lot. The full test would be to do a new epic with this tool and see what happens with months of constant use. I just wish it’d work fast in 32 bit mode as I don’t like changing modes just for one application.
There is something called set warp end, which I’m not sure how it works exactly.
The default hardness in the skeleton version was missing, I ended up copying the hard.dat rewrite of Dan’s into my new mode to get the hardness to shop up.
Actual editing of hardness for certain tiles is still an area which requires experimentation, although once you try a few things out it becomes clearer what you have to do. I still think you should read mimifish’s tutorial on hardness editing first to get a hold of the concepts.
Other things that could help is a button which launches dink.ini in wordpad (not notepad as this file gets large when you start adding lots of new graphics)
The hardness editing of sprite window could do with the option of zooming in on the sprite.
Overall 9.5 out of 10.0
Advantages: It is windows based, you can scroll between screens easily. You can copy, paste and more importantly delete screens easily. Sprite editing and placement has several advantages such as a properties screen that showcases standard information in once glance – I find this very useful in writing scripts – the ability to edit scripts while using the editor and thus you can have the screen/sprite the script applies to visible on one side while writing the script on the other.
You can toggle between default sprites being hard or non-hard. You can edit a sprites hardness faster in WinDinkEdit than in DinkEdit.
Hardness copying and pasting is a dream. The ability to multiple select tiles makes this so much faster than DinkEdit. And don’t forget to try the Hardness Polygon tool (press H for hardness mode and then hold down the SHIFT key and click four points to define the shape) – it used to crash WDE, but now doesn’t and is a great starting point for making hardness for large irregular sprites like houses etc.
Viewing tile sets is better as you can see more than one at a time.
If you unzip the whole package it includes a skeleton DMOD. This is then used as the basis to create new DMODs within the program.
The list goes on and on.
If you want to learn how to use it, read the readme file first – then if you still like to have screen prompts go to the options menu (under settings) and turn on the show help text and other info.
Low points:
The ability to place sprites at the edge of screen or off screen is not great. Accessing sprites that are under other sprites can be tricky. This is where DinkEdit’s cycle mode of selecting sprites (using keys) is good.
Doesn’t appear to have that may customisable options regarding saving and playing DMODs.
I have found this program to run really slow on huge epics - but the readme suggests using 16 bit mode instead of 32 bit mode to conteract this, and turning off the sprite info hover mode. I’ve tried this and it seems to help a lot. The full test would be to do a new epic with this tool and see what happens with months of constant use. I just wish it’d work fast in 32 bit mode as I don’t like changing modes just for one application.
There is something called set warp end, which I’m not sure how it works exactly.
The default hardness in the skeleton version was missing, I ended up copying the hard.dat rewrite of Dan’s into my new mode to get the hardness to shop up.
Actual editing of hardness for certain tiles is still an area which requires experimentation, although once you try a few things out it becomes clearer what you have to do. I still think you should read mimifish’s tutorial on hardness editing first to get a hold of the concepts.
Other things that could help is a button which launches dink.ini in wordpad (not notepad as this file gets large when you start adding lots of new graphics)
The hardness editing of sprite window could do with the option of zooming in on the sprite.
Overall 9.5 out of 10.0
