[Bug-freedink] Re: [OT] Made a small blog post about GNU Freedink

[Sylvain Beucler]

Hi,

> Couple of things you could do.
> 
> a. Make the font for Dfarc a bit bigger on both the sites

I put it in bold.  Probably we can make the FreeDink components list a
bit clearer for the newcomer.


> and perhaps have same versioning system so if you release firedink
> 2009.08.28 then also release Dfarc 2009.08.28 so people know these
> are together.

But, they are developped independently.


> b. Write about what Dfarc actually does which 7-zip doesn't do for
> this specific program.

Well nothing, except it renames .tar.bz2 to .dmod (so .dmod can be
associated to the front-end).  Before DFArc people just unzipped the
dmods directly.

I see that DFArc could benefit from a page just for itself at
freedink.org.

Can anobody submit a good screenshot at
http://screenshots.debian.net/package/freedink-dfarc ?

Preferrably showing off .dmod files in Nautilus, a good list of
installed D-Mods, and the latest version of DFArc3?

This one is a bit old:
http://www.freedink.org/screenshots/freedink-1.08_2008-07-31.png


> Most of the images in the dmods as well as the original dink smallwood
> are stored in .bmp format (see specifically the dink/tiles directory
> as well as /Addmods/int/graphics directory)
> 
> Wouldn't it be space and performance efficient if instead of .bmp you
> used .png ?

> I would also be interested to know what Sylvain has to say about this.

I already studied it :)

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freedink/freedink-data.git/tree/doc/dirff.txt
http://www.dinknetwork.com/forum.cgi?MID=98085#101719

My conclusion is: no :)


> I understand the bit about having constraint.The point is who is going
> to be your target audience, the hard-core gamer or hard-core gamer +
> casual gamers. The casual gamer always like convenience over hard. Say
> playing something like 5-10 minutes on the tea-break and stuff like
> that. If you implement auto-save it can just get better.
> 
> Although you do raise a valid point about compatibility with older engines :(

There's no problem of compatibility AFAICS (older engines won't know
this savegame format, but then just use FreeDink :)).

It's just not trivial to implement, since you need to put all the
engine in the exact same state, which normal savegames only partially
do.

I considered doing it but I had other priorities, so it's a good idea
but I don't plan to work on it right now myself.

-- 
Sylvain