Tile Hardness Tutorial ver. 1.0 (by mimifish)

Preface

This tutorial was first written in a dmod style file about a year ago (July, 2001). Before I finish the final readme file, I found out that there was another file by Wesley McElwee about tile hardness index. Although his file is not complete and some of the information was confusing or not quite accurate, I did not feel the urge to finish this project, especially as some of the subjects about tile hardness have been explained well in Paul's Hardness Help file.

I stopped doing any dmod projects for quite some time, and then decided to pick them up recently before I cannot do anything at all in the near future. Now I know more about tile hardness, and since nobody else has released anything about it besides those 2 old files, I decided to finish this tutorial. Since I felt that the dmod style file was difficult to use and the size of the file was unreasonably huge for a simple tutorial (more than 11 MB uncompressed, as I redrew all 41 tile screens with tile index number on each square with non-zero index number on top of the original tile screens), I decided to rewrite the whole file using html file. For an html file, this file is still quite large, but it is still much smaller than a dmod type file.

In this file, I will assume that you have at least a basic idea about how to make a dmod, and most of the procedures described in this file are for DinkEdit only unless it says otherwise, since the current version (0.93) of WinDinkEdit does not support any tile hardness editing.

I will repeat some of the information that was provided in Paul's Hardness Help file, but I will not discuss anything about sprite hardbox in this document.

Since I learned quite a lot of things from those 2 files about tile hardness, I would like to give credits to Paul Plsika and Wesley McElwee for their pioneer works about tile hardness. Extra thanks to Paul for his generous help of proofreading this file. I would also like to thank Simon Klaebe for encouraging me to finish this file and betatesting this file. I made some changes based on Simon's recommendations. Of course, a thanks to all people in RtSoft's for giving us Dink Smallwood and Redink1 for his excellent job for keeping Dink Smallwood alive. If you find this file useful, that will be the best reward for me.

Warning...

Although editing tile hardness is NOT as buggy as I thought, it is still tricky and can mess up your dmod easily. So please backup your dmod before trying it, or at least backup your map.dat and hard.dat files. And sorry, I will not take any responsibility for any damage toward to your dmod or computer caused by the use of this tutorial. ;)

Introduction

A map.dat file of a dmod can contain as many as 768 (32 x 24) screens, and each screen is 600 x 400 (in pixels) in dimension. The map screen (or background in a dmod) is made from 50 x 50 (in pixels) tile squares. There are 41 different tile sets and each set can be as large as 600 x 400, i.e. you can have 96 tiles in one set, and 3936 different tile squares in total. Each tile square has a number attached to it as well. For example, the first tile set has the numbers run from 0 to 107, and the 2nd set has numbers from 128 to 235 for its tiles...( Note: In fact I found out that you can even use 600 x 450 pixel image for a tile set so that you can have 12 extra tile squares on each set. Those extra 12 tiles have their designated numbers, too. However this might cause some trouble in WinDinkEdit since WDE only has 600 x 400 pixels for each tile set.)

Each tile square can be assigned a specific hardness index so that the hardness can be attached when you use that tile square. However, there are only 800 different tile hardness indexes numbered from 0 to 799. (In WinDinkEdit, the number is from 1 to 800.) Besides zero, each index number (from 1 to 799) can only be assigned at most once to a specific tile square (some of them cannot be assigned to tile squares at all). And to my knowledge, once an index was assigned to a certain tile square, you can neither cancel it nor re-use it for other tile square. Most of the tile squares have index 0 (or 1 if you use WinDinkEdit).

You can know the tile hardness index of any particular tile square by doing the following steps: First, in tile mode, you go to tile selection mode (Press 1 through 0, or Shift-1 through Shift-0, or Ctrl-1 through Ctrl-0, or Alt-1 through Alt-0, or Alt-` to bring up a particular tile set screen.) and select the tile square you want by pressing Enter. That would bring you back to tile mode. Now move the cursor square to where you want the tile to be copied, and then press S. Then go to tile hardness editing mode by pressing H. Press Delete key to remove possible external hardness index pasted on this particular screen square, then press C. The default index number of that particular tile square now can be read from the end of the first line of help text near the lower right corner of your computer screen.

There are 3 (or 4) different types of tile hardness: no hardness, normal hardness which blocks everything, and low hardness which can allow flying objects to pass through but block walking sprites. There is another hardness that would show different color on hardness editing mode screen, however as far as I understand it works exactly the same as the normal hardness.

A side note here, you can also change the look of the appearance of the DinkEdit by changing the eSplash.bmp and S??.bmp files in the main Dink or your dmod's tiles subdirectory. One of the nice example is Paul Pliska's DinkEdit Skin 1. Aside from the different look, the new skin might make it easier for certain backgrounds to see different hardness settings.

I will cover the following content about tile hardness: 1) Copy and paste a hardness on a map screen to overwrite the default hardness; 2) Edit tile hardness for a certain index; 3) Add a tile hardness index permanently. Then I will tabulate the hardness index for the original Dink Smallwood hard.dat file.

Copy and paste a hardness on a map screen to overwrite the default hardness

This is basically straightforward; not as tricky as the other parts about tile hardness. In tile mode, you simply press H to enter the tile-hardness-editing mode. In this mode, all hardness will be shown on the screen with different color. Light yellow or purple indicates normal hardness (including sprite hardboxes), blue for soft-hardness, and red for warp sprite. It is the same as when you press and hold Spacebar while in tile mode or sprite mode, but here you do not need to hold H key.

Now you can copy any hardness by moving the square cursor to the tile square with the hardness that you want to copy and pressing C. Then you can move the cursor to where you want this hardness to be applied, and press S. You can choose other hardness by cycling the index with [ and ]. You can ONLY see the shape of normal hardness (light yellow) in the copied hardness on your cursor. I know it is pain since you can only see the low hardness on the screen after you paste the hardness. Blame Seth!

This mode is a little buggy. If you move your cursor too fast or too far down, the alignment of the cursor square would be off (not overlapping any tile square on the screen). This usually is a harmless pain, and can be realigned by moving the cursor to the upper-left corner, although in some screens this trick might not work. I believe that you should be able to tell which tile hardness it represents even if the alignment cannot be fixed.

Fortunately, now we have WinDinkEdit. Although current WinDinkEdit (ver. 0.93) cannot do any tile hardness editing, it can do hardness copy much easier. Simply go to HardBox mode (press H), and then press E to go to the tile hardness indexes screen. All hardness can be seen using PageUp and PageDown keys. Here you can choose any hardness from the 800 indexes by simply one mouse click, and you can see both normal hardness and soft-hardness. Then it would bring you back to the map screen. Move you mouse to the tile you want the hardness to be applied, and press S.

Edit tile hardness for a certain index

This part is tricky, so do it very carefully.

You can edit tile hardness in 3 different places:

1. In tile mode

This part is tricky, and permanent damage can be done easily. In this tile mode, you can use the arrow keys to get to different tile squares on the map screen. If you decide to edit the hardness associated with any particular tile square, press "Enter" while the cursor square is on that tile square. This would bring up a window (450 x 450 in pixels) that is a blown-up picture of the tile square showing the current hardness. In the upper-left corner is a white square. That's the cursor as well as the hardness stroke you will use. You can move it with the arrow keys pixel by pixel, but it usually tends to move too fast (2 pixels instead of 1) and ctrl doesn't affect it. So if you want to move your cursor to a specific location, you might need to move the cursor back and forth a few times before it reaches the desired location. Just be patient. You can change the size and the shape of the hardness stroke by holding Shift and using Arrow keys. You can change the hardness stroke as small as a 1 x 1 or as large as an 8 x 8. To change the hardness of any pixel in the tile square, you need to use the keys Z, X and A. Z makes a pixel normal hard, X removes its hardness and A makes it low hard. Hard pixels are shaded red, and low hard pixels are shaded blue. (You can also press S to make pixels orange in the blown-up picture which shows up on the normal hardness view screen as violet and seems to work exactly the same as normal hardness.) When you finished the tile editing, press Enter or ESC to go back to tile mode.

Do I say tricky? Oh yes. You need to be careful about the following things:

1. If that particular tile have a zero index, press Enter would assign an unused index to that tile square permanently if there is an unused index number available. There are only a few unused index numbers you can use to assign to a tile square if you use the original Dink hard.dat. I noticed that the hard.dat file of Skelton_B was modified from the original hard.dat, and therefore it has even less unused hardness index number. After all unused index numbers were used up, press Enter on a zero-index tile will let you edit the hardness of zero index. In a normal dmod: NEVER EDIT ZERO INDEX HARDNESS, OR YOU WILL HAVE DISASTROUS HARDNESS NIGHTMARE. You cannot add hardness to the left-upper corner tile square (Tile square No. 0) of the 1st tile set. Press Enter on that tile won't do anything.
2. If you press Enter on a tile square where you earlier pasted another hardness to replace the default hardness of that tile square, the hardness you will edit is the original hardness associated with that tile square, not the one you pasted there. If that tile square has zero index, it will have the same result as described above.

Since it is very easy to accidentally press Enter in tile mode (I know I did it all the time), you might waste a lot of unused tile hardness index numbers on the tile squares that you never intend to add hardness for. Once you assigned an index number to a tile square, you cannot remove it! Seth should assign other key for this function to prevent such a bad luck from happening.

2. In tile selction mode

This is where you select tile. A particular tile set screen would be brought up. You can basically do exactly the same thing as in tile mode except you need to press Spacebar instead of Enter to initiate the editing procedure. The same tricky part applies here as well.
3. In tile hardness editing mode

This is where you can copy and paste hardness to any tile square. In tile mode, press H and you will be brought into the tile-hardness-editing mode. You can edit tile hardness here as well. Simply press Enter and you can edit hardness using the keys Z, X, S and A described above.
Is this part tricky, too? Oh yes! In this mode, the hardness you edit is not necessary the hardness index of that particular tile square where you press Enter. The hardness you are going to edit is the one in the memory buffer that you just copied. You can know which hardness index you will edit by looking at the right-lower corner of screen. There is a number in the end of the first line of the help text. That is the index number you will edit if you press Enter. It does not matter which tile square your cursor box is at.
Confusing? Yes, but this is the only place to modify the hardness of some indexes that are NOT assigned to any tile squares. Many of those indexes have hardness of a simple geometrical shape that you might find useful sometimes.

Add a tile hardness index permanently to a tile square with zero index

As I said in the previous section, you can add an unused index to a tile square that has a default zero index. Simply press Enter in tile mode screen or Spacebar in tile selction mode screen. There are only very limited unused index numbers left in the original Dink's hard.dat file. The numbers are from 640 to 689, 727 to 731, 741, and 742. They would be assigned automatically by DinkEdit in the ascending order. Since only 57 indexes are available, use them wisely. Since Skeleton_B wasted most of the unused index numbers (only 13 left), I would suggest dmod authors at least to replace the hard.dat file of Skelton_B with the hard.dat from original Dink.

Apparently, there are a few indexes that have been assigned to certain tile squares (some grass and floor tiles, for example) in the original Dink hard.dat that do not need any hardness. However, I did not find any way to remove the assignment within DinkEdit, and therefore those tile hardness indexes are wasted!

There are 3 possible ways to fix this problem as I can think of. The first one is to change the tile sets (Ts??.bmp files) by moving those tile squares with nonzero indexed to other black tile squares with zero-index, then you can use those wasted indexes or add new tile squares that need hardness assignment. I used this trick in one of my dmods. The only problem is that most of those wasted indexes were scatterred everywhere in different tile sets, so you need to break the existing Ts??.bmp tile sets in pieces. It can be done, but the sight of those tile sets would be ugly. The other way is a hard way. You can re-assign ALL hardness index by deleting the hard.dat! Once you use DinkEdit to edit the dmod without a hard.dat file in its folder, a hard.dat file will be automatically created and every tile square has zero index. So you can reassign the hardness index starting from 1 to the tile you want to have hardness and no more wasted hardness index. However this is a huge job since you need to re-draw all hardness from scratch, and I do not think people would like to do it this way. It would be good for people who want to completely change the tile sets though. (P.S. I am thinking to make a skelton without wasted hardness index, but it might take more than 40 hours to do so, and people might not appreciate it that much. ;p) The final solution requires a great programing skill. You need to write a separate program to manually remove the assignment of those tile squares that do not need non-zero indexes. I sincerely hope someone can do this.

As SimonK pointed out, you can practice your tile hardness editing skills by setting up a new dmod folder without hard.dat. Then you can play with all possible editing tricks before you really start to mess around the tile hardness of your dmod.

Tile Hardness Index

The following tables are the tile hardness indexes used in the 41 tile sets in the original Dink hard.dat. Some of the tile sets (No. 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 21, 22, and 23) do not have any nonzero-hardness-index tile squares, so they will not be included in the tables.

Index numbers from 1 to 638 (except for 260) were assigned to tile squares in original Dink's hard.dat file. The numbers that can be assigned by dmod authors to tile squares are from 640 to 689, 727 to 731, 741, and 742. 0 is the default number of most tile squares that were not assigned with nonzero indexes. It seemed that Seth reserved certain index numbers for other use. They are 260, 639, 690 to 726, 732 to 740, and 743 to 799. Many of them have hardness. I am not quite sure why they were left out and cannot be assigned to tile squares. Lots of hardness of simple geometric shapes can be found in the largest indexes (743 to 799), and they are usually useful for shaping up the boundaries of buildings.

In order to show clearly the different uses of the tile hardness indexes in different tile squares, I tabulated each tile set with a table instead of just showed the tile set screen image with index numbers written on it. The background and the numbers of different colors in the table indicate different situations as followed:

You can click the link at each Tile set number to see how the tile hardness indexes were assigned on each original Dink tile set.

Tile sets from No. 10 to No. 13 do not have any nonzero hardness index in any tile square. So I am not going to tabulate them.

Tile set No. 18 does not have any nonzero hardness index in any tile square. So I am not going to tabulate it as well.

Tile sets from No. 20 to No. 23 do not have any nonzero hardness index in any tile square. So I am not going to tabulate them.