AuthorTopic: Hackable pixel editors?  (Read 10509 times)

Offline questseeker

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Re: Hackable pixel editors?

Reply #20 on: August 04, 2017, 08:16:18 am
Just by reading Gimp's source code doesn't tell me it's the best. More like worst. Gimp has never been a number one choice for most artists, because it's buggy (crashes randomly) and slow, and is missing some basic features. Those are characteristic to open source projects which most are linux based.
As I said, Linux easily beats Windows for development infrastructure. That doesn't mean devs produce complete software (cause they are volunteers, and work on what is fun) - it means developing *is easy and reasonably fun*.  It means Windows-specific bugs hang around because no-one wants to bother with developing on Windows.
It also usually means that the Windows instructions are more complicated because the infrastructure has to be installed, rather than being there by default.

You believe you disagree, but you are actually discussing two different things. Having better, or at least more supported, development tools on Linux, doesn't automatically mean that Linux software or open source software in general is good.
GIMP suffers from inadequate or dated technical choices (GTK+, complex plugin interface, complex and low bit depth image data structures, etc.) regardless of the platform and is as horribly difficult to compile and develop on Windows as other software of similar complexity.

Offline yrizoud

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Re: Hackable pixel editors?

Reply #21 on: August 04, 2017, 08:52:18 am
Krice, the GIMP is certainly too big to easily get into.
It's certainly too much of a general-purpose image editing suite to become a good pixel art editor.
It's well-known to be very Linux-centric, so don't imagine it can easily become Windows-friendly.
So can you please accept that it doesn't fit any of your needs ? Thank you.

Now, if your original question was guenuine, you can see if Evilpixie looks more like what you want to do.
It's around 6K lines of code. The stable editor is for indexed colors, but I see there's a rgba branch.
It can be the easiest way to get some experience with the Qt GUI, which has official Visual Studio package, apparently.

Offline Ai

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Re: Hackable pixel editors?

Reply #22 on: August 04, 2017, 10:02:48 am
Quote
GIMP suffers from .. complex and low bit depth image data structures, etc.)
I'll just point out that GIMP doesn't suffer from low bit depth; that's an out-of-date critique. It's got pretty full hi-bit-depth support at this point. Roughly on parity with Krita, IIRC.

I agree that GTK+ is inadequate, particularly WRT the amount of macro incantations involved in defining objects (though properly that is a critique of GObject rather than GTK+, GTK+ is still heavily affected since it uses GObject). That said, there isn't a realistic alternative that I know of (since Qt is C++-based; it would be really asking for trouble to port the whole codebase across to C++. The idea that C++ is an adequate language choice is also contentious.)

As a plugin writer, I found registration to be the most needlessly complex area. I believe this is caused by the limitations of the PDB (no support for kwargs, etc); a project 'libpdb' was started to fix that, but it stalled IIRC.


« Last Edit: August 04, 2017, 10:13:07 am by Ai »
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline RAV

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Re: Hackable pixel editors?

Reply #23 on: August 04, 2017, 10:51:40 am
The thing I like to avoid most is when the issue boils down to either:

Someone arguing your're a bad person for not releasing your source. It's unethical. You should be ashamed.

And the other way around some critiques on Open Source projects come across way too ungrateful
and disparaging and blind towards the accomplishments and benefits they do bring to the table.


Besides that though, there are plenty of valid critiques on when proprietary products fail for various reasons.
As much as you can argue cases in which open source projects aren't quite where they need to be for serious consideration.

It can also be discussed if there may be even a causal relationship to these problems by virtue of the development paradigm.
Some might say, there is no downside to this or that. It's better on principle, it's just that people are not enlightened enough to take more advantage of it.

I believe that software development is a problem that exceeds pure technical consideration, because in the end the coders are just humans too.
So there is all kinds of questions about psychology, culture, motivations, economics, the situation, etc, that I think are important to factor in.
I think that there are at least associative relationships between these further factors and the development paradigms, that make the issue very complex.


As an example, I believe that a person's motivation is the most important key to the success.
We can then look at factors of motivation, and how powerful their psychological effect is.

Imagine that working on a snippet of code means, you are fully responsible for it, so far that you are held fully accountable for it. If the product succeeds because of your code, you may get a promotion and a higher income. If it fails because of you, you may lose your job, all your money. You may even go to jail in some cases. The company may sink, with all your colleages and friends. So you are sitting there, and maybe you give your code a couple more looks. Make a couple more test runs. Maybe listen more to customer complains. Maybe you even feel a greater sense of duty to do work that's not always fun and rewarding. The stakes are high, and your name is on it. So one person, from motivation to qualification, may put more value into a work than a hundred hobbyists.

Now I don't want to make the issue too simple. Because in a different scenario, that employee might be underpayed and frustrated with the job, feel like a cog with no say, etc, which also is bad for motivation. And in a project as a free hobby, you might be motivated because you just love to play with it and interacting with other creatives, and feel responsible for it as it grows on you.

Then we can argue about the difference of these as either a fully integrated development paradigm, or a mere fact of having companies release their sources. But there are such a huge amount of consequences to that too, what this means for companies and investors, one might not appreciate at first either. Then the discussion is at danger into devolving into fundamental critiques on society and life itself, it can get pretty awkward.

Offline Krice

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Re: Hackable pixel editors?

Reply #24 on: August 04, 2017, 01:03:27 pm
Now, if your original question was guenuine, you can see if Evilpixie looks more like what you want to do.

It's missing X11/xpm.h, png.h and impy.h. They are all external image libraries and no idea if they could somehow compiled/installed on Windows. I think you need at least png support to load and save images I guess.

Offline yrizoud

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Re: Hackable pixel editors?

Reply #25 on: August 04, 2017, 02:53:59 pm
Compiling dependencies is often like opening russian dolls :/

I'm not 100% sure you can get it all using only Visual Studio, but in case it's useful (for evilpixie or any other software), you can gain lots of time by checking if somebody else hasn't compiled what you need already :
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html
See for example libpng :
- The archive "Developer files" contains the headers (same on all platforms), and libpng.lib must be the only file you need for Visual Studio
- The archive "Binaries" contains the DLL, don't forget to put it alongside your exe for distribution.

Offline Krice

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Re: Hackable pixel editors?

Reply #26 on: August 04, 2017, 03:45:01 pm
Getting libpng was quite easy, but not only png file support is not used in the project, but pngsupport.cpp has errors that prevents compiling it. Great way to release source code. Guess I can just exclude it from the project, but I even spent time to write a new error handler to replace Wobbly (wobbly.h, also missing from the project). Now I have to figure out how to handle that impy.h.

Offline Krice

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Re: Hackable pixel editors?

Reply #27 on: August 05, 2017, 09:07:14 am
I think this is not worth the trouble. The source code is anyway in what I call a "transition phase C++" in which the programmer is moving from C to C++ but is doing most things the wrong way. Well that alone was not a reason to quit, but those pesky libraries. I think they could these days release raw .lib and include files for MSVC, because there is only Windows 10, right? When everyone knows how difficult it is to compile misc. shady linux libraries in Windows.