MS Paint Poll

[Zach]

Winners don't use MSpaint

I am not a winner.

[ptoing]

Perhaps I will to try to make a ProMotion for Dummies Tutorial at some point

[the_x_factor]

Well, I use MS Paint, I gave it a 5. It's not the best program for pixel art/sprites. But it "can" do what you want. No, it don't have layers, or animation, or even transparency as far as i know. But it works. Personally, I tried GGale and didn't like it. I have Photoshop, but i don't like using that for pixel art. I just stick with paint, because personally, I like the simple feel of Paint. And I been using it so long, it's not hard to do stuff, and I can make decent things(at least i think they're decent) pretty fast.

I have never heard of Promotion though. I may go download the trial in a bit to see how it is.

[Ryumaru]

Perhaps I will to try to make a ProMotion for Dummies Tutorial at some point

OR
you could send all of us money to get it in the first place.

[Evil-Ville]

OR you could buy the lite version like I did. Anyone who has enough money to own a computer should be able to buy it.

[Akira]

on pro-mo what features are limited when the trial period is over?

[Ai]

It's a basic image editor that comes with windows. BASIC... there are better image editors out there, like photoshop and even paint shop.. or god forbid GIMP... (which is actually a wee bit better these days). I know that these do not cater for pixelart but mspaint doesn't either.

Re: GIMP: recent versions compare favorably to other paint programs in pixeling capability. see:
http://dgowers-tech.livejournal.com/2310.html
for a summary of recently added things that are apropos to pixel art. Notable things are the ability to change to next/prev color in palette, and clipboard brush/pattern.
Next/prev color was added by me, and specifically facilitates pixelling (though is also good for CG or cel-shaded work)
Personally, I consider it more useful than Pro Motion for pixeling.. part of that reason is that I like to code a lot, and it makes it easy for me to try out theories and ideas (eg auto-aa, auto-colorcleaning, auto-scaling, morphing, and more mundane things like global or selection-restricted single color changes...)
It certainly has no indexpainting tools like ProMotion does. I would however rate it above the likes of Graphics Gale.

Something like pro-motion is MADE for pixelling. Argument over. Why even argue about it?

Winners don't use MSpaint

True..

Because every time I open up Pro Motion, I feel like a fucking idiot.

Strange.. it seems simple to me. Have you tried DeluxePaintIIe ? It serves as a good introduction to much of the functionality included in ProMotion.

My only objection to ProMotion personally is that it runs in Windows only, and has an obnoxious UI. (I'm counting that as one because those two things usually seem to go together.)

on pro-mo what features are limited when the trial period is over?

Trial period? I don't recall such a thing. IIRC saving is always restricted in the trial version. You can only save as SPR or .. (something else)

[pkmays]

Wow. Someone actually said Pro Motion has an obnoxious UI compared to...The GIMP? That's one for the record books. XD

Being a former Graphics Gale user, I can say that it's a good cheap ($20) alternative to Pro Motion, but only if you're willing to put some work into getting it set up correctly. Pro Motion comes with a well defined window and hotkey setup out of the box, whereas GGale is meant to be customized from the bottom up.

You'll have to set up everything from getting windows sized and docked in the right place to setting up hotkeys for tools and operations. I had a really efficient hotkey setup where everything was centered around the ASDF keys so I could leave my right hand on the mouse and not have to reach all over the place to switch tools and perform operations.

Ultimately, the main reasons I switched to Pro Motion where it's brushes palette and paint modes. I do miss GGale's layers though...

Graphics Gale is a good buy if you want a small, fast, customizable pixel pusher. However, like I said before, if you're stupid and lazy, you're much better off just living inside your little safety bubble and running mspaint.exe.

[Ai]

Wow. Someone actually said Pro Motion has an obnoxious UI compared to...The GIMP? That's one for the record books. XD

One of my main criteria for non/obnoxiousness is not having to look at pointless UI all the time. Mostly, paint programs provide a fullscreen toggle, which hides all the UI. But in my experience, it is better to only see the image and be able to move around to see other parts of the UI:

If I have to see any UI that is not relevant to what I'm doing, that's a bad UI. If I can usually see just what I want for what I'm doing, that's a good UI.

So most of the time I'm drawing, there is only the image window to look at. And if I want something else (like the color selector) I can just move the mouse 'offscreen' to shift the viewport.

The lack of virtual screen is endemic to Windows, so far as I know. Both MacOsX and Linux (and probably FreeBSD) provide the requisite virtual screen capability. I haven't ever seen it on Windows. Maybe some part of Windows' design precludes implementing it. Regardless, the lack of it is the kind of horribleness that is often not perceived until it is cured.


Does Graphics Gale have the ability to assign hotkeys to move through the palette colors? I regard this as vital for pixelling, and I've heard nothing to suggest it does have such a feature, which is why I presently rank it below GIMP.

[Helm]

Virtual screen is how much more useful than a keypress toggle of the UI on and off like photoshop does or whatever?  I find ProMo to be very easy to use on the basic level that I do now, I usually only have main window, preview window and tool window on-screen. How much less do I need than that? 80% of the screen is art. And the mouse pointer rarely leaves that area.