I'm making a paint program, so useful tools, ideas and features required please

[happymonster]

Hi there,

I'm currently trying (for the 3rd time!) to make and complete a paint program for my own use (and anyone else who wants to use it too). I'm not 100% happy with any paint program I have tried.

This will be aimed at 3 aspects of art:
1. Low colour (palette based) sprites/tiles/art
2. True colour manipulation (nothing too advanced)
3. Good alpha mask/channel editing and support.

These are in order of importance as well. The program won't try to compete with photoshop, but will fill a niche for the 3 aspects I described above.

So are there any tools, ideas or features you have that I can make a note of? I'm looking for unique ideas that will be practical and useful and preferably aren't offered in any other program (besides the basic tools common to most paint programs). No guarantees I will use or implement any suggestions of course, but they may well prove useful!

[happymonster]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestions..

1. I'm not sure how GIMP does it, but I do intend to add customisable keyboard shortcuts.

2. Definately - This is a very important aspect for me.

3. I'm afraid the interface won't be that flexible. I tried in the past to make a super flexible program and it just makes it all too much work to finish.

4. I would like to provide animation support, but it's not a priority for me at the moment.

5. Yes. Layers are planned.


Any other ideas or concepts that aren't in existing programs? Cool new tools or ideas that would be useful??

[happymonster]

Well, you must all be perfectly happy with your paint programs!

Or, of course you could be thinking this will never be finished. Which is a fair point, still brainstorming ideas and features is fun in itself and I do intend to finish the program this time..

What I can say so far is that it will work in either OpenGL/Direct3D, windowed or fullscreen at 1024 x 768 or greater sizes. The hardware acceleration helps with faster image magnification and layers. The higher the screenmode the better it looks though the interface is to some extent dynamic so it will expand in terms of spacing at higher screenmodes.

I'm going to add low-colour pixel specific tools and features as well as true colour stuff. Merging these two very different aspects is proving to be a tricky design!

[huZba]

A quick key for mirroring a selection/layer or the whole picture would be quite practical. I use it in photoshop all the time. Managing palettes is not very fluent in photoshop so I'm looking forward to this.
Also preview window that shows different zoom levels. Like where you can work on a 400% zoomed picture yet have another window with a 100% zoom.
There's probably more.... I'll try and track what I'm missing in photoshop the next time i make pixelart.

[surt]

I've got a list of random brainfarts for a mostly pixel-oriented raster editor here. If you can scavenge any sense from the unintelligible mess free to use it for your own ends.

[happymonster]

Xelados: I kinda think you misread my post. It will use either OpenGL or Direct3D and will work in either fullscreen or windowed.

Hu2ba: I do plan to have a mirror effect, and the preview mode will have zoom settings for the background canvas and for the zoom window itself (similar to Promotion).

Surt: Woo! There's a TON of great stuff there. It's going to take me ages to plough through those, but thanks a lot for these!!

[happymonster]

Update:

DONE:

Basic design and code skeleton implementation (over last few weeks). Using OpenGL/Direct3D in a window/fullscreen.
Load 256 colour BMP images.
Select pen colours from the palette and draw dotted and joined up freehand on the image at different brush sizes.

PARTIAL:

Canvas magnification (separate from zoom window magnification).
Scrolling with arrow keys (works, but need scroll bar GUI elements)

TODO NEXT:
Line, Box and Filled Box primitives.

[Ryumaru]

Any way this would be able to work on a mac? Id so give you thousands of cookies if it did.
I don't know if it's already implemented but a preset brush that is a 8x8 square would be awesome for doing tile work.

[surt]

Since you're using OpenGL (why bother with Direct3D as well?) canvas view transform is essentially free, so it'd be nice to have some tablet-friendly view rotation and wide-pixel-/mode13h-friendly pixel aspect ratio adjustment.

Also tablet-friendly view control would be nice. eg. middle-stylus-button drag panning, keyboard modifier plus stylus-button rotozoomer, etc.

[Raytheon]

a toggleable tilebox option where it shows you the boundaries of a box on an image


example you have a 64x64 image, and it shows you the boundaries of all the 16x16 boxes in it


if you dont get it i can just draw something up quick