AuthorTopic: I'm making a paint program, so useful tools, ideas and features required please  (Read 156414 times)

Offline happymonster

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Ryumaru: The engine is cross-platform, so a Mac version is very possible. An 8 x 8 square brush will be available.

Surt: The engine already supports both OpenGL and Direct3D (I'm not writing the engine as well as the program). As for the tablet friendly view rotation, that's something I'll have to think about. I still need to put those ideas you made into some kind of order/priorities! :)

Raytheon: I know what you mean, that's something I had already thought of and planned for (in the Grid tool, as a show grid options.. with then an optional snap to grid button)

Offline surt

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What's this engine you speak of? It sounds strange to me to build a non-content-heavy app on top of a pre-built engine.

Also, are you planning on selling it or going freeware or FOSS?

Offline happymonster

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It's an engine that a friend has built himself over several years for his own (shareware games). As a consequence it has good support internally for memory images (from paletted to true colour), primitives, blits, as well as GUI elements and then 3D display, texture management, etc.. So it's going to be good for both games and utilities, albeit without the normal Windows/Apple/Linux GUI.

At the moment, I'm thinking of freeware.

I've finally had time to go through all those ideas you posted Surt and put them into an organised spreadsheet. I will add my own (and other people's) ideas to this and use it to keep organised on what needs doing. A lot of the ideas you posted I am not sure about, so I would be grateful if you could have a look at any of the '?' mark ones (autofilters are there) and see if you can explain a bit more about what you mean.

BTW: I've got a total of 176 entries once I added in all your ideas (!)

As you can see, I am quite serious about organising and using people's suggestions.

Here is the XLS spreadsheet:
www.funkemunke.com/ideas.xls

Offline surt

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Added more info on the ones I could make sense of :-[ Thing!

Offline happymonster

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Thanks Surt! I'll go through your comments and update those ones. I'll upload the new version what that's done, and I will add my own features and ideas to this as well.

Does anyone else have any ideas or features? :)

Offline 32

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if possible maybe a simple quick canvas resize, like in mspaint (drag the corner of the canvas)

Offline happymonster

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Good idea 32! I've added this to the spreadsheet and gone through the updated entries from Surt and responded to those I can..
Now updated:

www.funkemunke.com/ideas.xls

Offline happymonster

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It's awkward to edit with OpenOffice compared to Excel, I'm used to Excel but don't have it at home. ;)

DONE:
Box tools: box, filled box, square, filled square and draw types, A to B, or expanding box/square.

Also, a lot of engine work and reorganising done today. It's going well! I still need to update the spreadsheet with my ideas and use this to keep track of things though.
Groan! :D

Offline Conzeit

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I have one...it's sort of oriented to ease the addition of stuff like tattoos or different fur patterns (like tigerstripes) camouflage on sprites.

You all know how when you are making a sprite you usually make a choice at one point in time when you say, "i'll have 3 tones per ramp for this one" and then you proceed to shade everything and interrupt your shading every time you are going to color a different section of the sprite (for example you are done shading the blue parts and you're starting the red ones) this makes it very hard to add any sort of complicated patterns over the skin/fabrics of the character.

The idea is that the depth itself, the lightness is handled in a single ramp. that way you make a single value/lightness pass.

Knowing that you've got the depth all taken care of, you proceed to create the equivalents of your original ramp in different hues. Say if you had 3 red colors originally, and you need to have gray and blue hues as well, you make 2 new ramps of 3 shades each, making sure the shades have similar lightness to your red ones.

This would make it much much easier to make characters with several different print patterns on their clothing, or if you mess up in the middle of putting the pattern on you dont have to re-trace your steps in undo, you simply change the hue information on it and nothing is lost.

This would all be handled internally, nothing would change in the end product, only in the inner process of coloring the sprites. You could even tell the program to for example use the same shade for the darkest red and blue shades for example, but if it turns out for whatever reason you can use more shades than you originally thought, you still have the separation of the two shades in the hue information, you just need to tell now instead of using that gnarly purple for your darkest blue and red hues, you'll have actual dark red and dark blue.

The people in SF3 obviously used this kind of tool, only to a much greater degree
http://www.zweifuss.com/colorswap.php?pcolorstring=IbukiPalette.bin&pcolornum=0&pname=ibuki/ibuki-jump.gif most evident in this particular animation. Oddly enough, even though they developed the tool they didnt take incredible advantage of it...as most people dont even notice it. obviously, it helped in making the Gill character posible since it would make it a simple matter of changing his hue information.

SF3 uses it in an even greater degree than I described, because if you pay attention closely...they do not only have different hue information for every part of the sprite, they have two totally different and separate palletes that go from the brightest color to the darkest color for every single frame. That is how they make their two lightsources, they have the normal sprite and the blue sprite, then they use some kind of tool to tell the painting program which part uses the blue hue, and which one uses the normal white hue.

if you think this could be of any use at all...I have an even more complicated idea about this...involving actually completely diferent shadings for each hue.....it would be useful for characters that have chromed armor and normal clothing...

Offline Rosse

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One useful feature would be a view-mode where you can select "normal" and "gray-mode". In "gray-mode" your image is displayed in grayscale, but the color itself is preserved. In programs like ProMotion or Photoshop, you must alter all your colors to gray to achieve a grayscale image. When you want your colorful image back, you have to undo your altered colors (or Palette in ProMotion). For that reason it's useful to have kind of a grayscale preview, which you can even pixel on and you can switch from "normal" (colorful) to "gray-mode" on the fly (colors are preserved while pixeling).