AuthorTopic: I'm making a paint program, so useful tools, ideas and features required please  (Read 156513 times)

Offline happymonster

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Thanks for these! I will think about them at work today.. ;)

Offline happymonster

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I'm uploaded the updated spreadsheet. Not had chance to add my own feature list to those yet, but I'm still made progress on the design and programming today.

Offline VisMaior

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What language are you going to use? Will it be open source?

Offline happymonster

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C++, and it won't be open source. But will probably be free. :)

Offline happymonster

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In another thread dogmeat said he thinks a paint program only needs:
Quote
1. Palette ( ability to load up colors, save palettes and maybe some hotkey mechanism to switch colors )
2. Pencil ( just like mspaint, left click paints, right click paints, if I click my palette it grabs that color )
3. Eraser ( instead of an eraser, I think it would be more beneficial to have a transparency color in the palette tool, use that to erase to trans )
4. Layers ( Only need 2 layers for any kind of pixel art, to easily move stuff around or to save an old copy of something for comparison )
5. Select/move tool ( a select tool you can use lasso with right click, square with left click, use shift for uniformity )
6. I also think a hotkey/button to select whatever color your cursor is over while using the pencil tool would be better than an eye dropper.

I know there is one viewpoint with the artists that only the most basic tools are needed, especially for the 'purity' of pixel artwork. However I disagree and think there are a lot of features which are either not available easily or at all for palette based drawing programs, or just have never been implemented beyond ideas in people's heads. There are a lot of improvements IMHO that can be made to a paint program that are not being used even today.

Offline Ryumaru

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I think as long as artist has complete control over their pixels( colors and placement) then it's pure enough for me. You could add useful features that might not be for the purists but do make things quicker and if the purists don't want to use those features they wouldn't have to.

Offline happymonster

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I agree. That's the way I see it..

Offline Jad

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I think as long as artist has complete control over their pixels( colors and placement) then it's pure enough for me. You could add useful features that might not be for the purists but do make things quicker and if the purists don't want to use those features they wouldn't have to.

It's not that I want other features because I'm not a purist, in my case, it's just that I want the production tempo to be as high as possible so I can churn out good art quickly and make money for myself and happiness for my clients : D

Things like photoshop-esque masking/selection or color replacement tools help greatly with this, also dither brushes and the like. All of them are awesomesauce that makes things go a lot faster! Also dither gradient fill would be one of those things that can look real ugly if you misuse it but save you a lot of time when doing large-scale things. Et cetera.
' _ '

Offline dock

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Another request for a mac version. There are a lot of people itching for a usable pixel editor on mac!

Try to copy Photoshop's shortcuts and main interface as much as possible, as it is regarded as the 'standard'. Things like zoom, scale brush, etc are in a lot of different programs now.

Please focus on a clean and modern user interface most of all, actually.

Offline Ryumaru

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I may be the only one on this boat but I like the interface to be as simple as possible. It's one of the main reasons that I still see ms paint at night instead of staying in bed with promotion. All I need is my pencil tool, fill tool, zoom, and palette to get started. Other things I like to bring up as I need them. Sometimes a program with so many tools on the tool bar and thousands of windows intimidates me and keeps me from making art.