TIGSource Forums

handy tips:

1. when drawing, or loading with 'exact palette' turned off, b sure to set the 'colour threshold slider' somewhere sensable for the image, by experimentation. also when drawing, setting it zero will add no new colours, anything higher will create colours progressively more frequently

2. use ALT to eye-drop

3. use arrow keys to scroll in Image View, or switch between frames in Tile View

4. you can 'lock' colours by SHIFT-clicking on them, or lock 'all but the colour' by CTRL-clicking them. also applies when eye-dropping!

5. using SHIFT-A / CTRL-A to 'select all' when in single tile view adds that tile to the selection. you can select multiple tiles easily this way.

6. locking the background colour (ENTER) stops it from being treated as transparent

7. you can drag colours in the palette. try it!

8. it can get pretty slow with large brushes and blend modes. beware!

9. you can trick the rendered to using 'software blending' of alpha brushes by locking a colour or creating a mask (this mode is slower but has a slightly different look. it's used by all other blending modes.)

10. handy keys not in menus:

[ and ]          reduce or enlarge the current system brush ala Photoshop
< and >       switch between colours
/                  go back to single pixel brush, 100% alpha and matte blend mode
- and +       zoom
BACKSPACE does clearing ala Photoshop
1-8             select system brushes
ALT-number select alpha in 10% increments ala Photoshop
T - infinite tile sheet (when in single tile view)

tools:
B - toggle dotted or connected brush
L - line
E - ellipse
R - rectangle
F - flood fill
M - marquee
W - wand

animation:

; / ‘ = select frame
SHIFT + ; / ‘ = select animation
\ - toggle play and pause
N - hide and show the animation tool
J - make new animation with selected frame
K - make new frame after the selected index (click the animation strip to go forward or backward, or the buttons, or use ; / ‘ ). note that the delete frame button also works on the selected index, so make sure to select the right one in the palette.

11. warning - save regularly, there may be rare crash bugs still

12. the program tries to find your desktop resolution (this is fullscreen only), but if something goes wrong, you can edit the 'setup.ini' file - just uncomment the 'width = xxxx' and 'height = xxxx' parameters to set the resolution you want

11. in wand mode, right button subtracts. also holding SHIFT allows you to 'paint' your selection with the current system brush, without the wand effect

update notes:



v0.81

- fixed file requester crash bug

- added ‘Exact Palette’ button to bypass the threshold slider in the 'Load image…’ page. images with more than 256 colours will reassign the colours after the first 256 to the nearest it can find.

- ‘Append palette’ will add the palette of the image onto the existing palette. this is useful when combined with ‘Load onto new layer’ to use a different palette for each layer

- setting the threshold slider to zero will now be useful because you can set ‘Append palette’ to remap a new image to a current palette.

- "New…” can now be cancelled properly

v0.82

- quit button / menu item
- improved responsiveness on initial click a little by optimising out the regenerating of the ‘editmask’, an array holding pixels edited in the current draw operation
- faster large system brushes when not using alpha, mask or stencil
- improved zooming to include a ‘fit to screen’ level that makes sense for each mode (also so as to avoid the anim palette)
- animation!!!!! when you tile your view, you will see it. you can have as many as you like
- adding a new frame when no animations exists creates an animation
- deleting the last frame of an animation deletes the animation
- you can rename your animations
- handy minimised play button
- ping pong / loop controls

anim keys:
   ; / ‘ = select frame
   SHIFT + ; / ‘ = select animation
   \ - toggle play and pause
   N - hide and show the animation tool
   J - make new animation with selected frame
   K - make new frame after the selected index (click the animation strip to go forward or backward, or the buttons, or use ; / ‘ ). note that the delete frame button also works on the selected index, so make sure to select the right one in the palette.

bugfixes:

- hide ‘view_all’ when animation plays
- fixed zoom window width for tall files
- fixed another file requester crash bug or two
- fixed ’New...' bug with tiled image
- reduced max texture size to 2048x2048, maybe improve performance for some

v0.84

- hide / show layers by double-clicking the image
- rename layers by double clicking
- layer box improved
- anim and layer boxes show background colour
- .PXL format! stores all project settings. auto save layers as png (using layer name when multiple layers used and not saving 'merged')  + PXL simultaneously.
- auto colour duplicate removal on load
- support for exporting colour 0 as transparent, saving merged .png’s
- import palette from .PXL (COMMAND - P)
- import anims from .PXL (COMMAND - A)
- merge layers (COMMAND - E)
- copy merged (SHIFT - C)
- tabbing between textboxes
- recent file list (F1-F10)
- swap FG<->BG colours in palette (edits the pixel data, not the palette order), hold SHIFT to do it one-way

bugfixes:

- GUI overlaps of menus etc
- animation box bugfixes (new anim shows correct frame)
- improved scrolling menus / list boxes
- layer creation / deletion fixed, layer box positioning / max height set correctly
- improved .png import for images with many colours  (compresses the palette and will allow larger thresholds as loading time passes and colours accumulate, hopefully provides a nice palette to reduce to around 256 colours without taking forever)

v0.85

bugfixes

- which fixes known crash bugsssssss (eg small custom brushes)
- the recent files menu works properly
- layer hiding works properly

This looks pretty cool. I'll give it a shot when you put the demo out.

this looks amazing! I would love to try it out.

This is awesome. Any chance you could share early builds?

fo sho

well close to a usable build. just adding KB shortcut in the menu and 'tip of day' so other people can use it

things missing still:

loading / saving combining palettes
PXL file format (stores layers and palettes etc)
animation tool (high priority - want it simple and quick)
rotate / scale brushes
transparent colour (for now just black, zero alpha'd pixels will be read in as black etc. but you can change the BG colour to make a different colour transparent)

should be posting later this afternoon. its already quite usable!

ok demo and instructions in the first post. let me know how u get on!  been workin on this for about 6 months, feel like its getting somewhere now?

at least, when it has animation in, it should be pretty decent for what it is, anyways

NEW BUILD

version 0.81 - link in first post


- fixed file requester crash bug

- added ‘Exact Palette’ button to bypass the threshold slider in the 'Load image…’ page. images with more than 256 colours will reassign the colours after the first 256 to the nearest it can find.

- ‘Append palette’ will add the palette of the image onto the existing palette. this is useful when combined with ‘Load onto new layer’ to use a different palette for each layer

- setting the threshold slider to zero will now be useful because you can set ‘Append palette’ to remap a new image to a current palette.

- "New…” can now be cancelled properly

Just gave it a spin, its amazing! Here's my own quick first impressions:

- Interface feels quick and snappy, zooming in-out the canvas feels nice, the whole thing feels sleek and uncluttered.
- Upon starting fresh, I clicked on the canvas for the first time to draw something and immediately everything froze for approx 3 secs. Also using bucket/colour fill tool has the tendency to freeze the app and this happens for slightly longer (around 5-6 secs or so).
- At first I kept looking and couldn't find any "exit program" option under the drop-down menu, but hitting Esc did the trick.
- Icon logo is pretty badass (I swear I could hear a vintage Yamaha coming out of my speakers when I double-clicked on it).

Looking forward to see how the animation feature will be implemented. Back in the days Deluxe Paint Animation was my bread & butter so its nice to see where you get the inspiration from. Keep up the excellent work!  :beer:

sweet, so glad you liked it!

the startup pause is annoying, cant seem to find whats causing it. the software tries to run at a low frame rate if theres no input, to save CPU, feels like it could be that the program doesnt get the message that the screen needs updating?

the flood fill is just because my algorithm is slow. wish i had a better one :(  will look into it again. the ones i've seen that look better than mine are in different languages and are degree-level complex, but maybe i could try porting one haha

the animation will be quite different from DPaint, much more based around the tiled images. my rough design is:

- there will be a key command / button to add selected frame to animation.

- animations get a default name (like Layer 0 etc), but you can edit it.

- the palette will show a mini frames trip, compressed to fit the box (not super long ala photoshop), along the bottom left, with play button, speed, loop and ping-ping control beneath.

- above it is the editable name of the animation, up and down buttons to select animation, and maybe a pulldown menu with all animations as a shortcut too, in case you end up defining quite a few. and a delete animation button.

- also at the top, or maybe the bottom, the "add frame" button mentioned before, and a "delete frame" (active when the current animation is paused and no other frame has been selected. this is a bit confusing potentially, will have to try it. maybe i need to 'grey out' the animation palette when you go off the current frame or something?) or maybe just that the frame of the current anim is highlighted in the palette with a strong red outline or something, and delete deletes that frame regardless of what frame is selected in tile view? yeah, probably this actually

- guess i'll need key commands (shift-L, shift-R?) to go between frames? and i guess ill need buttons for that too.

hmmm thats a lot of buttons. lets see what happens anyway!

NEW BUILD!

.82

- quit button / menu item
- improved responsiveness on initial click a little by optimising out the regenerating of the ‘editmask’, an array holding pixels edited in the current draw operation
- faster large system brushes when not using alpha, mask or stencil
- improved zooming to include a ‘fit to screen’ level that makes sense for each mode (also so as to avoid the anim palette)
- animation!!!!! when you tile your view, you will see it. you can have as many as you like
- adding a new frame when no animations exists creates an animation
- deleting the last frame of an animation deletes the animation
- you can rename your animations
- handy minimised play button
- ping pong / loop controls

anim keys:
   ; / ‘ = select frame
   SHIFT + ; / ‘ = select animation
   \ - toggle play and pause
   N - hide and show the animation tool
   J - make new animation with selected frame
   K - make new frame after the selected index (click the animation strip to go forward or backward, or the buttons, or use ; / ‘ ). note that the delete frame button also works on the selected index, so make sure to select the right one in the palette.

bugfixes:

- hide ‘view_all’ when animation plays
- fixed zoom window width for tall files
- fixed another file requester crash bug or two
- fixed ’New...' bug with tiled image
- reduced max texture size to 2048x2048, maybe improve performance for some

stuff i want to do:

- hide / show layers by double clicking
- 'merge down', 'copy merged'
- export ‘one layer / all layers / merged’ ‘colour 0 = transparent''
- animation speed box, (show / hide all layers button?)
- .PXL file format. can export to both as needed. will save layers, palette and anims
- recent files in file meu
- hide GUI toggle (use ESC, and change quit to COMMAND-Q?)

worked hard on this one! happy with th animation tool :)

see link in first post...

v0.84 is ready! and i'm calling this one 'beta'

this is a big update and is now on PC too

if you'd like a copy, please pm me (and hopefully leave some feedback in this thread later on!)

cheers,

PRDXCL

.84

- hide / show layers by double-clicking the image
- rename layers by double clicking
- layer box improved
- anim and layer boxes show background colour
- .PXL format! stores all project settings. auto save layers as png (using layer name when multiple layers used and not saving 'merged')  + PXL simultaneously.
- auto colour duplicate removal on load
- support for exporting colour 0 as transparent, saving merged .png’s
- import palette from .PXL (COMMAND - P)
- import anims from .PXL (COMMAND - A)
- merge layers (COMMAND - E)
- copy merged (SHIFT - C)
- tabbing between textboxes
- recent file list (F1-F10)
- swap FG<->BG colours in palette (edits the pixel data, not the palette order), hold SHIFT to do it one-way

bugfixes:

- GUI overlaps of menus etc
- animation box bugfixes (new anim shows correct frame)
- improved scrolling menus / list boxes
- layer creation / deletion fixed, layer box positioning / max height set correctly
- improved .png import for images with many colours  (compresses the palette and will allow larger thresholds as loading time passes and colours accumulate, hopefully provides a nice palette to reduce to around 256 colours without taking forever)

i still want to do:

- automatic palette swap dialogue for .png export?
- speed box
- undo / redo swap colours
- image preview in load requester?
- tilemap test box?
- brush palette remapping?
- snap to grid? grid options?

I gave it a try because it looked promising, but...
- only fullscreen?
- no system user interface?
- no linux?
:(

answers:

yes / yes / yes

hmm, three people have tried it now and it crashes in different ways for all of them. think i'm decided on not releasing this publicly now as i have no way of fixing whatever is causing it.

at least it works here haha.

This looks very promising. Have you chaps considered about a making it available for Linux, maybe in the future :beg:? (virtualboxes are so slow for me D:)

This looks great though, best of luck!

Check those 64 bit bugs! Recently had one myself which only started to appear with a recent Windows 8 update on other people's systems but not my own. It was allocating a certain object in > 4GB address space, revealing a very nasty undiscovered bug in some old code that turned a pointer into a 32 bit int...

Huge bummer. Huge pain to find (because it didn't crash on my computer at home or work). Super easy to fix once discovered.

Hi all,
I tried PXL for Windows today. I think it's a great program and I am confident that it will improve even more  ;D ;D ;D ;D.
seemed right to make a review, i love it.

Bye all,
Fenice

Looks promising, I'll give a try tommorow

Runs well on my PC. No crashes or failures to start up.

ah thats good to hear. still dont know what's causing the crash for others tho...

so did anyone use this to make some PXLS yet? ;)

i have a version 0.85!

- which fixes known crash bugsssssss (eg small custom brushes)
- the recent files menu works properly
- layer hiding works properly

if anyone is keen... mac only im afraid. building for pc involves opening my computer and removing a PCI card :(  and then it doesn't work for most people!

PXL v0.85 for OSX (http://www.newgameplus.com/PXLv0.85.zip)

a friend of mine is using it for his new project which makes me happy!

Get a Windows version yo!

i decided not to support windows as i dont have easy way to build it, and also there are many good progs on windows, such as Pro Motion / Graphics Gale, wheras on mac theres almost nothing...