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[happymonster]

Fixed a bug where recolouring a brush to fit a different palette didn't always work right.

Added in a new tool in the Colour Space Selector screen to add palette entries from the current brush to the image. I'm going to add some more palette tools to this screen.

[happymonster]

Added Load Palette from Image tool to D-Pixel

[happymonster]

If you right click on an image brush thumbnail in the brushes screen then you can now edit it as a normal image in D-Pixel.

To do this meant I had to remove some distinctions between brushes and images (not many as I'd always planned for this functionality). So in the project folder the brushes are saved as Image files and the Brush files are no longer loaded.

[happymonster]

Just released version 0.91 - same download link:
http://www.retroidea.com/DPixel_New.zip

This has the changes described recently as well as some bug fixes. Any feedback would be welcome..

[happymonster]

Anyone tried it then?

[JobLeonard]

I don't pixel, so there's no point

I mean, I like what I see. But that's kind of like saying "that's a nice car" while you don't drive.

[surt]

I can't grab slider handles anymore(?).
Mouse wheel on sliders could do with a larger page step when shift is held.
Draw filled in shade mode draws darker with both left and right mouse buttons.

You might get more feedback if you post on a pixel specific site such as Pixelation (you've already got a thread there) or PJ.

[happymonster]

Hi Surt,

Ugh, some more bugs.. I'll look at them.

What is the most active pixel forum then? I haven't been on Pixelation for a long time, and PixelJoint not at all.

JobLeonard: Thanks for replying in any case

[JobLeonard]

Well in that case, I'll just say again that I've been enjoying the steady stream of posts marking your progress

[happymonster]

Thank you

[happymonster]

Fixed a nasty bug where you sometimes couldn't draw anything (even with a restart) due to a missing check with user brushes.

[happymonster]

Fixed error with right mouse button filled in freehand drawing.

[happymonster]

New D-Pixel release (Version 0.92) which fixes some bugs (Thanks to Surt for reporting them)

Download link is the same..

[happymonster]

I've made a very simple website for D-Pixel now:

http://www.retroidea.com/

[nnyei]

I don't really consider myself a pixel artist (I prefer pushing around vectors and bigger chunks of pixels), but I do dabble a bit in the medium so I decided to give this program a go. I've barely looked at this thread so if you explained anything then I've missed that. I'm basically going into this blind.

I found the whole interface very confusing at first because I kept looking for a way to pan the canvas, pressed spacebar and H and looked for a hand tool before I found out by chance that it's the middle mouse button. Did not expect that at all. I know that some programs use the MMB to pan (mostly 3D and game development programs), but I've never seen it in a program that's purely focused on drawing with a 2D canvas (PS, AI, Sai, Graphic's Gale etc.) so that stumped me at first.
EDIT: I realize why now. Because I have my stylus in my hand in those kinds of programs and not my mouse. I don't have the option to middle click when I hold my stylus so that's why that was so befuddling to me.

Some tools seem to break sometimes (?) because when I checked out the Empty Ellipse tool it kept kept erasing in a square shape. And now I'm trying to select the freehand tool in the draw panel, but it's behaving really weirdly (is it erasing or duplicating a pattern? I can't tell), and I'm honestly completely confused. Maybe I simply don't understand the interface, but either way, I'm completely lost.

A bug that I'm sure is a bug: when I minimize the program, I can't maximize it again. I even have to open up the task manager to quit the program because it stops responding altogether. This was actually the first thing I did upon opening the program because I was looking for a way to drag the program over to my second monitor, but that doesn't seem to be possible.

All in all, I haven't given it a real try yet because I kept trying to figure out if the program is working as intended and I'm just obtuse when it comes to the interface, or if I ran into a couple of bugs. Basically, I spent my whole time with the program in perpetual confusion.

[happymonster]

Ouch! Sorry you've had so many problems with it. Yes I haven't done any proper documentation yet. You can change the right mouse button, or held down left or right mouse button to act as the canvas scroll (that's in the settings tool options panel).

I'm not sure what was going on with the ellipse and freehand draw tool from what you describe. Sounds like a bug, but never seen that here.

Also with the minimise thing as I'm just using SDL and it works perfectly for me, so I don't know why that's failing for you either.

Well, thank you for testing it out and for the feedback, even if I'm not sure what's happening!

[nnyei]

Sorry if I came across as overly negative. I knew that there were a lot of neat features burried underneath all the initial confusion, but it took me a while to get out of that first stage.

I spent some more time with it and I think a very large portion of my confusion stemmed from the fact that I didn't realize that some tools like the effects option affected all the drawing tools as well. I assumed it was like Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint where every tool was self-contained. But you opted for an interface where there's no visual difference between a tool and an overarching menu so this took me about 20 minutes to realize. I don't know if other people had similar problems with that at first, but if it isn't just me, then you might want to rethink that particular design choice. Maybe even color coding them would help distinguish the tools and the menus from one another.

So I think the Ellipse tool etc. not properly working for me really was a side effect of me not understanding the interface, haha. I'll have test it a bit more, but I'm pretty confident it really was just me being a dummy.

But the minimize/maximize problem happens consistently and it crashes the program without fail. Though it does sometimes recover after about 3 minutes of waiting, apparently. It's not a huge problem because I can just alt tab so I don't need to minimize it in the first place, but yeah. I don't know what to tell you, but it does happen consistently.

I found it weird that I had to manually enter ".bmp" when I wanted to save it as a bmp file because otherwise a saving error would pop up. But that's really a minor thing.

Is there a way to create transparency? I didn't see anything that would suggest it, but maybe I just overlooked it.

But let me tell you what I really liked about the program in particular:

I has surprisingly many features that I didn't expect it to have. Like the gray scale option where you can quickly check your values, or the little ramp feature that I always enjoy seeing in programs. Personally, I'm very happy to see the filled option in the drawing tools. So few programs have that and I'm always happy to see it because it can really improve your workflow. And the effects option has so many features that I really to take a closer look at.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to where you can take this program. I had a bit of a rough start with it, but now that I think I finally understand the interface, I'm having a much more enjoyable time with it.

[happymonster]

Thanks for testing it again after the confusion of the first attempt!

I think some of the confusion is due to the fact that D-Pixel is inspired by Deluxe Paint and Personal Paint on the Amiga which have persistent drawing mode properties as well (ProMotion also uses this approach). Now of course PhotoShop and other programs use the self-contained tool method you described.

The current paint mode is shown on the status bar at the top-right, but it's not always very obvious.

There isn't transparency at the moment as BMP images don't support it. But you can set a colour for transparency when cutting out and pasting brushes within an image if that's what you meant.

[nnyei]

I think some of the confusion is due to the fact that D-Pixel is inspired by Deluxe Paint and Personal Paint on the Amiga which have persistent drawing mode properties as well (ProMotion also uses this approach).

Yeah, I started off on the completely wrong foot because I made a lot of assumptions with regards to the interface.

There isn't transparency at the moment as BMP images don't support it. But you can set a colour for transparency when cutting out and pasting brushes within an image if that's what you meant.

Yeah, I figured that was the only way. I was only making sure because I overlooked or misunderstand, like, everything else so far so I figured I should just ask. XD

[happymonster]

I haven't had much time lately (having a day job and an 11 month old baby does that to you..) 

But I've started work on developing an Anti-Aliasing filter for D-Pixel: