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[Lee]

AsciiDraw, an ASCII/ANSI art editor for windows.


I know a few other similar tools have been released here but another can't hurt, right? I'm mainly posting it here for feedback as I believe it is now at it's first publicly acceptable state. More features are planned and this is not the final state.


Features
Draw bitmap font characters to a canvas freehand or with a number of shape tools:
   -Line drawing
   -Rectangle drawing (outline only or filled)
   -Circle drawing (outline only or filled)

Flood-fill tool

Right click on canvas for eyedropper functionality

Selection tool: select an area, cut/copy/paste the selection through shortcuts or the menu or click and drag to move the section, deselect an area with either the enter key or control + d. You can cycle a selection with control + arrow keys or move it with just the arrow keys.

Recolour brush, for quickly changing tiles foreground and background colours without having to worry about selecting the right tiles.

Undo/Redo that accounts for all possible actions, user customizable history size (in MB, and even 1MB is a lot of undo's - far far more than 255 actions in normal use).

Export as .png file.

Save and Load as .aff ("Ascii File Format") file, with embedded palette data.

Canvas resizing, cropping, flipping, and clearing (which can all be undone).

Customizable: default canvas size, default tile map, default palette and more can be set in the config file. Tile maps have a maximum of 256 tiles, and palettes have the same maximum of 256 colours.


ScreenShot

Download

Download (and maybe donate, although no payment is required): https://gum.co/AsciiDraw

Or just go and download with no email required: https://www.mediafire.com/?i4bb9ceplmo1d44

Future Features
Short term:
   Text Object: Write a string of text, keep as a "text object" separate from the canvas data so they are always editable
   Grid Manager: Grid toggle and customization
   Palette Manager: Change palette on the fly, swap palette colours, edit palette colours
   Tileset Manager: Change tileset on the fly
   Replace Tool: A tool to do essentially find and replace canvas-wide, replace any/all tile properties with another

Long term:
   Layers

Even longer term (i.e. may not happen):
   Animation, export as gif

Unsure (give feedback):
   More save/load/export types (framework is pretty modular, should be easy to add more but it depends what is wanted)
   Export as text? (would really only be fully compatible with utf8 tilsets like the included alt tileset)

[Lee]

-- Pre & Initial release images (linked to save bandwidth, all images in an album here: http://imgur.com/a/sLHCU#0)
http://i.imgur.com/9FUlB0b.png
http://i.imgur.com/y7lIitV.gif
http://i.imgur.com/T0dnfcK.png
http://i.imgur.com/jLETUsQ.gif

--- HOTFIX
http://i.imgur.com/RgwIe4W.png
http://i.imgur.com/OXgrhgz.png

I dun goofed, I called it Ascii Paint, but that's already a thing, no wonder the name sounded so good. I had this image in my mind of a paintbrush dripping ascii characters and I then thought "Ascii Paint!" that will surely be the best name for this program, but yeah... Out of respect I "rebranded" completely, also updated the program itself, usability polish and whatnot and added customizable undo history size.

[Lee]

--- BETA 2
http://i.imgur.com/8VYhhpA.gif

I finished up the select tool, that's selecting tiles, moving selected tiles around, cut, copy, paste, and also crop to selection instead of inputting values.

Note that everything I did here I could have done with shortcuts like ctrl+x and ctrl+v to cut and paste, and I did a couple of times, but I was using the menu bar to just show that it's there (and also because I added a fancy graying out when a command cannot be done).

Also now that I have done all the selection stuff the text thing I planned should be easier too as I can use a lot of the same code that I used for the selection object.

--- HOTFIX

I just checked it on another machine for the first time and it seems I forgot to link a dependency when I re-installed my IDE, I knew I had to link them but I had the intention of looking into ways to avoid the dependency... but real life got in the way and I subsequently forgot to follow up on that. That said I don't think it is even possible to bypass that dependency, which sucks as it bloats the size of the executable to nearly 3 times the size.

So, sorry to the select few that tried it and probably had it give an error but it's fixed now.

[Lee]

--- BETA 3
http://i.imgur.com/LhrvGbg.gif

The march of progress continues. More usability polish in various areas and more selection features such as image cycling, moving via the keyboard, flipping the selection. I also took out right click to deselect and replaced it with both (enter) and (ctrl+d), because these are the default photoshop shortcuts for deselect and it then makes right click consistently the same action which is better design.

--- BETA 4
http://i.imgur.com/3wzro3k.png

A minor update. Several small tweaks and behind the scenes stuff you probably wouldn't be able to notice, fixed a couple of issues as well. Most notably there is now a status bar that gets information printed to it instead of being drawn by the program as a bitmap font and taking up a lot of space. As in the above gif the selection information only appears when a selection has been made. Ignore the fact that the text and fill tools are in the tool list, no corresponding tool actually exists yet.

--- HOTFIX

Oh for christ sake... somehow, SOMEHOW, the compiler settings reverted themselves. I thought it was unusual that the program size had fallen dramatically... What the hell.

ughhhh... Updated the files.

[eigenbom]

Cool stuff mate! I had a blast working on Ascii-Paint, and there's a cool ascii animation thread buried in here somewhere. Anyway, have fun!

[Lee]

Thanks for the kind words! Still got a decent amount of work left on it though.

--- BETA 5


(original image size is somewhere around 1680x1050 but this is resized to ~40%)
Created a flood-fill implementation, got a little bit annoyed too whilst creating it... I started thinking about how I could do a flood-fill sometime around midnight, finished the implementation at about 2am and spent about 2 more hours getting increasingly frustrated trying to squash some bugs, turned out I just needed to sleep and then quickly go over it whilst sane. Only took a couple of lines to fix it at that point.

Also been thinking about how I can implement a replace tool gui, where you can replace a tile and/or foreground colour and/or background colour with something else. Also think this would be the best place for a palette colour swapping/editing. I think this will mean I end up using my own GUI instead of default windows controls... I think I will do that. I will use it for a grid manager as well. So there will be three special GUI windows: Palette Manager, Replace tool, and Grid manager. And they will be non-blocking so you can use them and keep the window open whilst you work in the main window.

When this is complete (v1: all above features + text tool + layers and layer manager + v2 file format with layer compatibility) I am going to clone the project and turn that into a tiled map making program. It will have most of the same features (all that are relevant) but it will use tile maps (of any size) with a scrollable tile select area and wont have foreground/background colour picking.

--- BETA 6

Several small hotfixes and behind the scenes stuff:





Most notably now arbitrarily sized and ordered tilesets work properly, also palette index indicators (the f/b/x on top of palette colour blocks) use the GUI font instead of relying on the tileset following ASCII standards.

Also added 'Select All' functionality.