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[08--n7.r6-79.84]

It's very good software.

[happymonster]

Thanks!

The problem with a resolution independent paint program which uses so many icons is how to make the icons look good at so many different screenmodes. I don't particularly wish to draw dozens of icons at all different sizes..

I know from my work on Space Hero Command that the best screensize for clean pixel scaling is a height of 120 pixels. This scales perfectly (or very well) into most PC screensizes: 480 (x3), 600 (x4), 720 (x5), 840 (x6), 960 (x7), 1080 (x8), 1200 (x9), etc.. It doesn't meet most sizes exactly, but it's very close.

There is one big problem with this screen size, it's very very low-resolution. This can work with some games, but for icons in D-Pixel it's just too small.

So I turned to the next good screen size I could find, which is of 180 pixels in height. This fits very well with the main screen modes in use today 768p (720, x4), 1080p (1080, x6) and 900p (900, x 5). As screen modes increase then the gap between them will also increase and this means that 180 should be fine for pixel scaling at higher resolutions. It's only at these low-end resolutions that it's hard to find a good value that fits neatly into these screen sizes.

180p is still low, Even with larger icons than with the original D-Pixel running on a netbook the icons can only be 12 x 12 in size (with no gap between them). For a lot of the icons this means that it's more likely to be 10 x 10 in size. So I did a series of mock-ups with 10 x 10 icons, window areas and the palette location and size blocked in to see how it would look and feel.

It kind of worked, you could do meaningful icons but they were very blocky and the font was a bit too large (I tried 3 x 4 which was OK, but a bit hard to read and 3 x 5 which was a bit too big).

In the end I wasn't happy with the fact that everything looked so low resolution and especially with the difficulty with the text being too large to fit with the icons.

That led onto my next idea...

[happymonster]

The idea was to keep the low-res icons but use a truetype font at different resolutions for the text (as in Android, iOS, etc..). However despite trying a lot of different fonts I could not find one that I liked and one that seemed to fit. The problem was that high-resolution fonts with very low-res icons just didn't work.

Then I reasoned that perhaps the text didn't have to always be the same size for every resolution. If I kept a pixel font style but with a higher resolution then the text would look better albeit not always at the same relative pixel size. That's what I did so the text size is the same at x2, x4, x6 scale resolutions, but smaller at x3, x5, x7, resolutions.

I did this by just halving the scale factor for the text, so x3 = x1, x4 = x2, x5 = x2, x6 = x3, etc.. This now looked better, but again the low-res icons were still a bit of a problem.

So.. I thought why not do the same with the icons - but keeping the same consistent clickable area across screenmodes whist having the icon graphics themselves appearing a bit smaller at some low-end screen resolutions. Not a perfect solution, but in testing it actually works quite well.

Now I have a font size which allows smaller text, and I can have icons of 20 x 20 instead of 10 x 10. This incidentally is the same size as the original icon gfx which means I can re-use a lot of the icons.

I hope that makes sense, I'm a bit tired tonight!

[happymonster]

One of the resulting problems from having bigger icons than in the original is that the GUI has to take up more space horizontally to fit in the same number of icons. I could reduce the number of icons horizontally but I think that the GUI would feel more cramped that way. If I keep the new larger width then the palette area has to grow and that means wider but shorter GUI areas for tool options.

Neither was particularly appealing to me! So.. I've made the palette show square swatches for 128 palette entries ( 16 x 8 ) or rectangular ones for the full 256 entries. Although a compromise this does mean that I can have larger tool option areas which is something I wanted to do in the original.

[happymonster]

Oh, with the larger icons I've also had to redo the main tool icons - now reduced to 15 and put in one vertical strip to the right of the palette and tool options.

In fact I'm simplifying a lot of the look. There will be no brush icons or image icons permanently on display (instead you will go through tool icons). There will be less colours used overall - no rainbow of coloured icon hues!

Once I've finished the first stage of some of the redone tool options I'll post some screenshots.

[happymonster]

Looking at D-Pixel with a fresh set of eyes means that I can also see some areas that I can improve - like editing stencils and some of the palette tools.

I'd like to add new stuff as well. Just being a bit wary as my motivation for programming is not what it once was.. 

[Noogai03]

Please make the save dialog appear in FRONT of the window; it's a nuisance having to minimize every time

[happymonster]

Oh, I never saw that on my PC..

Here's what the freehand draw tool options, palette and main tools currently looks like in the new version:

[Noogai03]

Just to clarify: this is almost an insanely awesome pixel art editor, and I love some of the features. However my earlier issue is annoying and .png export would be REALLY useful, perhaps with some kind of transparency (although that's not important atm)
One of my favourite features ever from other programs is the ability to customize what right-click does - with several options. The most important for me are: sample colour (i.e. rightclick is the eyedropper), paint secondary colour, erase.
Make sure the eyedropper is REALLY fast to use - i.e. just holding down its hotkey temporarily enables it until you let go - key in GIMP, Photoshop, etc

[happymonster]

Thanks!

Converting all the options to the new size is taking a while - but making progress!

[Noogai03]

The main download link is on your website, but please can you keep another mirror (from a download site) up in case you take your website down? It makes me so so sad when that happens and I don't have backups 

[happymonster]

Thumbnails now show more detail in the higher resolution screen modes:



Working on making the new panels work..

[happymonster]

I now also scale up the various mouse cursor graphics, which means I've had to redraw them at a smaller size so they don't look too large.

[happymonster]

Mostly I'm working on the new UI look and making everything work. But I have had time to revise some of the palette tools (copy, swap & ramp) so that they work with the pens set by both mouse buttons as soon as you click the icon. Previously you had to then set the destination which is more powerful, but felt a bit clunky at times (at least to me!)

It's coming together anyway..

[rundown]

Can't wait to test it when you implemented the animation options. Looks very promising.

[happymonster]

Well any animation options won't be any time soon I'm afraid. I would hope to have them in there at some point in the future though!

[happymonster]

It's clunky and slow but I've made D-Pixel hide the screen when opening the fileselector and then showing the screen again when done. I'm not helped by the fact that I'm not good at low-level windows programming and I'm using a friend's engine which is multi-platform but really designed for games.

I'm now working on improving the sliders in the gui (the look, feel and functionality).

[happymonster]

I've added left and right arrows for the sliders. At the moment I have triangle style markers for the sliders. I tried a normal bar style slider but it didn't work well for the palette sliders where it helps to see the precise point.

I'm thinking about whether I should have both styles dependent on the type of slider. That might work better..

[happymonster]

I need to add support to scroll the palette up and down with the mouse wheel so you can access all of the colours. So I'm adding that now..

[happymonster]

Well that was surprisingly easy.. I've now implemented this and I've added separate scroll position values for each image in your workspace (which are saved as well).