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2005-10-17 22:18

Mirage

Registered: Jan 2003
Posts: 113

New PC paintprogram for c64

Some of you might already know this, but i've been working on a paintprogram of my own for some time now.

It's based on Paint.Net (http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/ (check it out, it's great (and free!))), so it has layer functionality, effects, all default tools, antialiasing, unlimited history and more fancy stuff you'll only find in that program and photoshop but my adaptation also has filters to convert to c64 formats (FLI, koala and single color bitmap but also the option to convert to sprites and more).
On top of that you can paint and draw in single and multicolour mode with all 16 c64 colours and a transparent colour.

Here's a screenshot of what it currently looks like and shows some of the features:

http://www.tehwinnar.com/timanthes001.jpg

It currently doesn't export anything, because i'm not quite sure how to implement that yet, so any suggestions are welcome :)

For the moment i'd like to get some feedback and in about a month (I have to put together a document first on how to use it) I'll be putting out a first alpha version which people can test (this requires windows 2000/server 2003/XP and the .Net framework 1.1)

Cheers,

Mirage/Focus

... 91 posts hidden. Click here to view all posts....

2005-10-23 06:36

Jazzcat

Registered: Feb 2002
Posts: 1044

Lars: cool to see this tool finally. Awesome stuff. I've seen much work done in it and it certainly will help those artists out there.

Regarding if done on C64 or PC. As long as the finished product works 100% on the real thing, I don't care where it is done. I prefer C64 and people watching my productions on a real C64. Emulators and PC should be regarded as tools only. This is an age-old debate which will never end - why does it keep coming up? Because people have true C64 spirit! Hail to you all!

2005-11-03 23:07

Mirage

Registered: Jan 2003
Posts: 113

Jailbird/not Krill:

You were right in calling it a retouch-o-mat before, but i've been implementing realtime colorclashes and all that in the last 4 nights... I hope the next couple of screenshots will take your doubts away :)

Every layer you create will have a set of restrictions like this:

http://www.tehwinnar.com/layeroptions.jpg

When I say layer, this means you will have the ability to create sprite layers with their own restrictions aswell (or stuff like singlecolor bitmaps interlaced with multicolor bitmaps), which will go in front or behind other (bitmap) layers:

http://www.tehwinnar.com/layers.jpg

I've already implemented several restriction modes, like '3 colors per char, don't paint over stuff i've already got in my picture'... which looks something like this:

http://www.tehwinnar.com/clash01.jpg (original beautiful koala picture by Sander/Focus)

You'll notice that colorclashes are indicated as bright red colors... I'll come back to this later...
You'll also notice that i was saying '3 colors per char' instead of '4 colors per char'... This is because every character can also contain transparent pixels that will show the background or the layer below instead.

Another restriction mode is the '3 colors per char, remove colors that are least used', which looks like this:

http://www.tehwinnar.com/clash02.jpg

With all these colorclashes in place it's easy to lose track of what the picture was originally supposed to look like, so you can always switch off your restrictions to see what the picture looks like without the clashes (and because the program does all the converting in realtime you can then, after you've checked the original bitmap, switch back to restricted mode to correct your errors):

http://www.tehwinnar.com/clash03.jpg

Going back to your original restriction settings, you can easily get rid of any clashes and make the picture look like this (this took me no more than a minute to complete):

http://www.tehwinnar.com/clash04.jpg

Now comes the beauty of all this... because the program does it's converting in realtime you'll get your results back immediately...

This is what a character looked like before (bright red denoting the colorclash which needed to be fixed):

http://www.tehwinnar.com/clash05.jpg

Once I removed (i.e. replaced with gray pixels) the 2 orange pixels that were not really relevant in this character i automatically ended up with this:

http://www.tehwinnar.com/clash06.jpg

An other option was to replace all the bright red colors with a color that was already present in the character... All up to you

-------------------------------------

Another restriction mode I've implemented just before I wrote this post is the FLI-8-lines-per-char mode

Without going in too much detail now, here is a screenshot of me selecting a piece of the picture and copying it around:

http://www.tehwinnar.com/clash07.jpg (original pancake mix/overlayrastertje FLI picture by Hein/Focus+Onslaught+Vision,etc.)

(I apologise for the number of men in that picture, I could have easily picked the woman or the dragon to copy)

While I'm moving the selected piece of bitmap around I can see the colorclashes appear and disappear (i can select anything and it's not restricted to any 8x8 grid)... All in realtime and still running at normal speeds, ofcourse...
I've also tried painting with anti-aliased brushes, using massive shapetools with different anti-aliasing settings and dithering settings... little problems with colorclashes whatsoever :)

This is all still work in progress so you might notice some weird stuff going on in the screenshots (i.e. the layers in the first screenshots are in reverse order when you compare them to photoshop layers, etc) but at least it rarely ever crashes ;)

So there... hope you're atleast a little bit excited ;)

2005-11-09 08:11

Frantic

Registered: Mar 2003
Posts: 1641

Go on! :)

2005-11-09 08:42

hollowman

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 474

yes, please do!

2005-11-09 11:55

JackAsser

Registered: Jun 2002
Posts: 2014

@Mirage: I am impressed!!!, please go on and make it stable and usable so that it doesn't end up in yet another unfinished product (but maybe it already is, I havn't tried it!). =)

2005-11-09 12:23

Cruzer

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 1048

Go Mirage GO!!

Looking forward to nov. 18th :)

2005-11-09 15:44

MRT
Account closed

Registered: Sep 2005
Posts: 149

Quote: By the way. I have seen and tried a lot of those wunderprograms for pixelling on PC. Still, even so buggy as it is, I find Oswald's the most usable crossplatform pixel-editor. Once he finishes P1 and charm away the nastiest bugs, I think it will be the most/least a _pixel graphician_ will ever need for painting on PC.

Well, I really appreciate Mirage's effort, but according to the screenshot, this is another piece of retouch-o-mat for helping out those who know little about pixelling but wanna do radical magic.

COOOOLLLLL, now I don't need a graphics artist anymore... ;-)

2005-11-09 16:20

TDJ

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 1879

Quote: COOOOLLLLL, now I don't need a graphics artist anymore... ;-)

No no no!

It has to be VERY clear that although Mirage's program rocks it can NOT be used in the making of a real demo. All demo graphics should be drawn on a real c64, attached to a real monitor, with a real arcade joystick. Otherwise your demo will suck ;-)

2005-11-09 16:44

T.M.R
Account closed

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 749

Shit, that explains a lot... i've always used a Zipstik rather than an arcade! =-(

2005-11-09 22:34

Mirage

Registered: Jan 2003
Posts: 113

@Cruzer:

Might not make it before november 18th, but don't worry, it's not like i'm making a 'meet crest' demo... this will definately be releaseworthy before the end of the year, probably much sooner :)

Hein has been and still is an extremely helpful alpha-tester and i've been able to straighten out all of the crash-bugs (Hell, I wouldn't have even dared resizing/rotating a palettized koala-picture to a non-8x8-aligned picture so the character data is completely out of sync, but some people try anything to make the program crash... long story short, i didn't know people who didn't code the program could make it crash so easily, so that took more time for me to sort out then i originally thought :/)

Btw. loved the yktr stuff, more sequels, please :)

@Frantic/WVL/hollowman/Krill/other coders:

Thanks for the feedback :) I'm looking into exporting stuff right now... i've only been programming for c64 on pc for the last 2 months or so, so i don't know what kind of binary/ASM chunks you would like me to export...

I was thinking something like this:

1. a file with picture-information (size, width, height, format (hires/lowres/indexed chars/sprite data/etc.)
2. a file with bitmap data in standard assembly language (i.e. bitmapdata .byte $00, $01, $10, $11, etc)
3. one or more files with charhigh/charlow/colorram data in the same standard assembly byte format
4. optional data like spritecolours, etc.

I'm pretty sure i'm not up to date with most compilers/linkers on pc. I'm pretty comfortable with using TASS/TSLINK/PRGBin2ByteReader/PET2ASC/c1541, but some of you might be using different tools/parameters... Should I also export pure binary-byte chunks for easier linking?

Also, I was thinking of not including any start-addresses for any of the datablocks, but maybe there are good reasons to do this after all (i'm thinking relative position sequential loaders, krill? :))

All feedback is very welcome :)

I will ofcourse also start to implement exporting to .prg .koa .fli and .d64 formats (with viewers for the exported picture on that same .d64), but for now i just want to finish basic chunk-exporting first...

By heart, i'm a pixel-artist... All this layered bitmap-surface-GDI-stuff can make me somewhat sick at times, but the sooner I get this stuff out of the way the sooner i'll be on my mery way of pixeling (hopely lovely) stuff again :)

Cheers,
Lars.

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