Dpaint 4.5 style ranges interface

[jimhigson]

dpaint 4.5 came with a ranges dialog outside of the palette dialog:

This is really useful for pixel art because the ranges don't have to be contiguous on the palette - the user can pick and choose any combination of palette colours in any order by dragging+dropping into the range.

In Dpaint 4.5 this dialog (and the palette dialog) snaps to the bottom of the screen because it is drawn using a vertical interrupt that puts the screen partially into HAM mode. No need to go into HAM mode on modern hardware, but the snapping to the bottom works quite well I think.

[jimhigson]

This could also maybe be tied to the option to have a dpaint 4.5 style palette too:

The 4.5 palette was quite a strange beast. Here I have a 16 colour image, but it allows more than 16 colours to be stored in the palette - but with only the first 16 being usable in the image. This seems weird, but it was useful for making cycles that contained 'extra' colours. Eg, a 16 colour image that cycled through 32 colours.

It is also quite useful for games with alternative palettes or palette swop techniques to store colours from the 'other' palette in the extra area

[mriale]

@jimhigson
Thanks for the feature requests.

I'm not a fan of the palette requestor from DPaint IV. It always felt "wrong" to me like I wasn't fully in control or something. I really do like the palette requestor from DPaint I-III, though, so that's what I implemented (with a few added features).

The DPaint IV Range requestor is interesting to me, though, but I think there is probably a better way to do it since we aren't limited to HAM mode or 256 colors now. I'm not sure I really want to work on that right now, though.

[Sleuthgame]

The range editor from Brilliance 2 was quite similar (I don't remember who copied who).

[jimhigson]

yep, I understand not liking the 4.x palette tool - it was very clever how it went into HAM mode for just part of the screen, but it also looked quite strange with the HAM three pixel ramping-up between colours.

But I think the ability to create non-contiguous ranges was a bit of a game-changer for pixel art with colours in many ranges. Eg, you could have multiple ranges all ending on a common black at their dark end.

A modern range editor combining the best of multiple dpaint versions would probably have a floating window interface like 1..3, but the ability to drag/drop colours into ranges in any order like 4.x

@Sleuthgame - great screenshot collection. I never used Brilliance so I never realised it was so similar to dpaint 4, especially for ranges

[Sleuthgame]

Yes, theses range editor were powerful. But as Ryan is the only one programming PyDPainter, it will take some time. We just finish the new gradients and dithering. Patterns and layers are on the todo list and we need to keep it the most bug free as possible.

My source : http://obligement.free.fr/articles/logiciels_creation_graphique_2d.php you probably can translate the text from French using google translate with the url.

[jimhigson]

Yeah, I get that - as someone who maintains (or did until I didn't have enough time) a once somewhat well-known open source lib myself, I understand it is a lot of work. It's a tricky design ask too to put the v4 capabilities into the v3(ish) dialog. Eg, once you've decided you want to allow non-palette colours in ranges for cycles, that pretty much changes the whole shape of the dialog past the usual 16/32 colours.

I'll have to do an experiment to see if non-contiguous ranges set up in dpaint V.5 are honoured in pydpainter. I don't know what the byte-level storage is in the iff file so no idea if that's likely to work, but would be an acceptable middle ground maybe.

[mriale]

@jimhigson

The CRNG IFF chunk is what older versions of DPaint use. PyDPainter supports this fully. DPaint IV and higher will also write this chunk for color ranges are contiguous.

The DRNG IFF chunk is what DPaint IV uses for its non-contiguous ranges:

https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/ILBM_IFF_Interleaved_Bitmap#ILBM.DRNG

DRNG would require additional support in PyDPainter to support. I would like to implement this in the future but not right now. I'll leave this issue open as a placeholder.