ASCII-Paint version 0.1 released
prio...@gmail.com
I'd just like to announce my new project: ASCII-Paint. It is a drawing
program which uses ASCII characters instead of pixels. Although it can
be used by anyone I am trying to make it especially for rougelike
developers. The main reason I started working on it is because I
needed to do some drawings of how my rougelike would look without
writing lots of code. It uses the awesome libtcod (which I must say is
a pleasure to use).
This is the first released version so expect to see some bugs etc ;).
The project page can be found here:
http://code.google.com/p/ascii-paint/
Currently there is an exectuable version for windows and a source code
version.
Please check it out and let me know what you think.
- Shafqat
corremn
Cool project. I gave it a try and whipped up something very quick with
out reading the manual. Most issues I had were then cleared up by
reading said manual.
It took me about 3 minutes to get the hang of it.
Menu fading was weird but the ctrl-h fixes that issue. (RTFM!)
What is secondary stuff for. I cant get it to do anything.
Very nice features. Flood fill is great.
How about shortcuts for undo (ctrl-z) and redo.
Transparent background choice so I dont have to use the pick command
to set the correct background colour before adding a new character.
Once you select the Symbol you can unselect it, if you clicked it by
accident. So you have to reenter the symbol.
Also how do I get the symbols I dont know keyboard commands for, maybe
have a popup cymbol chooser. It would be good to show the ascii code
or manually enter it.
Also an option to choose font.
Manually setting the RGB numbers does not really work. I did change
the colour once but now I just am confused about it.
Greate job. My issues dont really take much away from the usability
of the program.
corremn
>
> - Show quoted text -
Ok so the fonts in a file, that cool, I still would like ascii code
support.
prio...@gmail.com
Thanks for the feedback.
> What is secondary stuff for. I cant get it to do anything.
If you draw using the right mouse button, then you use the secondary
brush. I added it so that you don't have to constantly change your
brush when trying to draw two different things again and again.
> How about shortcuts for undo (ctrl-z) and redo.
Yeah those are pretty important. I'll try to add keyboard shortcuts to
those and others soon.
> Transparent background choice so I dont have to use the pick command
> to set the correct background colour before adding a new character.
Nice idea! Should be easy to add. Can also add transparent foreground
and transparent symbol.
> Once you select the Symbol you can unselect it, if you clicked it by
> accident. So you have to reenter the symbol.
Right now you can press ESC to cancel symbol selection. But I guess I
could also add clicking to cancel selection
> Also how do I get the symbols I dont know keyboard commands for, maybe
> have a popup cymbol chooser. It would be good to show the ascii code
> or manually enter it.
Yeah a popup is a good idea especially for those weird symbols.
> Manually setting the RGB numbers does not really work. I did change
> the colour once but now I just am confused about it.
You have to hold-click on the color box to open the full screen color
selecter. To manually adjust the RGB values you can mouse-drag the
arrows next to the numbers or try clicking and editing the numbers.
Thanks for the helpful feedback. Most of the features you asked for
shouldn't be too difficult to implement. Also I still need to complete
some basic functionality like save and open dialog and the filled
circle.
glo...@gmail.com
> Hi everyone,
> I'd just like to announce my new project: ASCII-Paint. It is a drawing
> program which uses ASCII characters instead of pixels.
> - Shafqat
Awesome, it looks like just what I'll be needing in a few months if it
had one important feature. Saving to a plain .txt file. If I
understood correctly, the .asc save file contains the colors and
background symbols as well, so I can't copy-paste the plain foreground
ASCII symbols of the drawing directly into some data file from
the .asc without deleting all the other unnecessary data first. With
that little addition, it would save me a lot of time. Creating floors
with Notepad is quite a lot slower.
Another not as important, but nevertheless useful feature if it's not
too much work: the ability to change the size of the drawing.
Currently it's 80x50, but many roguelikes only use a 80x24 terminal,
minus the stats/message lines so it's even less for the actual map.
But it's not as necessary since I can just draw to that area and, if
you add the saving to a .txt file, just copy-paste that part of the
drawing from the file. Just a thought.
Oh, and I think it's worth mentioning that there's another ASCII
drawing tool out there as well, but it uses Curses+console, not SDL,
so it lacks the very useful line and circle modes, for instance. It's
here: http://www.tailpig.com/AsciiDraw/ if you want to see it. In any
case, good luck with the development, I'm sure it will help many
developers with designing static floors!
jice
Of course my opinion might be a bit biased, but I find it awesome !
Great work on the UI intuitiveness.
Also congratulations for having mastered the undocumented and rather
rough gui library !
Do you mind if I add it to libtcod's project page ?
Now some feature requests :
* I think the menu fading should rather be enabled/disabled in
options. When disabled, the GUI switch should use a more simple key,
like TAB instead of CTRL-H.
* A symbol picking screen would be cool, with the same principle as
the color picking screen
* it would be cool to have shortcuts to be able to easily lighten/
darken current foreground / background color by a small amount
(defined in options). You could do it only for the primary color to
avoid having 8 shortcuts, and add another shortcut to switch primary/
secondary settings
* it would be cool to have an opacity level on colors. Instead of
replacing the color by the new one, do a lerp between current color
and the new one
* be able to export independently background color (as png),
foreground color (as png) and text (as... text...)
Very impressive. Keep on the good work !
--
jice
jice
> On 29 jan, 02:52, priom...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hi everyone,
> > I'd just like to announce my new project: ASCII-Paint. It is a drawing
> > program which uses ASCII characters instead of pixels. Although it can
> > be used by anyone I am trying to make it especially for rougelike
> > developers. The main reason I started working on it is because I
> > needed to do some drawings of how my rougelike would look without
> > writing lots of code. It uses the awesome libtcod (which I must say is
> > a pleasure to use).
>
> > This is the first released version so expect to see some bugs etc ;).
> > The project page can be found here:
>
> >http://code.google.com/p/ascii-paint/
>
> > Currently there is an exectuable version for windows and a source code
> > version.
>
> > Please check it out and let me know what you think.
>
>
> * I think the menu fading should rather be enabled/disabled in
> options. When disabled, the GUI switch should use a more simple key,
> like TAB instead of CTRL-H.
> * A symbol picking screen would be cool, with the same principle as
> the color picking screen
> * it would be cool to have shortcuts to be able to easily lighten/
> darken current foreground / background color by a small amount
> (defined in options). You could do it only for the primary color to
> avoid having 8 shortcuts, and add another shortcut to switch primary/
> secondary settings
> * it would be cool to have an opacity level on colors. Instead of
> replacing the color by the new one, do a lerp between current color
> and the new one
> * be able to export independently background color (as png),
> foreground color (as png) and text (as... text...)
>
Oh and another very important one :
* import background or foreground color from a png, import text from a
text file
--
jice
jice
> On 29 jan, 10:47, jice <jice.nos...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On 29 jan, 02:52, priom...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > > Hi everyone,
> > > I'd just like to announce my new project: ASCII-Paint. It is a drawing
> > > program which uses ASCII characters instead of pixels. Although it can
> > > be used by anyone I am trying to make it especially for rougelike
> > > developers. The main reason I started working on it is because I
> > > needed to do some drawings of how my rougelike would look without
> > > writing lots of code. It uses the awesome libtcod (which I must say is
> > > a pleasure to use).
>
> > > This is the first released version so expect to see some bugs etc ;).
> > > The project page can be found here:
>
> > >http://code.google.com/p/ascii-paint/
>
> > > Currently there is an exectuable version for windows and a source code
> > > version.
>
> > > Please check it out and let me know what you think.
>
>
> * import background or foreground color from a png, import text from a
> text file
>
erm.. last one I promise :
* being able to use another font with different character size and
especially different layout
--
jice
Ido Yehieli
>
> Please check it out and let me know what you think.
>
> - Shafqat
Just played with it for a minute, since I am not at home.
It seems awesome! Much better than I expected, great UI.
I concur with the request to add "export to plain-text" functionality
- that is absolutely necessary for a project like this one. Maybe
export to 2 files, one with the characters and the other with numbers/
tuples for the colors?
That way everyone can write his import function to either just import
the text 'image' from your program or to also take advantage of the
colors.
Keep up the good work!
-Ido.
corremn
>
> I concur with the request to add "export to plain-text" functionality
> - that is absolutely necessary for a project like this one. Maybe
> export to 2 files, one with the characters and the other with numbers/
> tuples for the colors?
>
> That way everyone can write his import function to either just import
> the text 'image' from your program or to also take advantage of the
> colors.
>
myself as my engine takes care of colours internally.
If you get ascii output out before the 7drl date I will definately use
your program for at least for one level design, and more for secret
levels.
I think this sure beats notepad.
I wonder if level design before the 7drl contest is started is
classified as cheating?
prio...@gmail.com
implemented the following:
- Popup symbol chooser
- Export to txt (can't believe I forgot to include that)
- CTRL+Z shortcut for undo, CTRL+Y shortcut for redo
- Menu hiding now controlled by TAB
- Menu transparency removed(Or do you prefer to have it as a third
hide option?)
- Made the color chooser screen stay open until the user clicks a color
(Or do you prefer to keep it open as long as you keep holding mouse
button down?)
Currently I am working on "drawing no symbol, background or foreground
for a brush" as suggested by corremn. This will allow you, for
example, to *just* modify the background color of a cell without
affecting its symbol and foreground color.
@jice
Your tcod-gui library is very easy to use and quite functional. As you
can probably tell, I used your hmtool as the main inspiriation for the
UI. As they say 'Good code is the best documentation'. Thanks, it
would be awesome if you could include ASCII-Paint in libtcod's project
page.
Thanks for your suggestions. As you can see I have implemented the
first two. As for the others:
- I could add a lighten/darken tool later. (Maybe working a bit like
GIMP's dodge/burn)
- Switch brushes operation sounds handy(and easy to implement ;) )
- I could add an 'alpha' value for brushes later
- As for exporting the background, foreground and text separately, I
thought of another idea to make it easy to access them below.
- Importing background, foreground and text sounds interesting. The
text sounds simple enough but how about importing background and
foreground. Will each pixel represent the color for a cell or each
10x10 block?
- As for using different fonts, sizes and layouts, I need to first
learn about using different character sets and stuff which you
recently added to libtcod.
Thanks for making the awesome libtcod. BTW there are a few issues with
libtcod-gui which I'd like to discuss later(maybe on the libtcod
forums).
@Ido and corremn
As I stated above, I've implemented the export to txt functionality.
This will create a test.txt file when you click 'Save'. For extracting
the color info etc I have another plan: I am planning to distribute
'load_asc.h' and 'load_asc.cpp'(or .c) as a small library to load
ASCII-Paint's .asc files. With that you should be able to easily open
and examine .asc files within your code and extract whatever
information you like. This is not yet implemented but it shouldn't be
too hard to do.
Finally, I will be going away for the weekend so I'll not be able to
work on ASCII-Paint or answer your posts. I plan to release the
implemented features as well some others in a 0.2 version soon after
coming back.
Thanks again for the positive feedback.
prio...@gmail.com
Just a quick update before I leave for the weekend. I've added a few
more stuff to ASCII-Paint that should hopefully make it easier to use.
Here is a drawing I made with the latest version:
http://i39.tinypic.com/snditk.png
See you all hopefully in a few days!
jice
> - As for exporting the background, foreground and text separately, I
> thought of another idea to make it easy to access them below.
> - Importing background, foreground and text sounds interesting. The
> text sounds simple enough but how about importing background and
> foreground. Will each pixel represent the color for a cell or each
> 10x10 block?
A cell per pixel. For a 80x50 console, you get a 80x50 png. Being able
to export and import them would make it possible to use paint.net/gimp/
photoshop to tweak them, and it would be much easier to import them in
the game.
>
> Thanks for making the awesome libtcod. BTW there are a few issues with
> libtcod-gui which I'd like to discuss later(maybe on the libtcod
> forums).
>
No problem, or you can contact me by mail directly.
> As I stated above, I've implemented the export to txt functionality.
> This will create a test.txt file when you click 'Save'. For extracting
> the color info etc I have another plan: I am planning to distribute
> 'load_asc.h' and 'load_asc.cpp'(or .c) as a small library to load
> ASCII-Paint's .asc files. With that you should be able to easily open
> and examine .asc files within your code and extract whatever
> information you like. This is not yet implemented but it shouldn't be
> too hard to do.
Then put both import and export functions in the library. I might be
interested to add this feature in libtcod too. This way, you could be
able to create an offscreen console directly from a .asc file.
--
jice
Simon Richard Clarkstone
> I'd just like to announce my new project: ASCII-Paint. It is a drawing
> program which uses ASCII characters instead of pixels. Although it can
> be used by anyone I am trying to make it especially for rougelike
> developers.
Timofei will be pleased!
> The main reason I started working on it is because I
> needed to do some drawings of how my rougelike would look without
> writing lots of code.
Ah, you are writing one too.
;-)
http://common-lisp.net/project/lifp/rouge.htm
--
Simon Richard Clarkstone:
s.r.cl?rkst?n?@dunelm.org.uk / s?m?n_cl?rkst?n?@yahoo.co.uk
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