HCGS
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Posts
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Posts posted by HCGS
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Drawing/scaling from center is awesome! As a matter of fact, I even kinda assumed we already had it. I even tried it a few times, but nothing happened, so I would think I just didn't know the keybind
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Tile Count v1.0
Render > Tile Count
Description: Draws a counter on tiled, spritesheet-like images.
Download:
TileCount.zip (Zip with bat installer)
TileCount.dll (Just the dll)
Before
After
UI
Long description
This plugin counts the tiles (or sprites) of a spritesheet-like image and draws a number on top of each one. It divides the entire image in a grid, and as long as there is at least a single pixel with an alpha greater than Alpha threshold on a tile, this tile will be counted. The counting goes from top left to bottom right. If this sounds complicated, I think the example images above will do a better explanation.
Important notes
- This plugin assumes your image is already properly divided into a grid.
- This assumes all grid cells have the same size.
- You can set Alpha threshold to -1; this will cause every cell in the grid to be counted.
- This does not take your selection into consideration, it works with the entire image. I might fix this if I ever get around to it.
Less important notes
This is my first plugin. I really needed to count a lot of sprites for a project and there was no way I was going to do that manually, so I wrote this in like, 3 hours... sorry if it lacks features or has bugs. I thought it may be useful to others, that's why I'm sharing it here. I think someone might even find another use for it, like... making a calendar. If you're interested, here's the source code: TileCount.cs
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13 minutes ago, toe_head2001 said:
Most people don't use tabs with any C style language.
A shame, really.
13 minutes ago, toe_head2001 said:That's completely subjective. The same exact things can be said about tabs. I'm not even joking.
The standout issue with tabs is variable tab width among different environments. For you a tab width might appears as 40px, but for other people it might be 80px.
This is very evident in web browsers. For some reason, a tab is about double the normal (if there is such a thing) width in a web browser.
A space is always the same width.
Yes, I know it's completely subjective. That's why I think it's silly to enforce this... (I'm not talking about you - I blame Microsoft!)
Personally, I think it's a great thing that tabs have variable width! To me, indents are logical separators, not visual ones. One indent equals one tab, and its visual width is just your personal preference.
Anyway...
52 minutes ago, toe_head2001 said:it would be very easy to add an option to CodeLab for tabs. However, all the templates within CodeLab are hard-coded with spaces. So basically, you would easily end up with a document mixed with tabs and spaces.
Well, it's not really a big deal, replacing manually is quite easy. Or actually, it would just be easier to simply to do a replace in the templates before adding them to the documents if the user has some "use tabs" option enabled.
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Just now, toe_head2001 said:
Why would you want to use Tabs in C# ?
Well. I always use tabs on every language. It's just better. Spaces are slower to work with, can mess indents accidentally and, in general, make no sense at all. I know there's a bunch of code style conventions in C#, but is spaces vs. tabs really one of them? I've been using C# for years and have never heard of this.
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Aww, no option to use tabs instead of spaces?
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56 minutes ago, toe_head2001 said:
There is also the r/paintdotnet subreddit, which includes Reddit Chat.
That sub is nearly abandoned. I'd even say this forum is more active...
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18 minutes ago, toe_head2001 said:
That's not surprising if you consider the audience.
The people here on the forum probably prefer to use forums and not chats.
And people that prefer to use chats aren't here on the forum; otherwise there would probably be people saying that using Discord is a good idea.
Yeah, it makes sense. It is a shame, though. Most people nowadays don't have the patience to use a forum. And I'm sure a large part (possibly most?) of the userbase has never even visited this place.
You know, I think a lot about the sate of this software and of the community. I wonder how many active PDN users are there. A few million? A couple thousand at most? It's a great tool (even if it has some big issues), but I feel like it has fallen down to the state of becoming too niche. I still remember the "golden age" of PDN, back when a lot of people genuinely thought it would eventually replace the original MS Paint. I was one of these people.
I know it's not the case, but whenever I use PDN (which is almost on a daily basis, professionally at that!) I always feel like I'm the only one out there still using it. Like a stubborn old man who refuses to learn something new. I rarely see a PDN user "in the wild", and whenever people ask me what I use for editing they get baffled when I tell them it's a 2005 tool named "paint.net". Well, it's really good, I just wish more people knew about it!
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5 hours ago, toe_head2001 said:
There's an unofficial one that @LoudSilence
is running.https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/117015-i-made-a-paintnet-unofficial-discord-server/
That pinned stuff is still relevant, but I think I know what you mean.
Judging by the responses to that thread, it seem like this wasn't a very welcome idea. Oh well.
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Is there one, and if there isn't, could there be an official PDN Discord server? What are your thoughts on this? It's a relatively small community, I don't think it would be hard to manage one (or finding mods). It would make sharing stuff, asking for help, and just talking about this tool in general much, much easier. And faster.
Sometimes I feel like we're stuck in 2007. I get a strange feeling every time I open this forum and see stuff from decades ago pinned...
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45 minutes ago, HCGS said:
Quick report of a bug I notice every time there's an update but always forget to post here... (oops)
The Portuguese translation of a lot of text in the following wizard is all messed up, here are the fixes:
Original:
A instalação de paint.net foi completada com sucesso.
Fixed:
A instalação do paint.net foi completada com sucesso.
Original:
Você também pode apoiar o paint.net por ter comprado na loja de Windows.
Fixed:
Você também pode apoiar o paint.net comprando-o na Microsoft Store.
Original:
As atualizações são completamente automáticas..--sem mais atualizar avisos, já!
Fixed:
As atualizações são completamente automáticas. Chega de avisos para atualizar!
Although that last green bit is not the most accurate translation from English, it sounds better than the closer "Sem mais avisos de atualização, já!" which has a literal translation "sem mais" (no more) which is not very natural in Portuguese.
Oh, and I just noticed that in the first blue paragraph, paint.net is written as "Paint.Net" whereas it's "paint.net" everywhere else. Shouldn't this be fixed too?
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Quick report of a bug I notice every time there's an update but always forget to post here... (oops)
The Portuguese translation of a lot of text in the following wizard is all messed up, here are the fixes:
Original:
A instalação de paint.net foi completada com sucesso.
Fixed:
A instalação do paint.net foi completada com sucesso.
Original:
Você também pode apoiar o paint.net por ter comprado na loja de Windows.
Fixed:
Você também pode apoiar o paint.net comprando-o na Microsoft Store.
Original:
As atualizações são completamente automáticas..--sem mais atualizar avisos, já!
Fixed:
As atualizações são completamente automáticas. Chega de avisos para atualizar!
Although that last green bit is not the most accurate translation from English, it sounds better than the closer "Sem mais avisos de atualização, já!" which has a literal translation "sem mais" (no more) which is not very natural in Portuguese.
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Didn't know about that one, @Djisves, thanks! It really seems pretty powerful and useful. Installed it immediately! Unfortunately it suffers from the same curse that all plugins have - everything has to be stuck in a tiny window with sliders for everything. As someone who relies on pixel perfect precision and and fine tuning (which require a lot of zooming and moving around the canvas), sadly I won't be able to use it very often. But thanks for the recommendation anyway!
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I see. Thanks!! I'm looking forward to those future big updates
Still do wish that we had at least line spacing though... and no auto scrolling. Guess I'll wait ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Hey,
In all my years using this excellent program, I've noticed that in comparison to pretty much any image editing software, our text tool in particular, is pretty limited. Like, a little bit TOO limited. I think that it deserves a bit of love. And no, I don't mean straight up rewriting everything and adding text layers since I'm well aware of how much of a technical burden that would be. So here are a few small suggestions of things I think we're lacking, more or less in order of importance/difficulty to implement.
- Line spacing. To me, this sounds at the same time extremely useful and easy to implement (just a new field in the tool options and some code to move every line by X pixels...). I'm constantly having to write text then manually move lines closer together, which honestly is really tedious, boring and potentially imprecise. Line spacing is found on nearly every single image/text editing tool, and it would make a lot of people's lives easier.
- Character spacing. Basically the same arguments as line spacing. Not as useful, but probably equally easy to add.
- Selecting text. I'm not quite sure how hard would this be to implement, but considering every image and text editor ever (including the original Microsoft Paint!) has it, probably not too much. Also would be a really, really useful feature. Having to delete huge blocks of text by holding backspace is not just painfully slow, but also sounds a bit humiliating...
- Grouped font families. Also unsure how hard this would be to implement, but probably not very. As someone who has hundreds of fonts installed, having to scroll through every single variant of all of them in a single list is really time consuming. Inkscape does it and is open source - if I was the single developer working on PDN, you bet I'd take a look at their code, haha
- Editing parts of the text independently. This refers to the ability to make certain parts of the text bold, italic, have a different font, text size... This relies on having text selection. If we had this, I honestly might as well kiss Rick on the lips, because it would be INSANELY useful.
- Scrolling the mouse wheel while changing the font size should snap to the closest value on the list, not the first. Is this even a suggestion or a bug report? Basically, go to the text tool, set the font size to 25 and scroll up on the font size list. It should snap to 24, but it goes all the way back to 8. This is really annoying :^/
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The entirety of this topic about auto scrolling. If this was fixed, it would save me hours of stress every week.
I don't want to sound demanding or entitled to beg for features, so this small list is just a few minor and easy to implement (I think?) additions that would hopefully make everyone's lives easier while not being too much of a burden on our single developer
Thanks for making Paint.NET, and onwards for a great future for this software!
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Maybe I want to type text that is partially visible. Or, in most cases, I want to move the text to the correct place after typing. The auto scrolling is really annoying since it makes it super hard to move text around when I'm zoomed in on an edge/corner of the canvas. Or just panning around, really, since it auto scrolls when I hold ctrl to zoom.
I don't think anything should ever auto scroll in any user interface without the user's input. As I said, it would be nice if that was toggleable in the settings. Because it has only caused me trouble so far...
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When you're using the text tool and are writing stuff near the edge of the canvas, every time you press a key (even ctrl, which you have to hold in order to pan the view!) the entire canvas view moves around to make the text visible. Why is that a thing? I'm sorry but, in my opinion, that seriously is the single most frustrating thing about PDN... I wish this feature was at least toggleable. Or removed entirely.
On that note, I also feel like the canvas view should allow me to go pan more than just 50% beyond the size of the image. It would make my life a lot easier haha
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Quote
Changed: Holding Ctrl when starting to move a selection with the Move Selected Pixels tool will no longer leave behind a copy of the selected area
Yes.
YES. Thank you so much for this. Thanks for the update in general, but a specifically huge thanks for this one change.
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Wow, @Azrhod! These look delightful!
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Whenever I try to rotate a very small selection of pixels, I get strange, unexpected behaviour. This seems to only occurs if the selection's area is less than 16 pixels.
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3 minutes ago, Ego Eram Reputo said:
Plugin Index is closing in on 2 million hits, far eclipsing any other thread on the forum. Metric enough?
Well, that's interesting. But I wouldn't say it's enough without knowing how many users does Paint.NET actually have. Also, wouldn't that value count multiple visits by the same person?
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2 minutes ago, Ego Eram Reputo said:
Bwahhahaha. That's THE most daft post I've seen on this forum in a long time. 😵
Hahahahaha..... Honestly, that's gold that is! Have you considered comedy as a career?
Generally, most people don't use plugins on any software, but I could be wrong. Most of the users I've talked to outside of this forum didn't know about them. But we don't have any actual metrics, do we?
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@BoltBait oh, come on. We need to stop saying "oh there's a workaround" or "just use this plugin". Most people don't use plugins. When they download Paint.NET for the first time, what do they see? An incomplete software. If we keep telling people to just add a plugin for everything, Paint.NET might as well just be a framework, right? Why have a Gaussian Blur effect? Why have a Hue/Saturation tool? Why have anything at all? This kind of argument slowly kills any software, it halts progress.
As much as I love PDN and how much effort is put into it to keep improving it, we need to admit that feature-wise, not really much has been going on for a while. Miraculously two new effects were added last year, and despite not seeing any use case for them just yet, I'm happy to see we still are getting those. Before that, we got Vignette in 2014 (5 years ago) and Surface Blur, Dents and Crystalize in 2009 (10 years ago).
Another issue with a plugin-centered view is that... most of them are just old. Like, around a decade old, back in PDN's golden age. With time, more and more of them stop working on the latest versions.
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6 minutes ago, BoltBait said:
Try pressing [ and ]
Whoa. How did I not know about that one?! Thanks a bunch. I will mark that one off my post.
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Hello everyone,
I'm a long time user and massive fan of Paint.NET. I've been using it for nearly 10 years now, and must say that it is definitely my favorite image editor out there.
However, as we all know, PDN is by far not the most powerful one out there. In fact, it's nothing when compared to, say, Adobe Photoshop. But I believe comparing them is unfair. PDN was never supposed to compete against Photoshop; they are designed to do different things. One is a very powerful and professional image editor while the other is simple but gets the job done easy and quick.
Despite all of that, from my long experience using this software almost daily, I do think we could make it much better without resorting to add massive, complicated features (although, sometimes I think it would be good to have some; more about that later). This is a list of suggestions I've been making for a while now, of small tweaks and additions that would increase quality-of-life significantly...
1. Brush Width ShortcutWhenever I'm drawing something with a brush, using the eraser, or clone stamping something, very frequently I have to change the brush size as I'm working. Of course, I can always just manually change the value by scrolling on that text box or typing the value in. But that breaks the workflow a lot. Specially when I want to keep my mouse in the same position. It would be really, really nice to have a way to change the brush without having to move the mouse. I suggest Alt+Mouse Scroll.[EDIT] This actually already exists. It's [ and ].2. Move selection by amount of pixels
This is something that haunts me a lot when I'm doing more precise stuff, such as UI designing, making diagrams, or doing pixel art. Sometimes I have to move my selection exactly 4 pixels to the right, or exactly 20 pixels upwards. For small distances it's fine to just use the arrow keys and good old counting on your head; but sometimes it's really annoying to tap the down arrow key exactly 11 times. Using ctrl+arrow keys does help, but not enough. It would be amazing to have an easier way to move selections. What I suggest is something similar to what Blender does: just start typing the number in and press the arrow key corresponding to the direction. So, if I just type "320" on my keyboard and press "left arrow key", my selection is moved 320 pixels to the left.
3. Sampling Mode should be by tool
Many, many times I have had to pick a color and use the fill tool somewhere else. What often happens is that I usually want the sampling mode of the color picker to be "Image" and the sampling mode of the fill tool to be "Layer". To me, it doesn't make sense that the sampling mode is universal. Each tool should have its sampling mode selection independent of the others.
4. There should be a way to disable Infinite Undo to save RAM
The title describes it well. Despite Paint.NET being pretty lightweight, it's always good to have ways to make things run as smooth as possible for weaker machines. Infinite Undo is a great feature, which also has the potential to use infinite RAM.
5. Flip selection
This is one of those features that would increase quality of life immensely. It's such a fundamental thing that sometimes we forget it doesn't exist. We have a really rudimentary flip tool that only flips the whole image. If I want to flip just a part of an image, I have to 1) select that part, 2) copy it, 3) open a new image, 4) paste my selection, 5) flip the image, 6) copy it, 7) paste it back on the original image. This is... a lot of steps for such a small thing. It would be awesome to have a button that just flips the selection. In fact, this could even replace the current flip feature.
6. Inputting text should not move the screen
In all of those years of using PDN, there has never been anything more infuriating than using the text tool and having the view jump around like crazy when text goes beyond the canvas. The control of the view should be entirely in the hands of the user. Sorry Rick, but how did you think this was a good idea?
At least make this "feature" toggleable, please!
7. Merging transparent layers should have expected behaviour
If I merge two layers, I don't expect the image to change. I just expect both layers to be a single one. However, if the bottom layer is transparent, then we observe strange, unexpected behaviour that can be better explained with this image:
8. Resize canvas and fill empty space with transparency
When you increase the size of the canvas, surely some empty space appears in the image. What's bizarre is that on all layers, this empty space is just transparency (rgba(0,0,0,0)) except on the layer named "Background". On that one, instead of transparency, the empty space is filled with the secondary color. This is a really weird and unexpected behaviour. I think that either all layers should just be transparency, or the bottomest layer should receive the secondary color, or some combination of the both: add a way to toggle this.
9. Continuous clone stamp
The clone stamp is a very useful tool. However it has an interesting behaviour that could potentially improve: it literally just shifts the image to a direction. It would be nice to have an option to make it sample from the current image, not from the original image before the first click. In other words, a continuous clone stamp.
10. Size dropdowns should go to the nearest number when scrolling from one not on the list
This is a bit tricky to explain. You know the size dropdowns? Such as the Brush Width or the Text Size dropdowns, that both allow you to type in a value or choose one from the list? When you mouse scroll over them (or hit up/down keyboard arrows) the selected value cycles through the list. For instance, if I have a text size of 72 and I mouse scroll down or hit the down keyboard arrow, the text size is changed to 84. However, if I instead type in some value that is not on the list (such as 83) and try scrolling, instead of the value snapping the the closest downwards (in this case, 84), it actually snaps to the first value in the list (in this case, 8). Capiche?
Well, that's all, I think. I know that development is not easy, specially when you just have a single person working on it. I would like to reiterate that this is in no way trying to demand anything from Rick (I mean, PDN is completely free, how could I?), and that all of these points should be just considered suggestions
I would just like to add a few secondary suggestions that as I said in the very beginning, are quite big and complex to implement, so these are just some personal wishes. These are three plugins that I feel like should be actually added into the core app. Kudos to the developers!
At least make this "feature" toggleable, please!
I think we should talk about Alpha Masks
in Paint.NET Discussion and Questions
Posted
Hello everyone,
In all my years using Paint.NET (around 15 now!) one thing that I noticed to consistently struggle with the most is dealing with transparency. Simply put, I don't think the app has enough tools to deal with alpha. We have like, the eraser and the ability to delete things. The most obviously missing thing is an alpha mask feature. I'm sure this has been requested hundreds of times and I'm sure there are pretty good reasons as to why it was never added. I assume that this is due to technical reasons- depending on how intricate the desired implementation is, it might even require a total rework of the pdn file format or layers (for instance, adding yet another widely requested feature: layer groups).
However, I don't see a reason as to why we couldn't have a way more simplified implementation. Would it be too hard to add a new layer Blend Mode that, you know, interacts with alpha whatsoever? For example, a "true" multiply mode that multiplies even the alpha channel. I don't know how the blending is implemented, but if it's like some standard shader code, it should be easier to implement a multiply with alpha rather than what we currently have.
I'm well aware of Alpha Mask plugins, such as the one in BoltBait's pack. However, as it is merely an effect, it's not really an option in situations where constant change is required. I hope you can understand why constantly flattening an image, copying a mask texture, applying an effect and saving an image is not exactly scalable. It's a lot of rework for something that should be instant and easy.
There are a lot of use cases for tools that more easily deal with alpha- from design to game development, it's a vital feature for any image editing software. And I don't think it's particularly healthy for a feature to rely solely on plugins.