Cel Paint is a new game development aid used for creating animated cels or sprites. Some of its functionality is present now and will give the user a good idea as to the direction I am taking in the user interface. Most of the user interface is straight forward but a few things need to be explained.
To get going quickly, just launch Cel Paint and select "New" from the "File" menu. You will see a new document window opened. Now select "Show Paint Tools" from the "Windows" menu. The "Tools" palette will be opened. You can now start painting.
The foreground, background, line color and pattern are all taken into account when any paining is done. To change these settings you will need to open the "Color Tools" window. This window will show you all of the current color settings. To change the foreground color just click and hold the mouse button within the forground color box. You will be able to select a color from the popup color selector. You can also just quickly click in the forground color box to open the "Color Chooser" window. Selecting a color here will change the color of either the foreground, background or line. You can set the color that will be changed by clicking quickly in the appropriate color box in the "Color Tools" window. The affected color box will be hilited in black.
The patterns and line sizes also work as popups unless you click quickly, in which case a palette will be opened to allow you to change the settings.
To change the brush shape you can double click on the brush tool in the "Tool" window. Double clicking on the eraser tool will erase all, and double clicking on the marquee selection tool will select all.
Use the "Trace" menu to create more cels so that you can start making an animated sequence. The commands here are easy to understand.
"Spatter", "Trace edges" and everything in the "Selection" menu are not operating yet. You can try out "Invert" and "Fill" to manipulate selections.
Some features to be added in the future is support for all types of Photoshop plug-ins, and some export features. I also need to do most of the selection operations like rotate, scale and distort.
If you have any questions, bug reports or feature requests you can contact me at steve_israelson@mindlink.net and I will make a note of it. I probably will not be able to reply to every message.
I still do not do much out of memory testing, so if you are having problems, then try giving Cel Paint more ram to work with.
Steve Israelson
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NOTEs:
Since I am currently working on Pfhorte, a Marathon map editor, I will not have too much free time to spend on Cel Paint. I should get back on Cel Paint by June. If there are any serious bugs reported, or easy to add features asked for, I will probably put in the time and make a new release.
Changes Since first release:
- Changed the release numbering scheme.
- Fixed a bug causeing the clut to be bad and several of the tools to crash.
- Added the ability to export to a folder of PICT files.
- Added some hot keys: comma, period and the arrow keys change cels to the next previous or first and last cel. Number keys 1-9 go backwards that many cels and animate forward quickly, allowing you to get a quick look at the animation like the way animators do while they are drawing animation.
