FeedBack Verve v0.99v.16

Pilou !

He was talking about the little RED, GREEN and BLUE dials under the color wheel on the interface. They did not respond to picking a color outside the Verve window, nor did they respond to HUE DANCER or the color swatches. It's all working fine now, though.

That's right. And I confirm it works fine on my PC too now, great feature, thanks Taron !

Out of curiosity, what is CTRL-F2 mapped to? If I hit it three times, Verve crashes with an "Exception Access Violation."
Yes, yes. "don't do that."

I like the color swatch panel, and looking forward to a little more development (colors instead of buttons would be good). "N" still seems to pick random colors rather than cycling through the swatches, even when the swatch panel is pulled up.

I'm having an issue with colors changing that appears to have something to do with anti-aliasing in transparent areas. Let's see if I can find a quick way to demonstrate it.
Here's the steps: Start with a new project, default settings. Turn off canvas texture. Pick brush 9, lower the bristles to 50% or less and turn off size (W). Scale it up big. Pick a light color (white works well) and make a stroke. Now pick a contrasting color and watch the first stroke when the brush hits the canvas. The anti-aliased edges of the previous stroke will flip to the new color.

(update). I've discovered that the new stroke doesn't even have to be on the canvas or make a mark to flip the colors to the new color. Also not all of them flip, so if you start with a white stroke, then pick several different colors, for other strokes, that first stoke will now have party-colored confetti sprinkled throughout. It doesn't seem to happen in areas that have any fluidity in their history, but I'm still playing with it to see where it does it.

Here's another bug related to "Victor blows things up by hitting all the wrong keys." I blame being too used to Photoshop and the way they constrain things with combinations of shift, alt and ctrl.

So say you want to crop an image. SHFT-F2 brings up the crop. You start dragging the lower right corner and only then decide you want to constrain it. Hit CTRL, then ALT. Your crop window will shrink to 7x7 or less. If you mistakenly hit the LMB at that point, your image is gone (well, all but the middle 49 pixels), and undo won't bring it back. Fortunately hitting HOME will restore the default image size without leaving the cropping tool. Worse is if you hold down ALT first and THEN hit CTRL while dragging. That seems to perform the 7x7 crop and accept it. There are different behaviors for this combination depending on which corner you drag (upper left is the least damaging, because it only seems to eat a strip off the top and left), but ALT-CTRL accepts any of them.

I ran into this while doing the avatar challenge, because I was hoping there was a square constraint (I didn't find one ).

[Taron]

[Ctrl]+[F2] doubles your resolution
[Ctrl]+[Shift]+[F2] cuts it in half
It's kind of legacy stuff from before I had cropping hooked up. You blew up Verve, because you went beyond your graphics card memory...

The transparency thing is a trade-off for having the fluids and paint work they way they do. Know it and understand how to work with it and all will be well. Consider it a quirk of the medium. It's ok, while you sketch in one color on one layer, but if you really want to paint, you should consider filling the canvas as if using a primer with real oil paint or acrylics.

As for [n] going through random colors, I wrote about it in the docs. If your currently active swatch list has only 1 swatch, it will use random colors. Only if your active swatch list has more than one swatch...yadda yadda...you see? If you have more than one color in your swatch list and [n] brings up random colors, please, let me know and show it to me in a video!

As for cropping and wicked stuff happening...ahaha... ...I somehow must've not expected anyone to do what you do. ...
If you drive with your car at 180 km/h and you yank the steering wheel all the way to the left, you may fly off the road with a deadly accident! I recommend you never driving a car! ...the only advantage of that situation is, you won't be able to report that bug to the car company.

But, kidding aside, there are many things that need improvements and fool-proofing and all that. Just because we're on a computer where a program could be developed for that serves all our digital dreams and wishes, doesn't mean we can expect that from every app (or any for that matter), (let alone a free one )
I get you, though, really. And I value your feedback! I'm so used to people accepting the shortcomings of Verve as it develops for the things it actually does well. It's interesting to get a reaction of someone, who is, ehm... like you!

As for photoshop vs. Verve...they're very different tools and though I try to have some of those "conventions" regarded, I still want to fine tune others to my liking or the logic I see more efficient. Photoshop comes from a very old technology and is stuck in less fortunate paradigms here and there. I have no interest in inheriting those for no reason. But I also see the dilemma of habits. Especially while Verve is still in its infancy.

Again, thanks for your feedback and I'll do my best to find a healthier balance between habits and accidents, haha.

(By the way, I thought about square constraint very early on and totally forgot about it until I started with the brush images, which actually has something like it, but the whole selector square handling is even worse than for cropping, hahaha, so...please, don't try too much stuff with that! Everyone else: go ahead, it's weird, but fun! )

I'm really not complaining, and I am amazed by what you've done already. I have seen some rather horrific and embarrassing bugs that would cause massive data loss in programs that cost tens of $thousands, except for those, they shield their developers behind multiple protective layers of very thick and dense sales staff. I really don't expect it to act like Photoshop, either. Some keyboard motions just become reflex after using them for twenty years and I have to break habits, like going from Maya to Blender.

I certainly did notice that the color shift did not happen except in areas of zero fluidity. So maybe I just keep it at a minimum of "1"

"Why would ANYBODY do that?" was what my brother would always say to me while looking at the smoking remains of his software when I was beta testing it. I am certainly figuring out all the wrong ways to do things, and I'm hoping that by finding them all, I can learn to avoid them and start doing things the way they're supposed to work and get the results I see other people getting.

I just tried an experiment setting up six color swatches of primary colors. First time I hit "N" came up with a lavender that wasn't any of them. I'll see if I can get a video up.
I also just discovered that "new project and reset default settings" does not get rid of the swatch list, which could be a feature? Anyway, I might be using it wrong. If so, my apologies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0XHWB0DN3g (private video)

Thanks for pointing on this transparency thing. I often noticed that something had changed suddenly but never got the relations.

[Taron]

OH WOW, that's so funny! You're amazing, man!
Shhhhiiii...I have to make videos to explain stuff, I'm afraid, hahaha! Thank you for the video, though, I would've NEVER known what your problem was, hehehe...ok, enough giggling.

You've made new lists of swatches with 1 swatch each instead of filling one list with several swatches!
- The round buttons are swatch list selectors (creators)!
- Hold [Ctrl] and move your mouse next to an actual color swatch, not the round buttons above it. Then you'll see mini swatches appear besides the swatch.
- Click on a mini swatch to add a new full swatch, now showing two swatches next to each other!
- you can keep going until you have a whole set of colorful swatch tiles, representing a list of swatches.

You can go up to the buttons and add more lists with different swatches, if you wish. But [n] will only go through swatches of one list! If this list only contains 1 swatch, random colors will come while holding [n].

[Taron]

Knacki, the transparency thing has never changed, it was never any different!
New draw modes may reveal a bit more of that flaw, but it's an old one. Using Brush #9 can bring that out dramatically as well as using brush images, because they can have transparency and AA that will reveal the trouble even more, but it's an old thing.
I designed the first brushes to make this less of a visible issue, but it was there.
...however, I keep thinking about possible alternatives, maybe even some naughty trickery, but it's rough. My approach to enable all of this as fast as it does what it does makes it hard to go for traditional paint program methods. I wished, I could have more access to openGL blending to avoid the whole mess, but it has its limitations still.

Anyhow, Ponyhome, I really, really like you already, even if I may have come across a bit harsh, <caugh>, but you have a great spirit and I hope we'll have plenty of good times together! It's really amazing to me, too, probably more so than to your brother, but I'm not sure about that, hahaha, but you are teaching me some very good lessons already, which I need! It's awesome!

Everything will change, once I start making videos, though, because they'll explain it much better. I should make a series of small tutorial clips for sure.
However, I still want to clean up the interface before I do that! It's a mess right now. This thing was just temporary and I had literally abandoned it already. So now this is a bit awkward to me to fix and add so much stuff in this one, but heck...it's also GREAT FUN and that's total priority to me!

SOOooooo, I don't remember having said that already, so here it goes:
WELCOME TO THE FORUM, PONY!

I love all the new features and improvements. I hope you do some new videos showing them being used, because your videos make me happy!

+1