Dev Diary

[Taron]

Uh, that's a cute direction, too. Thanks, Lemi!
The changes I envision are a lot more dramatic, actually. The color pallet will be in the lower right corner and will be a combination of parametric color interface and traditional pallet, which you can toggle between edit and pick. The parametric section will have various color gradient choices and RGB/HSV sliders along with swatches, where you can toggle between custom and history. History will have a record of all colors you have already painted with.
Above that, I believe, I will put layers and canvas matters.
Along the bottom and to the left will be all brush matters from the slots 1 to 10, smudge and erase toggles to a potential custom interface, which can be populated by parameters of your choosing to have direct access to features of brushes you frequently adjust, or something like that.
Above that along the left side will be the whole image and editing section, including grids and guides.
It remains to be seen whether that feels right or not and how much customization is desirable.
But, yeah, it will be a pretty dramatic difference, no matter what.
I will try my best to make it look and feel as clean as possible. That's what I enjoy about your design there. But once you expand a bunch of these, it'll be probably much scarier, haha. Anyway, I'll have a lot to do that is independent from any layout. But once it is done, any layout should be possible. In other words: After the interface element logic is done, we can try anything!

Great and exciting news,Taron! I am pretty sure you will set new interface in a good way!

[Taron]

Yeah, well, we shall see, really. I'm rethinking stuff the whole time... so... guess we'll have a look at some of it with the next release!
Loads of work still ahead...

[Taron]

More for the dev diary....another perfect example for my wicked style of development:
As I'm hooking up interface elements, I figured I finally put switches there with which you can choose whether to [PAINT], [SMUDGE],[ERASER] or [AVERAGE]... so then I realize, oh, I could hook up a [WARP] switch, too. Works perfectly fine and it's great! THEN I finally remembered the mask mode, much neglected. So I hook up a [MASK] switch, too, and instead of proceeding with the interface I now finally attack masking some more. We now have masks that actually function as masks (YEHAWWW) ....but it's wicked!
The new [MASK] switch also has a [*] toggle, which activates or deactivates the mask. While you can paint the mask in the mask mode [MASK], it automatically gets activated. Once you go out of mask mode, you'll see that the activate toggle is lit, indicating that it's active. When you now paint, the masked off area remains untouched. HOWEVER, now you can deactivate the mask and paint everywhere. When you activate the mask again, you then capture what ever was in the masked off area and it'll stay protected. It's totally cool, but also totally "huh", has anyone ever had it that way?! It feels strange and beautiful, but I wonder if it'll be a little confusing for a moment?! The whole thing is still a little wacky and I need to hook up more safety measures, but all in alll... Verve finally has functioning masks!

Ah, here's a small glimpse at what I'm doing...

YEAH HURRAY WOHOOOOOO!
Masks are one of the most important things and Im sooooooo happy to hear this Taron.( didn't really understand the purpose of the original method)
THANK YOU!@#$%^
And what you are describing about flicking masks on and off and freezing anything outside the mask is BRILLIANT!@#$%^
Fluids in motion…dancing in a masked area….and then poooof…set them free and poof…..let them bleed…and then poof…freeze em up!
Ohhh this is going to be sweeeeeet !!!!!!!!!!

Good to see you are still working on verve! Masks now? Great feature! Good luck man!

[Taron]

AH, HEYA, Nezumi! Been a while! Thanks, yeah, of course I do...can't get my hands off of it!
Well, Stavros, I can only hope it'll act like you'd want it to, that's for sure! But there should be plenty I could do about them further down the line, so... loads to improve!

[Taron]

Oh my, this is going to be quite testy, too. I'm sure the masks will cause a bit of grief for all of us, haha...ouch. It's not as easy as one might think, keeping track of all the things that could matter. Alone dealing with UNDO in this case is rough. I have to really revamp the whole engine, no doubt. But that will have to wait a moment. Anyway, I hooked up mask invert, too. But because masks in Verve are painted, they almost always have a feathered edge because of alpha gradients. As a result, when you invert a mask, well... you'll see!

And will it be possible to use ANY brush to paint a mask?

[Taron]

Ah...y...w...e...lll.....yes, well, I need to still hook that up!
Kept bothering me, too. Boy, oh, boy, there are plenty of things that need looking after. It's weird how deep things go already. I wonder, if I have to revisit the overall logic and make it more sleek. But it's rough, really. You wouldn't believe the things I have to watch out for, ha... pfffff....
I noticed that I could also use the masks to allow grabbing image cutouts. Presently it would simply take what ever is within the rectangle (quadrilateral). But with the masks I could say: only take what is not masked; consider the mask the inverted alpha, so to say.
That would be yet more powerful!

Want to get an idea what I need to watch out for?
- copy current layer's color and material components into a temporary mask buffer
- display this content, but do not apply it while painting with the mask on
- any changes to the mask trigger painting those mask buffers back into the layer components
- watch out for the undo buffer and refresh the buffers accordingly
- high quality requires rendering the contents at double the resolution, thus deal with the mask buffer accordingly
- inverting the mask constitutes a change, hence buffers have to be properly copied to where they belong.
- changing the layers means the mask has to be updated...buffers copied to original layer, if they were active, watching out for undo state. New mask buffers taken from new layer, if mask was active.
- a whole bunch of crap piling on top of me, once I consider masks for image grab
- all hell breaking lose, once I'll try to allow all brushes to work on the mask, because brushes are aimed at dealing with color and material buffers, while mask is just an alpha with a display color only. Requires new paint modes internally to understand the difference.
- Oh, and copying the current layer's material build-up as mask works now great again, too. Presently it overwrites the existing mask, though.

And I noticed some ugly stuff with the fluids and the mask, as vectors can get trapped at the feathered edges of masks.

So much stuff!