Pixel Ninja is my pixel-accurate painting program for UI and game designers who pine for Studio/32, PixelPaint Professional, Deluxe Paint, FullPaint Professional, and other classic paint programs.

A very very very early and crude version of Pixel Ninja is available on the main website. Please check it out and provide feedback here if you have any.

A good start.

A couple of nits:

* the size of the window is bounded to the size of the image, even when it's zoomed in (ie if the image is 32x32, then the window is still limited to 32x32 even at 400%)
* something appears to be wacky with the colors for the scribble? tool (ie the not-pencil). With red selected as a color, it will always draw black in aliased mode, while in anti-aliased mode it will draw in black while moving quickly, but will partly draw in red if you move it slowly.
* dragging selections around seems to leave destruction wherever it rests (ie without deselecting)
* selections persist when selecting other controls and doing other drawing
* keyboard shortcuts on save/discard/cancel dialog box
* really minor: the navigation palette is visible when the program initially launches with the initial size dialog showing

Andrew

The pencil behaves like the pencil in Studio/32 (and MacPaint ... after a fashion) -- it turns any pixel that isn't the fill color to the fill color. It toggles the fill color back to the background color.

The navigator is borked atm :-/

Actually I meant the squiggly backwards S tool. Leaving the default color of red, draw some squiggles and then zoom in at 800%. You should see a mix of black and red.

While playing around with this, I also noticed the scroll bars don't update after zooming. Also, while creating a selection works in zoomed mode, dragging it seems to have some problems.

Not sure I'm a big fan of the "highlight the selection by darkening everything else" effect. It works well with a white background - not so much with a dark one.

Andrew

Fixed the squiggle issue.

I'll be allowing users to change the unselected color "on the fly" and probably (as per our chat) hiding the effect while you drag the selection.

Select an area (either rectangle or free shape)
drag the selected area
click on another tool (eg pencil)
poof! the selected area disappears

Andrew

and another thing I've been wondering about...

shouldn't the pencil and scribble tool (the reverse S tool) be the same tool?

To put it another way, the pencil tool's behavior of leaving dots behind as you move it doesn't seem terribly useful.

Andrew

The pencil, as implemented, is a simply astonishingly useful tool in "fat bits". It's the main tool I use when, for example, creating new tool icons.

The way the pencil works right now (essentially modifying a full-screen off-screen buffer for each pixel changed) is extremely inefficient for drawing freeform lines and leads to the trail of pixels being sparse. This doesn't affect the main use of the pencil (which is for modifying single pixels) but I'll eventually optimize the refresh which will help with this.

So pending optimization, the two would become a single tool?

Also, some wackiness is going on dragging selected regions while zoomed.

1) Zoom in
2) Select region
3) Drag selected region
4) click outside selected region to deselect

the previously dragged region then jumps to a new location

When I have time I'll revisit all this.