Good news, everyone.

Swanky Paint is now Steam enabled! You can now let your friends know when you're swanking in style!

The keen eyed amongst you may notice a few changes around the site so please pardon the housekeeping. We've also realised that there's been quite a few versions since our last blog post so we'll post them below if you aren't able to watch the video above.

Till next time, happy swanking and thank you so much for your support!


Alpha+9a (v16.x) release notes:

- Fix home dir sniffing which got borked in switch to SDL2.
- Added GUI Scale option and display main paint area under cropped GUI.
- Updated 3D view widget so you can move/scale the object (badly).
- Added 3D bump mapping, 2nd frame of texture is optional height map.
- Added 3D sliders, to control lighting in preview.

Alpha+9 (v15.953) release notes:

- Smart centering of zoomed window using occlusion of preview window.
- Switch to SDL2 as default input/window manager.

Alpha+8d (v15.496) release notes:

- LuaJIT version bump
- Scroll wheel patch on PI
- Startup script for PI

Gareth Halfacree has written a lovely, little review about Swanky Paint in the current MagPi magainze. The official Raspberry Pi magazine, you can get a copy at your local smiths or download a PDF to read over here.



Don't forget to vote for us on Steam Greenlight! The Swan King (and us) thanks you :}

We have the pleasure of sharing Swanky Paint at the Halifax Mini Maker Faire held at the Eureka Museum this weekend and it's been a blast seeing kids as young as 0 years old and parents in tow creating swanky pixel art.

Here's some of them below!

Good news, everyone.

Swanky paint is now even swankier. We have also entered the third dimension where we plan to do battle with all manner of alien scum.



New Alpha+8c (v15.376) release notes:

- Show layer size in checkerboard background of image
- Frame and layer panels with key list setting
- Fixed bug layer loading crash (Thanks, Truck!)
- Made exiting with error a last resort (so probably less user data loss)
- Added resize knob to 1:1 preview and changed how the positioning works
- UV mapping preview mode (see GIF above!)
- Windows now has icon and removed the forced doswindow (terminal)
- Copy brush palette to image




We currently have a game in development featuring exclusive use of Swanky Paint which we recently showed at GAMAYO#8, an event for game developers in Yorkshire, UK.

Dan Morse from Press to Jump got in touch and wrote an article about it which you can read here - http://presstojump.com/gamayo-8-big-trouble-in-fat-pixels/

Thanks for the support, Dan! Hit Press to Jump for more indie gaming goodness!


A reminder that you can get a keyboard cheatsheet at Swanky Paint shortcut keys PDF. You won't be able to use Swanky Paint quite the same way after you've memorised them!

Swanky Paint is on Greenlight! Do vote if you like what we're doing :}

If you've found any bugs, send us your reports. We appreciate it! We try really hard to fix bugs faster than we add them so it helps a lot.

The next bit is a coded message.

Why is six afraid of seven? -> http://dime.lo4d.net/dl/swpaint/because789

After some considerable work we now have an Emscripten build as well as a NaCl build. Originally I tried using Pepper.js which seemed like a quicker port as we could just reused the exact same pepper API calls but sadly its missing plenty of mappings to needed API calls and I had to switch to a native Emscripten build to get things working.

Not too hard to achieve but it took a few days of fighting APIs and building annoying wrapper code so we can treat everything the same. It's a real shame we cant do proper threads under Emscripten as I can see that causing future problems even if I have been avoiding threads so far. Still the number of CPU cores is only going to increase and this is going to be a real problem for future JS based performance.

What this all means to you dear reader is that the web version of Swanky Paint should now work on any browser that has working javascript and WebGL. The WebGL is the only problematic dependency as sometimes browsers blacklist graphics cards with bad drivers and this becomes disabled even if the machine is capable of supporting it.

The order of engine preference is pNaCl under Google Chrome then asm.js under Firefox, if it works well in any other browser then it's a miracle... So far I've had no luck with it working under Android but maybe it will on some other devices.



So Google Chrome (not Chromium as it may have NaCl disabled) is still recommended but no longer required.

Woah, feels like only a couple of weeks ago since we last updated!

We've got a whole new bunch of features this time and if you squint, you should be able to see that we're using a different webcam for this video. Well, it's actual an old kinect that we had lying around. The previous inbuilt laptop webcam was a tad slow and blurry so hopefully this looks better!

New Alpha+8b (v15.184) release notes:
- Fixed trace shaders so they compile on more hardware
- App ICON in alt-tab and task bar (linux only so far)
- Trace alpha slider can cause it to draw over the main image
- Individual settings for each image buffer
- Load and save settings inside PNGs (inside a JSON text chunk)
- Animated PNGs added and now the prefered animation format
- Rechop layers using last brush pickup size
- Spritesheet to new anim using brush pickup location and size
- Swap frames and layers (produces a strip layout only)


By the way, if you're using Swanky Paint like the rest of us here, the shortcut keys are your best friend. Here's a complete list of all the keys and what they do in a handy Swanky Paint shortcut keys PDF. You won't be able to use Swanky Paint quite the same way after you've memorised them!

Swanky Paint is on Greenlight! Do vote if you like what we're doing :}

If you've managed a copy to play with and found any bugs, send us your reports. We appreciate it!

Why is six afraid of seven? -> http://dime.lo4d.net/dl/swpaint/because789

After 3 attempts, we finally made a new video using OBS https://obsproject.com/ so muchos, muchos thanks to Truck!

Do pardon the over-excitedness. We've been at this since yesterday, trying to fix previous audio latency issues to no avail so may be a little delirious. Also, !!EXTRA wide screen!! so we might need to tame that back a bit.

HUZZAH!!!

New Alpha+8a (v15.145) release notes:
- Bleed pixel filter
- Fixed scroll wheel on non Linux builds
- Image to brush and brush to image
- Image "strip" from animation for simple flat export
- Mousewheel works in more GUI places apart from file request scroll
- Background trace mode and change of how things render


By the way, if you're using Swanky Paint like the rest of us here, the shortcut keys are your best friend. Here's a complete list of all the keys and what they do in a handy Swanky Paint shortcut keys PDF. You won't be able to use Swanky Paint quite the same way after you've memorised them!

Swanky Paint is on Greenlight! Do vote if you like what we're doing :}

If you've managed a copy to play with and found any bugs, send us your reports. We appreciate it!

Why is six afraid of seven? -> http://dime.lo4d.net/dl/swpaint/because789

Hello! It's been 4 months since the last update but that means only one thing - new releases, bug fixes and features have been introduced. We've been really stress testing Swanky Paint, mostly thanks to our new game project - currently named, "Big Trouble in Small Pixels", an old school retro tribute to Double Dragon style arcade brawler but with heightened silliness. Due to the heavy animation of such a project, we've been implementing new ways to make animating in Swanky Paint more robust and efficient, more shortcuts and various ways to chop, slice, rejoin and reanimate all the pixels!

Oh and we've got a new mic too! So hopefully we sound better than the previous video.

New release (Alpha+8) release notes:
- Add current dir to history on startup.
- J now does a copy to spare
- New layer menu with chop/join
- New frame menu with add/del and shortcuts of shift+2/shift+1
- Brush handle with auto corner when you pick one up
- Brush pickup with right mouse cuts pixels clearing to background color
- Added rechop menu for quick layer setup/fiddle
- Flatten layers option in menu
- Added close image to image menu
- Added close all/other to file menu
- Fixed remap image to work with animations
- New and improved menu GUI (we now have sub menus)

By the way, if you're using Swanky Paint like the rest of us here, the shortcut keys are your best friend. Here's a complete list of all the keys and what they do in a handy Swanky Paint shortcut keys PDF. You won't be able to use Swanky Paint quite the same way after you've memorised them!

Swanky Paint is on Greenlight! Do vote if you like what we're doing :}

If you've managed a copy to play with and found any bugs, send us your reports. We appreciate it!

Why is six afraid of seven? -> http://dime.lo4d.net/dl/swpaint/because789

Recently I've been having problems with WebGl on Google Chrome which is a bit of a pain as it is one of the requirements for swanky paint so I can no longer even test on my machine without a workaround.

The good news is that there is a workaround, the problem seems to be caused by WebGL sandbox code interacting with some bad GPU drivers (drivers are always bad) but this can be bypassed by starting chrome with --disable-gpu-sandbox as a command line option.

For me this gets WebGL working again, with Intel GPU drivers on my laptop running under linux. So give it a go, hopefully it will fix your chrome too, this is of course something that should be fixed in a future update of chrome.

BTW you have to make sure that you fully shut down chrome before launching it again otherwise it will just open another window. You can tell that you got it working as chrome will complain about it like this.





Also, here are some downloads as I see the last batch ran out and I forgot to post some on the last blog :)

http://dime.lo4d.net/dl/swpaint/donotbork

That other night, we went to the museum, gave a talk about pixel pushing and watched people swank.

Massive thanks for swanking these swanky pixels! And if you were there, thanks for coming! Hope you had as much fun as we did :}