garyo@masscomp.UUCP (Gary Oberbrunner) (12/17/86)
[]
Dpaint II is finally here! And it's sooo much better than DP I I just
*had* to write a quick review. (ha!)
When I originally demoed DP I to my mac-owning friends, they said ``well
that's ok, yeah it has color, but...''. No more. My roommate who has a Mac,
after I gave him a run around DP II, said "it puts MacPaint to shame."
And it's true.
Quickie new feature list:
* Stencil mode: 'lock' any set of colors (pick from anywhere) so painting
goes 'under' them. This is superb. You can put in the background after
the foreground.
* Gradient fill: Any of the *4* cycle ranges (which now go either direction)
can be used as a fill pattern with selectable dithering, from straight
color bars through completely randomized graded pixels. Gradient fill works
vertically or horizontally, and will selectably map to weird polygon edges
(rather than being constant-speed gradient).
* Lasso for brush selection: This was necessary. Unfortunately it's a
rubberband line lasso, not a real freehand one. And it seems to crash my
machine with large brushes and complex polygons. But great all the same.
* Lock Background: makes whatever's on the screen be the background color
(what you get when you hit CLR). When you draw with the background, your
picture reappears from behind the new stuff you just drew.
* Tile mode symmetry: like hundreds of brushes in cartesian lock-step.
* Smooth Mode for brushes: antialiases (in real color space, see below)
whatever's under the brush. Can even do rudimentary text antialiasing.
* Selectable screen formats: All possible types are now available, and can be
dynamically switched. The palette changes correctly (to get ~the same
distribution of colors). If you're going to lose stuff, it asks nicely
before zapping it.
* Selectable page size: standard options are Full Screen, Full Page (8.5x11)
or Full Video (??), or you can type in any X and Y size. With 1 plane
in 320x200 mode, I could get up to 1008 x 1024 pixels on the page. And I
still have the spare screen available! (I have 512k.) (Is this 1k x 1k
page size because they're using SuperBitMap? Moving around is so fast I
tend to think so, but then again the blitter really screams, as we all
know. DP II is the best blitter demo I've yet seen.)
Unfortunately, unlike the Mac the Show Page is just a simple show - as soon
as you click you're back in the normal 1:1 mode. They should have allowed
at least rudimentary page layout editing in Show Page mode. Oh well.
* No more Color 0 bug - you can set the colors any way you like; the menus
set the color map so they're readable when on-screen.
* MANY MANY more double-click and right-button-click options on the right-
side menu bar buttons; like Fill Pattern (dbl-clk Fill), Dotted Line
Pattern (yeah, it has dotted lines now) (dbl-clk Line), etc.
* MANY more keyboard shortcuts (not listed on menus, boo hiss); so many
that you can actually run w/o the rt side menu bar most of the time.
(Of course you could always run w/o the top menu bar) so now you get
the whole screen to play in, without all that F9/F10 stuff.
* Selectable toggleable Workbench (from menu).
* (and many more... I've only had it two days now... that's about 20 hours
of experience...:-))
But best of all (I think):
3-d PERSPECTIVE mode. Takes any brush and rotates it in 3-d (any axis,
any amount) so you can design a rug, or wallpaper, and just throw it up
on the wall!!! This is great. Grid mode works in 3-d too, so you can do
3-d tiles. Not only that, it has three levels (including off) of ANTIALIASING!!
And it works in real color space; that is it finds the appropriate color
wherever it is in the color map. (Doesn't use map adjacency, which would
be wrong).
Select the perspective center (vanishing pt) anywhere you like, absolute
or relative coordinate axes, it's all there. Essentially a complete
flat texture mapping package. You can even select (from Fill Type requester)
Perspective Fill, so the perspective brush fills any area or polygon.
All in all, it's so much better and more REAL than DP I that I can't help
but think that DP I was just a trial-run, or a pre-release version (sort of
like the 1.1 os release :-)) and this is the real thing.
As Always,
--------------------------------
Information is not knowledge; | Gary Oberbrunner
Knowledge is not wisdom; | !{harvard,ihnp4,allegra}!masscomp!garyo
Wisdom is not truth; |
Truth is not beauty; |
Beauty is not love; |---------------------------------------------
Love is not music.
Music is the best. - FZ
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