Pin2Dmd Editor

[lucky1]

5 hours ago, Syco54645 said:

Yes that is not what is happening, it is copying the entire frame over and deleting the next frame. Do I need to enable masks or something?

That is what it does if the ColMask checkbox is not checked (replacement mode)

[Syco54645]

35 minutes ago, lucky1 said:

That is what it does if the ColMask checkbox is not checked (replacement mode)

Is this documented anywhere? I thought I read everything but apparently missed that. Also why does it limit us to 4 colors in ColMask mode? Just curious, trying to understand how to use this.

[Syco54645]

5 hours ago, steve45 said:

But anyways I'm working on an new version 2 of the editor which makes a few things easier especially with copy and paste frame content. Maybe you will wait until the new version in finally released. Hopefully this week or next week.

Would it be possible to compile this for Linux as well? I am unsure what the source is but I hate having to run a VM to edit this stuff. Also can we get ctrl-z for undo please?

[steve45]

16 minutes ago, Syco54645 said:

Would it be possible to compile this for Linux as well? I am unsure what the source is but I hate having to run a VM to edit this stuff. Also can we get ctrl-z for undo please?

Yes this is also available for Linux. And again version 2 also have the ctrl-z accelerator keys

 

[Syco54645]

2 minutes ago, steve45 said:

Yes this is also available for Linux. And again version 2 also have the ctrl-z accelerator keys

 

Where can I find the Linux version? Or do you mean version 2 will be available for Linux?

[steve45]

Just now, Syco54645 said:

Where can I find the Linux version? Or do you mean version 2 will be available for Linux?

Version two will be. I could setup a build job for both, but actually nobody ever asked for a linux version :-)

[Syco54645]

I do not have any other OS in this house ;). Wife and 7 year old son both use Linux too. It is great!

[lucky1]

6 hours ago, Syco54645 said:

Is this documented anywhere? I thought I read everything but apparently missed that. Also why does it limit us to 4 colors in ColMask mode? Just curious, trying to understand how to use this.

It is described at http://pin2dmd.com/editor/ under 3.3. You get 16 colors with ColMask with 4 shade sources

[Syco54645]

7 hours ago, lucky1 said:

It is described at http://pin2dmd.com/editor/ under 3.3. You get 16 colors with ColMask with 4 shade sources

I do not understand why we are bound by this. It appears we can use 16 colors unless in colmask then we can only use 4. And if we want to use copy to next we have to be in colmask thus we only have access to 4 colors. Is this correct?

[steve45]

4 minutes ago, Syco54645 said:

I do not understand why we are bound by this. It appears we can use 16 colors unless in colmask then we can only use 4. And if we want to use copy to next we have to be in colmask thus we only have access to 4 colors. Is this correct?

With color masking your are extending the color depth from 2 to 4 but without changing to original 2 planes. This means you can of course have 16 colors, but you cannot give each pixel an arbitrary color out of the palette of 16 colors. You could see it like putting different colored films on top of the existing image.

This is often times the much easier way to give a certain scene more colors than the original 4 without redrawing everything. On the other side it also perseveres dynamic content like score and so on, which cant be replaced be redrawing it. This way you can give color to scenes that consists of a mixture of static and dynamic content.

How the "masked" or "colorized" pixels will look like depends on the palette of course, but since you are not going to change the original planes you effectively choosing the group of 4 colors (col 1-4, col 5-8 ...) that a certain screen area will have. Its hard to explain in words, you have to experiment a little to get the right feeling how this works.

One variant of the same technique is to remove parts of the original scene by simply "coloring" them to black. So if you choose to put a color mask of the right part of the scene that effectively maps to a color group where all 4 colors are black, you are removing that part from the scene.

Hope that someone understands what I'm trying to explain. And yes I will provide a short tutorial video on that shortly

[Syco54645]

11 minutes ago, steve45 said:

With color masking your are extending the color depth from 2 to 4 but without changing to original 2 planes. This means you can of course have 16 colors, but you cannot give each pixel an arbitrary color out of the palette of 16 colors. You could see it like putting different colored films on top of the existing image.

This is often times the much easier way to give a certain scene more colors than the original 4 without redrawing everything. On the other side it also perseveres dynamic content like score and so on, which cant be replaced be redrawing it. This way you can give color to scenes that consists of a mixture of static and dynamic content.

How the "masked" or "colorized" pixels will look like depends on the palette of course, but since you are not going to change the original planes you effectively choosing the group of 4 colors (col 1-4, col 5-8 ...) that a certain screen area will have. Its hard to explain in words, you have to experiment a little to get the right feeling how this works.

One variant of the same technique is to remove parts of the original scene by simply "coloring" them to black. So if you choose to put a color mask of the right part of the scene that effectively maps to a color group where all 4 colors are black, you are removing that part from the scene.

Hope that someone understands what I'm trying to explain. And yes I will provide a short tutorial video on that shortly

So if I understand correctly when in colmask mode 4 colors are represented by 1 color yet on the actual hardware it will be a the real color that was chosen? I have no way to get it on the real hardware as my vm is not forwarding usb correctly so I am unsure how it even looks on the real thing.

[steve45]

You can see how it will look in the preview widget. And you can of course choose what color it should be, but a pixel that was originally in color 1 can only be masked to be either color 5, 9 or 13 (depending on your color mask). The same is true for color 2: it can only be masked to 6, 10 or 14 and so on. So if you choose to make color 14 white this applies to all pixels masked that way. This some constraint or limit, that col masking introduces. It's like drawing over the existing picture with a colored pen with a limited number of colored pens and no eraser. 

[Syco54645]

1 minute ago, steve45 said:

You can see how it will look in the preview widget. And you can of course choose what color it should be, but a pixel that was originally in color 1 can only be masked to be either color 5, 9 or 13 (depending on your color mask). The same is true for color 2: it can only be masked to 6, 10 or 14 and so on. So if you choose to make color 14 white this applies to all pixels masked that way. This some constraint or limit, that col masking introduces. It's like drawing over the existing picture with a colored pen with a limited number of colored pens and no eraser. 

Is there a way to use the copy feature without the colmask then? Because if not then to have a 16 color animation you would in fact have to do every frame by hand.

[steve45]

What way would you suggest? If you like to give every pixel an arbitrary color out of a palette of 16 or even 32k (which is max color depth actually) how should this work other than doing it frame by frame? The new v2 editor also supports system clipboard so you can use external drawing programs as supporting tool but you still need to colorize frame by frame. 

[Syco54645]

12 minutes ago, steve45 said:

What way would you suggest? If you like to give every pixel an arbitrary color out of a palette of 16 or even 32k (which is max color depth actually) how should this work other than doing it frame by frame? The new v2 editor also supports system clipboard so you can use external drawing programs as supporting tool but you still need to colorize frame by frame. 

I am not sure but some sort of detection of similarities between frames to give the option to autocolor would be nice. Not sure how one would code that however. It would dramatically speed up the process. This is of course assuming that a game can support the 16 colors on the actual hardware if colored frame by frame. I am unsure about that.

I should also state I am a software developer, however primarily with php, angular, and more recently vuejs. I however am not sure what is technically possible in the case of this editor.

[steve45]

The pin2dmd firmware supports up to 32k colors (5bit per channel). This color depth is also supported in the editor in general. Not sure if you ever saw this poc video 

And the editor is open source, at least for the most part. see https://github.com/sker65/go-dmd-clock new version is on branch feature/follow-hash. So if your are a developer and like to contribute some cool colorization feature / drawing tools, feel free to contribute. I will be happy to see somebody other than me working on that stuff.

[Syco54645]

2 minutes ago, steve45 said:

And the editor is open source, at least for the most part. see https://github.com/sker65/go-dmd-clock new version is on branch feature/follow-hash. So if your are a developer and like to contribute some cool colorization feature / drawing tools, feel free to contribute. I will be happy to see somebody other than me working on that stuff.

I had not seen that POC video but that is very impressive.

I am currently working 12+ hour days and am quickly approaching burnout at the end of those days unfortunately. Also I am allergic (READ: HATE) Java development. However if I ever have any time to contribute to open source coding my efforts would more than likely go towards this project.

[lucky1]

I just took a quick look at the intro and it took me about 5 minutes to colorize it using the method described. Here are the project files

ft.zip

[steve45]

4 hours ago, Syco54645 said:

I had not seen that POC video but that is very impressive.

I am currently working 12+ hour days and am quickly approaching burnout at the end of those days unfortunately. Also I am allergic (READ: HATE) Java development. However if I ever have any time to contribute to open source coding my efforts would more than likely go towards this project.

Just to be clear I'm also working hard on my day to day job and cannot do anything with love or hate with respect to programming languages. It's all just tools, firmware is build with C/C++ for goDmd partly based on nodemcu.

Web frontend application for goDmd is based on simple HTML and jQuery/JavaScript. You have to be flexible these days. Maybe you can contribute in some other way...

[malenko]

9 hours ago, steve45 said:

The new v2 editor also supports system clipboard so you can use external drawing programs as supporting tool but you still need to colorize frame by frame. 

Awwwwww man that will be AWESOME!   Would we have to draw the whole frame in an external program (i.e. photoshop) or can we copy pasta portions?

Super excited for this!!!!!

[Syco54645]

6 hours ago, lucky1 said:

I just took a quick look at the intro and it took me about 5 minutes to colorize it using the method described. Here are the project files

ft.zip

Thank you, i will look at that. I am thinking something is just getting lost on me.

[Syco54645]

5 hours ago, steve45 said:

Just to be clear I'm also working hard on my day to day job and cannot do anything with love or hate with respect to programming languages. It's all just tools, firmware is build with C/C++ for goDmd partly based on nodemcu.

Web frontend application for goDmd is based on simple HTML and jQuery/JavaScript. You have to be flexible these days. Maybe you can contribute in some other way...

Well I have left jobs where I did not like the tech stack. I much prefer Linux and PHP to Windows and .NET.  A place I worked was switching from LAMP to .NET so I left. I realize it would have probably been in my best interest to diversify myself and learn .NET a bit more but I detest that framework, probably more than I dislike Java. Being that my familiarity with Java is rather low I will spend a great deal of time just ramping up on it, which is not something that I am particularly interested in doing either but I may in order to help out. It depends on my free time, which lately I have none. Today was a 17 hour work day for me (yesterday was 14). I would rather spend this time with my family but am more than willing to help out if it makes sense.

What is the frontend app? I have not seen it yet. That interests me more than working on Java.

[Syco54645]

6 hours ago, lucky1 said:

I just took a quick look at the intro and it took me about 5 minutes to colorize it using the method described. Here are the project files

ft.zip

I wish I had a video of you doing this so that I could see how it was done. What if you wanted to do it in say, 6 different colors though? Would you have been able to color it as quickly as described?

[lucky1]

I only used the fill tool for this on the first picture and filled the letters with color block 2 (colors 5-8) and the shadows with Block 3 (colors 9-12)
Then I used "copy to next" on the complete scene. - Done

The random bubble effect kind of limits the palette in this scene. Finding the right combination of colors to preserve the bubble effect was the "hardest" part. I had to play a little with the palette to figure that out (one minute or so)

6 colors should be no problem given that Block 4 is still fully available. The only difference would be that you have to spend a little more time on th first picture. The rest is the same. You should play a little bit with the ColMask mode to get familiar with it..The hard thing here is to understand how it works. Once you understood the principle, it is easy to do colorizations like this.

[steve45]

Awwwwww man that will be AWESOME!   Would we have to draw the whole frame in an external program (i.e. photoshop) or can we copy pasta portions?

Super excited for this!!!!!

The system clipboard support is only basic right now, but could be improved. For color masking there is already a mode where you can post mask portions and place them to the exact position.

Similar thing could be done with images from drawing program. Need to figure out image / mask formats when using Photoshop ...