Odd limitations?

Share your suggestions & ideas for BlackInk
shadowmint
 
Posts: 2
Joined: 18 Mar 2014, 13:23

Odd limitations?

Postby shadowmint » 18 Mar 2014, 13:29

I bought black ink on steam, and it's great, but... odd.

Two particularly odd things which I can't find any information on are:

- You can only have 8 layers. O_o

- You can zoom in but only 'a bit'

These seem to both be extremely severe technical limitations on an otherwise great drawing package.

Am I just missing something? Why can't you zoom in? Why only 8 layers?

I've seen people talking about merging layers but ahhhg! That's a terrible suggestion. It's like, oh gee, don't worry about, just flatten your photoshop documents; you'll never have to work on them again or anything.

If these things aren't ready yet, are they are even on the roadmap...?

(the layers things in particular ... just... unbelievable. How can you not support more layers than that?)

User avatar
u2bleank
 
Posts: 1182
Joined: 11 Jun 2012, 10:41

Re: Odd limitations?

Postby u2bleank » 18 Mar 2014, 18:43

- You can only have 8 layers. O_o


My answer from this thread :

yes the layer limit is manly due to the GPU memory limit.
It can take a really great amount of memory to store 8 layer in 64bits in high resolution.
Sure Black Ink use also the CPU memory but the real performance bottleneck is the transfer GPU <-> CPU and if we increase the number of layer on system which doesn't have enough VRAM it can kill performance for a simple operation as panning / zooming.
Anyway for the short term the next Black Ink release will got the Merge layer features.
For the long term the number of layer will probably be increased but i can't tell you when :(


We will probably do something for users which have good hardware. So +1 for the request.

- You can zoom in but only 'a bit'


Ok +1 for the request even if you can create larger canvas ( Black Ink can handle easly really big one without any performance lost ). This is the main reason we didn't had the more than 100% zoom because we want to promote the use of larger canvas with Black Ink.

shadowmint
 
Posts: 2
Joined: 18 Mar 2014, 13:23

Re: Odd limitations?

Postby shadowmint » 19 Mar 2014, 16:32

That seems totally reasonable.

Just a couple of points:

1) Regarding zoom:

I understand what you say about zooming, but sometimes when you have drawn a picture and want to do some fine colouring it's really convenient to zoom in to 8x or 16x to finely texture the colours. Definitely a +1 from me.

2) Regarding layers.

I see what you're saying, but surely this is a limitation on the number of *active layers* rather than the total number of layers?

Consider:

If I have 20 layers, but I can choose only 7 of those layers to be 'active'.

The rest of the layers are flattened into a temporary layer than is 'read-only', and turns up in the layer list as a normal layer.

There would be some UI work required for this, and some technical stuff to handle rasterizing up to N layers on the CPU and storing it in a temporary location... but this would be a lot better than the current solution.

The ideal solution for me would be:

The root layer container is now a 'Folder', and 'active' by default.

A 'Folder' can contain up to 8 'Folders' or 'Layers'.

A 'Layer' is a normal drawing layer.

A 'Folder' shows up as a layer, but is read-only. It is rasterized on the CPU as the combination of all the folders and layers it contains.

If a 'Folder' is active, you can edit the 'Layers' in it.

So for example, if you had a layer layout such as this:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
- Root
-- Layer 1
-- Layer 2
-- Folder 1
--- Layer 3
--- Folder 3
---- Layer 4
-- Folder 2
--- Layer 5
--- Layer 6
--- Layer 7
--- Layer 8
--- Layer 9
')

By default the root item would be active, there about be 4 layers in the layer list: Layer 1, Layer 2 and read-only Flattened Versions of Folder 1 and Folder 2.

If I wanted to edit Layer 5, I would click on 'Folder 2' and make it active; now the layers pannel would have just: Layer 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 in it; and I could work on those.

This way you can still at most have 8 active layers at once, but you can have much more complex layer layouts.

This is just my ideal solution; I'm sure you guys have plenty of ideas too. ...but a hard limit of 8 layers is really a terrible limitation on this app~

User avatar
u2bleank
 
Posts: 1182
Joined: 11 Jun 2012, 10:41

Re: Odd limitations?

Postby u2bleank » 19 Mar 2014, 17:10

shadowmint : thanks for this consistent and valuable feedback ;)

1) Regarding zoom:
I understand what you say about zooming, but sometimes when you have drawn a picture and want to do some fine colouring it's really convenient to zoom in to 8x or 16x to finely texture the colours. Definitely a +1 from me.


We are agree and this will be added for sure the only question is when.. we keep track of all request we got and maintain a sort a list of priority. This feature is on the 15th place in that list and will be added sooner if more people need it.

2) Regarding layers.
...


the more layer is 4th and the next version of black Ink will implement the first 3.. So we will definitely do something on that soon :p


Return to Suggestions

cron