Painting Overhaul

[JimboJambo]

Painting Overhaul

1. Remap Controls

Current controls are crazy weird confusing. Here's what I propose...

• LMB: Draw
• Shift+LMB: Large draw
• RMB: Erase
• Shift + RMB: Large erase
• Mousewheel: Zoom
• MMB: Rotate
• Shift + MMB: Move

All drawing is done with LMB. All erasing is done with RMB. All camera controls are on MMB (plus wheel). Shift is the only modifier; you don't need to touch Ctrl, ever.

2. Improve Painting and the Preview

A few new tools and a few changes to the preview to make painting easier.

• Add a mirror tool. For obvious reasons.
• Add an option to "Remove all..." of a certain color. Sometimes erasing can't get it all, and it's a pain in the ass not to be able to load a certain template because you're missing "0%" of some color. (And on the subject of percents, values should be rounded UP, not down.)
• Undo. Ctrl-Z it up, baby! (It doesn't even need to refund your paint, I just don't want to have to erase every misclick, especially when my tablet decides to rebel and draws a nice thick line over a highly-detailed area.)
• (Maybe) Add option to remove/hide clothing. It's easy enough to take off your clothes before painting, but maybe you forgot, or maybe you just don't want to freeze to death while painting your chest. Optionally hide your hair too. It would just be a nice little feature.
• (Maybe) Add a toggleable grid overlay. The paint layer on survivors and dinos is kinda low-res, which is understandable, but if we're going to be doing pixel-by-pixel detail then a grid would really help. It would be too much to ask you to make a new grid texture for every creature and paintable surface, but maybe there's a way you can just take the existing map and highlight the edges of each pixel with programming magic. Or maybe not, I dunno, but it would be nice if it could be done.
• Move the directional light source to the front or the back of the model (relative to the camera). This is a no-brainer. Half of my body is obscured by glare, the other half lost in shadow. Either remove the directional light source entirely or move it somewhere so that it lights the model evenly and doesn't blind you when painting one side of your model.
• Use individual survivor proportions when painting on body. Currently, when you paint on somebody's body, you're given a generic/default character model to work with, but survivors can have vastly different body proportions, and there's no reason the preview shouldn't reflect that. What looks good on Beefy McBeefcake might not look as good on Old Man Skin'n'bones.
• Get rid of the drift. You know how the camera continues to move/rotate a bit after you release the move/rotate button? Pretty cool, right? A lot less cool when you're trying to get a precise angle and have to keep correcting it.

3. Make Dark Colors DARK, Not See-through

Black paint is transparent and nearly useless on survivor bodies, and has been since early access. I don't know why this is -- maybe the paint system uses #000000 as transparency and dark colors become somewhat transparent as a result, in which case you really should add an alpha channel or use a format that supports it. Whatever the case, it really ought to be addressed. It's ridiculous that white paint shows up better on pale-as-a-skeleton skin than black paint does.

[[Please see the attached image for an example. Here I painted three colors onto two different skin tones, and you can see that white shows up well on both while black is basically invisible on the dark skin tone. Interestingly, red shows up better on dark skin.]]

4. Fix Client Time-out When Loading Image onto Canvas

Have you ever used the camera item on an official server? Save your black pearls, it's useless. When loading a photo onto a canvas, the paint is applied in multiple passes and each pass takes progressively longer until you inevitably time out and lose connection to the server. You will never get a complete photograph onto a canvas. This has been an issue since at least 2018.

[[Please see the image for an example. This is the result of me trying to load a full-color photo of a yutyrannus onto a canvas. Can you spot the dino in this picture?]]

5. Make a Normal Save/Load System

In early access you couldn't overwrite or delete existing paint templates. They've fixed it since then, and very I'm grateful, but they came sooo clooose to making it perfect and just didn't. I don't know why so many games are trying to re-invent the wheel with this.

• When saving a file, a list of all existing files should come up.
• Clicking on an existing file should auto-fill the name of your new file with the name of the one you just clicked.
• Trying to save something with the same name as an existing file should give you a prompt asking you if you're sure you want to overwrite it.
• Clicking on a file when trying to load a painting should also give you a prompt asking you if you want to load that file.

Just like every other program!

Also, what is this?  Am I uploading my painting? Flip that arrow upside-down to represent a download. Just like every other program.

6. Other Odds and Ends

• Make more objects paintable, even if they only have one color region. Preserving bin, mortar and pestle, crop plot, etc. The "vessel" object? It's a vase! It should have its own freepaint map. And I'm not sure if you can paint the simple bed, but every time I try I just end up hitting the floor.
• Address the bug where selecting a color region immediately after applying a color to another region will play the painting sound again even though no more paint has been applied.
• Soap. Why is it so expensive? Three poly just to clean one item? It's especially weird that you can make dye at level 8 but can't figure out how to scrub it off until level 48. Can't it use mejoberries instead? I know they're used in kibble, but they're the only berry not used in dye, so it kinda follows. ...Also why does my character insist on eating the soap when I select it from my hotbar? I don't eat the paint off the brush, and I'm pretty sure the soap isn't any tastier.
• It might be neat to have a palette item or a palette feature in freepaint -- something that could hold multiple dyes at once so that you don't have to switch brushes or waste a whole dollop of dye when you want to work in a different color. It's not super necessary, but like I said, it might be kinda nice.

 

Thanks for reading!