Re: [Pipmak-Users] Great Tool!!

[Christian W. <cwa...@gm...>]

Andrea Viarengo wrote:
> You can get what I done from the download section of my homepage
> (http://viarengo.altervista.org/index2.html?page=download.html)

Wow! That's very cool! I really enjoy exploring someone else's creation 
in Pipmak. The special ages are nice, too. :)

May I add a small screenshot and a link to your download page to the 
not-yet-existing "showcase" page on the Pipmak web site?

A few detail comments:

- If you can, you should configure your web server to send MIME type 
application/octet-stream for *.pipmak files. Right now, it sends 
text/plain, which causes the file to show up as gibberish in a browser 
window instead of being downloaded.

- In nodes 7, 8, 84, 86, 87, you forgot to comment out the 
pipmak.saveequirect().

- In a finished project like this, you might want to override the 
default global keydown handler that does things like bringing up the Lua 
command line when the L key is pressed. Users might be confused by 
strange things happening when they press random keys...

- Actually you aren't supposed to use 640x640 cube faces - officially, 
only powers of two (512, 1024) are supported. But as you can see it 
works, so there's no reason not to do it. That capability came about as 
a side effect of other changes, and I plan to declare it an official 
feature once I get around to checking whether it really works in all 
circumstances.

> I've had some problems with hotspots map, because with Photoshop 
> I cannot manage to tell to the program that the color white was 
> the index 0, so sometimes I got all the background like an hotspot!

What version of Photoshop are you using? I have no trouble here in CS2. 
(You should paint in indexed mode from the beginning, not start in RGB 
mode and convert the finished image to indexed - maybe that's the 
problem? But even then, it should work if you use your own palette and 
no dithering instead of letting Photoshop compute an "optimal" palette.)

> I think that the hopspots map creation method is a little complex...

Agreed. Eventually, you'll be able to paint the hotspots directly in 
Pipmak. In fact, this already works to some extent. It's not enough to 
be useful yet, so it's disabled by default, but you can try it if you 
like: On a panorama that already has some hotspots, show them (C key) 
and call pipmak_internal.tool(2) to bring up the brush tool. Press the 
option/alt key or call pipmak_internal.tool(3) to select the eyedropper 
tool to pick up another color (hotspot number). Pan using the right 
mouse button (or using shift to switch to direct mode). 
pipmak_internal.tool(0) brings you back to the hand tool. Currently, 
your paintings aren't saved, you can't change the brush size (without 
recompiling), and it only works on panoramas.

  -Christian