Gimp 2.10

[Greebo]

Well, this is less than ideal.

I'm sure HT will sort it out after the holidays are over. If I am right he just has to apply his BMP fix for the game and viewer to the BMP to RES file converter. This is just a heads up in case anyone was about to submit a skin and had used 2.10 to convert it.

[Vraciu]

The P-38L skin I am working on currently has 178 layers, although a fair few of those are layers I used to create other layers and could be deleted now if needed. I've never run into a layer limit with X9 and can't see one listed in the help file. One other advantage of X9 is that it is 64-bit rather than IIRC 32-bit for v5. This means it can handle very large files a lot better as it can address a lot more of your PC's memory without resorting to a swap file. This is much more of an advantage with some of the later 2048 by 2048 or 4096 by 2048 res AH skins as these use four or eight times the resources of a 1024 res skin.

Corel have a "Try free for 30 days" offer on PSP 2020 and you can run it alongside your current version rather than overwriting it. If you do try this make sure you test it with a copy of one of your skin files rather than the original, as there is no way of reverting that psp file back to v5 spec once it has been converted to run on 2020.

178 layers?????????????????????   

Yeah this could explain why I occasionally crash my program while working on a skin...   Maybe once I finish this one I'll try switching to something else.

Thanks for the heads up on that psp format change.   

[Greebo]

Well about 40 of those layers I could delete now. I also use some layers like masks multiple times, so probably another 30 of those layers are duplicates. Then there are separate layers for things like spoked and covered wheels, so I can just turn these layers on and off as needed. I'm just being a bit lazy here, on a 4096 by 2048 res skin I would be more careful about layer management and delete the unused layers as the file can get so big it makes PSP chug towards the end of the build even on a fast PC with lots of memory.

There is one thing that I don't like with X9 compared to v5; on the earlier version the mouse wheel zoom worked much better. It would zoom down to precisely where the mouse cursor was, while on the newer version it zooms to a point somewhere near the cursor and won't zoom into a corner at all. I find this a constant irritation even years later. Having said that the much larger tool size and superior memory handling more than makes up for this drawback and I wouldn't go back now even if I could.

The only time I have had X9 crash is if I try to use the mouse wheel zoom at the same time as I am dragging an object. Now that I have trained myself not to do this it works fine.

[Vraciu]

This is the exact opposite reaction I get when I zoom with PSP 5.   When I scroll in with the mouse it just randomly zooms in on some other point.  I can't figure out why.  PSP 7 zooms perfectly.   At least I think so (haven't messed with it in awhile).

I wonder  if I have a setting dorked up somewhere.

[Greebo]

I may be mis-remembering, perhaps it was v7 that zoomed this way. I used v7 for a few years after v5.

[Vraciu]

Yeah, I think it is 7.  It's the one thing that makes me want to go to 7 from 5.   I'll do it one of these days.

Of course Devil keeps trying to get me to use GIMP.   I should just do that and be done with it.  LOL

[Devil 505]

I like Gimp, but it's by no means perfect.

I still have to use PS CS2 to make normal maps because I could never get the Nvidia normal map plug in to work in Gimp.