ahefner ([info]ahefner) wrote,
2010-01-31 14:25:00
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  • Music: De La Soul, "Breakadawn"

McPixel, a frivolous lisp hack.

Yesterday, I had the idea that it would be easy and entertaining to hack together a toy application for drawing and animating pixel art. Some hours later, McPixel was born. It provides an editable grid of pixels, a color palette, and allows you to string sequences of images together into animations. It's a toy, but someone might find it amusing. Obligatory screenshot:

McPixel

Features:
  • 80's retro McCLIM user interface.
  • No documentation or online help.
  • Maximally frustrating color sliders, using IHS colorspace.
  • Intuitive modeless drawing UI, achieved by including only a pencil tool.
  • Saves/loads files only in its own format, based on unportable s-expressions.
  • Requires X11 and SBCL with threads, to keep out the riffraff.
  • User-editable brush shape.
  • Remap Color and Silhouette commands, for tracing previous frames.
  • Realtime animated preview plays while you work.
I'm not sure I'll ever put this to productive use, if a productive use for such a thing even exists, but there you have it.

Update: I've added the ability to export an animated GIF file, using Xach Beane's Skippy library. Here's the "turtle.anim" example file, exported as a GIF:
McTurtle
Tags: 8-bit, hacks, inane, lisp

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  • 4 comments

[info]tkpapp

January 31 2010, 09:20:54 UTC 2 years ago

thanks for making it public

The "80's retro McCLIM user interface" doesn't look that bad. And small examples of how to write applications like this are always useful. Thanks for putting it on Github.

[info]patrickwonders

January 31 2010, 16:37:19 UTC 2 years ago

Awesome!

[info]xach

January 31 2010, 18:01:09 UTC 2 years ago

I've used augmented GIFs for a storage format in the past - a header with per-frame metadata and then the actual GIF. They're pretty easy to read and write with skippy. The downside is the 256-colors-per-frame color table limit.

[info]xach

February 1 2010, 16:39:07 UTC 2 years ago

turtle.gif is awesome.
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