I’ve been working on some new features for canvas in the lead up to it starting so figured I would share some of the new stuff I’ve been working on and that will be available when the event starts.

If anyone wants to also help contribute changes the project is open source and I would love to help out with getting anyone else set up with the codebase to help grant and I clear out the tickets that are on the gitlab.

A change I made and that was just accepted is the ability to create snapshots of parts of the canvas! This is essentially just an easy way to create screenshots of areas to then share instead of needing to use other screenshot tools. Its useful as you can easily take screenshots of parts even if you aren’t looking at them (for example doing a full canvas screenshot) and you get full pixel precision instead of the scaling being weird.

Capture Canvas

This was a feature that existed in the previous iteration of the event but I noticed not many people knew about due to it just having a keybind (The P key). So I took the opportunity with adding the rest of the snapshot types to add a physical button thats easily findable for it as well.

This downloads a picture of the current canvas so that you can share it or use it for anything you might need the full canvas for (for example putting it into aseprite and then planning out a design for some new art over it.

Capture Template Area

This is similar to capture canvas but instead of capturing the entire canvas it captures only the area your template is within. It takes a picture of the smallest rectangle that contains the template plus 2 pixels of padding to make it look a bit nicer. This is useful if you want to share with the group that’s placing down the template how progress is going easily without needing to pan and scroll to get a good angle and then screenshot manually. Can be activated using shift+P or the ui button.

Capture View

Similar to the above two but captures the area you’re currently looking at (all visible canvas pixels on your screen). For when you want to show off a cool thing on the canvas you found. Can be activated using the L key or the ui button.

Capture Region

Lets you select a rectangle area and then takes a picture of that area. For similar use cases as capture view but if you want to share a more precise area rather than the entire area you can currently view. Can be activated using shift+L or the ui button.

Polaroids

Whenever you take a snapshot (using one of the four methods above) it shows a preview of what you just took as a little polaroid visual in the center of your screen before downloading it. I mostly just added this cause it looks nice but can be useful to know that you took a picture of the right thing without needing to open the file.

If anyone has any other feature suggestions feel free to let me know somehow and I can make an issue for it on the projects gitlab repo if there isn’t one already. I have some other cool stuff in progress that hopefully should be done before the event starts