Transplant Comics

Gimpy Robots

The problem with technology is that it changes. In general, this is a good thing. Unfortunately, once you get used to doing something in a certain way and it changes, your instinctual reaction as a domesticated primate is to see the new way of doing things as wrong.

So it goes with the Gimp. Today I upgraded to v2.4. I was hoping that this release would clear up some of the tablet-related problems I had been having with v2.2; instead, tablet handling is worse than ever and I’ve been brought face to face with my own mortality. This has not been a good year for me and software upgrades.

First, the tablet issues. The brush tool has been completely, if you will forgive me for saying so, gimped. Pressure sensitivity has been made very coarse, such that as you increase pressure the line width will remain the same size for a while until suddenly jumping up to a much greater thickness. It is absolutely impossible to draw a smooth line with the new pen tool.

I went to the Gimp knowledge base to see if someone had reported this bug; they had. The response from the developer was to not use the brush tool.

Instead, people using tablets are now expected to use the ink tool all the time. Well, I don’t want to use the ink tool. The brush tool worked (mostly) fine before. The ink tool has ten thousand options and it scares me. Why did they change it? Who out there is using pressure sensitivity without a tablet, and thinks that ragged lines look better than smooth curves?

This is where the “facing my own mortality” part comes in. I realized at this point that I was rambling like an old man, and I’m barely even 35. Eris help me by the time I reach 40. I decided that I would learn to do things the new way, that change is not always a bad thing, and that if I was really serious about the brush I could always download the source and revert the code myself.

Another thing which has changed is that moving a selection no longer moves the image contained within the selection. I had to go back to the knowledge base to find out how to move things. Bah. Back in my day we didn’t even have selections, we just had brushes. And there were only two layers. And we had 4096 colors, but could only use 32 of them at once. And we liked it, dammit!

But I digress. Aside from these issues, the new version seems to be pretty good. I drew the above robot using the pencil tool, which doesn’t appear to suffer from the same jaggedness problem as the brush tool. I’m going to use it in the masthead of my game site, pictured below.