I am working on an hd13 wacom tablet… I have to almost always press undo twice so that it works… i also have to twice click and then hold to move the scrollbar of the timeline up and down… Sometimes i have to reselect the tool to start drawing again… Alt tabbing to quickly look at reference deselects it… It picks the eyedropper… And sometimes when i want to use the shortcut for the hand tool to quickly reposition the canvas, it does not go back to the tool i was working with, so i have to reselect the pen tool again… The dpi scaling is broken too, it messes up the layout no matter what settings i try… used to be fine with the previous version i had (dont know which version as i no longer have it)…
Think its time for some bug fixing and QOL improvements… Since you guys are the only simple to understand open source animation software out there… Please continue and make our lives easier…
That sounds awful, and I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I’m pretty sure that it isn’t bugs.
I use Pencil2D with a XP-PEN 22E graphics tablet, and can’t reproduce any of the things you describe.
My best guess is that it must be some clash between the shortcuts in P2D and in your tablet, or maybe a driver issue.
So now my brush size also changes after alt tabbing back… Yeah i checked the shortcuts, nothing… I didnt have this before with an older version… Idk which one that was though, im not making this up…
@GameDevDave Hi. Sorry to hear you’re having these problems.
Let me address each issue one by one and most of these problems normally occur with tablet input and windows OS, however if you’re using Linux systems please get the digimend drivers for your appropriate tablet model https://digimend.github.io/
This is going to be a bit long, so apologies for the wall of text
Windows OS & Wacom Tablet Related Issues Breakdown
The undo problem you mention I’ve had it too, it seems it’s an issue that doesn’t happen widely. I hadn’t reported it as I thought it only happened to myself. This seems to happen once per session. You have to draw and when you undo for the first time it fails to undo, so I normally have to undo with Edit > Undo /Redo to stop this behavior and then it starts working properly.
I’ll report this soon seeing as you’re also having this problem and once I can find a way to predictably reproduce it.
The scrollbar issue sounds weird, feels like the tablet input is somehow not calibrated if you have to double click.
Make sure you calibrate your screen tablet first, even if you had done it already, calibrate it again, and if possible use an application profile for Pencil2D.
This issue could also happen with Wacom tablets due to the annoying Windows Ink drivers. If you can please take a look at your driver settings and make sure to turn off “Windows ink”, although in Windows 10 it seems that setting is sometimes not entirely effective, but that’s a problem between Wacom and Microsoft at this point.
The eyedropper issue is actually a problem with Pencil2D. I’ve had it a lot.
It seems that when you alt + tab the eyedropper gets locked into focus, so when you come back and try to draw it uses the eyedropper instead of the tool you had selected before.
To me it has been extremely frustrating as well, though this has been happening for the past two version according to my testing. I’ve yet to report this issue as I thought It was only a thing that happened to me, but reading your report it seems that’s not the case.
As for the canvas pan tool not updating, are you using spacebar? that’s the only key that will temporarily activate the hand tool, if you select the tool directly with their shortcut these are permanent.
The dpi is broken on windows and other system for hi-dpi resolutions due to how the base technology accomplishes hi-hpi scaling between operating systems.
Basically the only workaround we’ve found is to enable compatibility with Windows 7 for the Pencil2d.exe file which incidentally also fixes various issues with tablet input. This problem is currently under investigation by the development team. Unfortunately it’s been extremely difficult to find the root cause
On the other hand If you meant to describe the issue where resizing the panels and windows tend to overlay the contents of panels, this is a new bug we found recently and it’s been reported to the ticket tracker.
The current work around for this is to stack some of the unused panels into the ones that you use more to reduce layout space being taken, I made a simple video in this answer so take a look> Timeline keeps disappearing whenever I press ALT
Think its time for some bug fixing and QOL improvements
I wanted to address this separately. Personally I understand how you feel, seriously I do but first of all we’re all just volunteers there s not Pencil2D company or foundation, it’s just 5 people working on it for free, and the devs work as hard as they can on their spare time but even then they can only do so much.
It’s not like we can match Adobe or Toonboom in development pace, and now with the COVID pandemic, most of us have been affected one way or the other, so efficiency has plumetted. I wish we could do more about it, but unless we have people willing to contribute we don’t have the resources to fix everything immediately. I’m sorry but it’s the truth
Despite that fact and the current issues we’re all facing, discovering and suffering from previous versions, this new version has over 600 individual refinements, features, enhancements and fixes from a full year of work.
We have not announced it globally because we were waiting for other maintainers to catch up and meanwhile we wanted to use this time as a testing passive period to find the most pressing issues to fix with a patch.
That said, we’ll seriously look into these problems and try to investigate how to improve these areas.
However I’ll be honest with you, if you’re having such an incredibly frustrating experience with Pencil2D, maybe it would be worth considering to use something else while the program is fixed, and trust me I don’t say this lightly, take this as advice coming strictly from a professional standpoint. Quite simply If the tool you’re using is not up to the task at hand, just drop it and find a better one.
To help with that I’m going to post here a list of alternative animation applications:
From that list simple to use software I can recommend is:
Wick (Free + Browser based)
Tupi (Free + Desktop)
Roughanimator (~$5 + Desktop & Mobile versions)
In reality I wouldn’t want you to abandon Pencil2D, but I’m much more worried about you losing time and work because the tool gives you trouble, than trying to keep you as a “customer”.
You can still use Pencil2D to export GIF’s and stuff like that. But maybe you could try to use other apps to draw and color the animation and then export an image sequence to finalize the work in Pencil2D or in a video editor, you shouldn’t feel restricted to use a single application, at least not if you’re using open source software
There are a couple of points I would like to add to as well.
For the alt-tabbing issue, this has been an issue for a while. Basically, the alt button is used to temporarily switch from a drawing tool to the eyedropper for easy access. When you press the alt button down (including as part of the alt+tab shortcut), it switches to the eyedropper. When you unpress the alt button, it switches back to the tool you were using. However when you switch to a different application and then lift your alt key, Pencil2D doesn’t get told that the button was lifted since it is not in focus anymore. That’s probably why it stays as the eyedropper. I do not have a Windows computer to test this on right now, but I’m pretty sure that if you just tap alt after you go back into Pencil2D and it is stuck on the eyedropper, it should switch back to your previous tool. Assuming this works, it should be a fairly convenient workaround for you since you probably already have your finger on the key from alt+tabbing back to Pencil2D.
The dpi issue is also a persistent problem, it is difficult for applications to get this right. If you right click on the application and then go to Properties > Compatibility, there may be some options which will help with this. Jose suggested using Windows 7 comptability mode, newer compatibility modes might also help. There may also be a “Change high DPI settings” button near the bottom which will present you with a couple options you can change. You will have play with all these settings and see if you can find some combination which works for you.
Hey guys, switching to compatibility mode for windows 7 fixed all of it… There’s only a few minor nuisances like having to pick the tool I was working with again after using the handtool (I use the handtool with the pen button, so i guess that’s wacom’s part but it’s still good to compensate it on your end to make things more compatible)… Thank you so much guys, awesome software <3
@GameDevDave Hey! Glad to hear that the Win7 compatibiltiy advice helped. To be fair we are planning to look for a way where Pencil2D does not depend on this, however I can’t really say when this will happen
On the other hand, yes, there’s an ongoing problem where Pencil2D hand tool gestures are sort of baked into the middle and right click so assigning the pen stylus buttons with the middle and right click functions respectively will cause the zoom and pan to misbehave unpredictably when using the drawing tools.
Even when mapping other functions it’s honestly unpredictable ad we’ve been looking to fix that for a while now. What I had to do was to simply disable those buttons from my wacom only for Pencil2D using an “application profile” but this is not an ideal solution by any means of course.
