Today we are releasing a major update to Retro Sketch. It is now running on our new in-house Vulkan-based game engine. All of the rendering and UI drawing has been optimized and ported over from the old OpenGL renderer. In Windows 11, we were noticing that the graphics for the software were completely messed up, probably due to some updates in modern drivers. This pushed us to port over everything to the new engine. In the process we ported all of the UI and business logic Lua code over to C to be at parody with the engine.
Updates
Most of the work was moving over all the existing systems, but we did add in a few fixes as well as quality of life improvements.
- Complete rewrite to in-house Vulkan C game engine
- Added menu bar at the top for desktop
- Moved most tools out of the toobox to the menu bar
- Greatly reduced memory usage by removing redundant canvas rendering code
- Fixed bug with Atlas export for binary files when scaling the animation
- Fixed bug in selection code that sometimes caused a crash
- Removed lasso selection tool and added selection painting
- Right click on layers, animation frames, and timeline tracks to view options
- Added number row 1-5 to quick swap between colors in first row of color palette
- Made all canvases share the same zoom and position (it was annoying to have different placements per-canvas)
Known issues
There are some known issues that will be fixed in upcoming patches:
- File drag-drop not working
- Some overlay messages are showing at the top of the screen
- Export window doesn't use aspect ratio of the project
- Sometimes importing PNG files doesn't refresh the UI previews
- Tools window can't be collapsed
- Timeline X scroll is uncapped
- Layer window doesn't fully collapse when clicking title
Future things
Here is a list of some things we'd like to get to at some point in the future
- Auto-scroll timeline to current canvas when opened
- Add flood fill selection hotkey to select tool
- Add FPS to settings so you don't have to set it in different places
- Save export settings to the project settings be re-used on project reloads
- Show indicator somewhere that there are pending changes (*)
- Add "Open..." option in menu bar (use "New..." to load projects for now)
- Add ability to generate pixels/canvases in LUA (Lua plugin support)
Thanks!
Thanks for supporting Retro Sketch and for any feedback and suggestions you may have. We are game developers and use this tool to create art for our games as well. So any ideas that we haven't yet thought of would be awesome!
Happy drawing!