| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ CREATION GRAPHIQUE ★ THE IMAGE SYSTEM ★ |
Andy Wilton looks at an ambitious art package You may have thought that the Arnold market was awash with art packages, but CRL clearly don't. They've just brought out a new one called The Image System, and the price tag on it suggests they're going for the top end of the market. Its major selling point is its ability to distort pictures - to 'zoom, move, copy, scale, rotate and even twist or fold (them) in 3D space' as the inlay so eloquently puts it. While these features certainly are available, they do have some serious drawbacks. Indeed, the package as a whole has its problems right from the start. DRAWING The whole screen area is available for drawing, but in normal use an area of it is covered by a status/command window showing the position of the cursor in x-y coordinates, and the current palette set-up. There are always 16 colours on the latter, because the system only works in Mode 0. Using the cursor keys you can move the drawing cursor around the screen one pixel at a time. Holding the key down accelerates things somewhat. Holding down the key while moving the cursor lets you draw freehand. Pressing 'L' puts you into rubber-band mode: you pin one end of a line using , stretch the other end to your chosen position using the cursor keys, and then use again to fix the whole line.
The only other drawing method is the circle/ellipse function, called up by the 'C' key. Instead of the traditional centre-radius method, you use the cursor to fix the two opposite corners of a box. The program then draws a circle or ellipse to exactly fit inside the box. either in outline if you press or solid colour if you press and . The problem with this method is that it only gives you a true circle if you get the defining box perfectly square - no easy matter, that. FILLING IN Once you've created an enclosed area using one of these three drawing methods you can fill it with a solid wash of colour. To do this you just move the cursor inside the chosen area, hold down < shift > and press . The fill is fast and thorough, though it does occasionally make mistakes. Given that it is thorough, and will leak out at the slightest opportunity, it should be used with care - there is no way to undo it afterwards. Rather than filling with a solid colour you can define a texture of your own if you prefer. This resembles, the texture fill of Melbourne Draw, but is much less flexible. It only works on a fixed size (16x32 pixels) of texture which you have to put together in the top-left corner of the screen: That's s an awfully large area to work on if you're trying to-create a. fine pattern. To make matters worse you can't fill an area of ;Colour with a texture if you've used that colour in the texture itself. So far we've seen nothing amazing - certainly nothing that other packages couldn't do better. Unfortunately this is all that that The Image System can do in the way of creating pictures. All its I other features are dedicated to manipulating pictures that you've already created. SPECIAL EFFECTS The different things you can do with your pictures a& revoke around saving your pictures in memory. Having pressed 'S' for save, you use the cursor keys to define a box around some section of your picture. The Image system then squirrels thai picture section away in Arnold's memory, compressing it:sc that it takes up as little space as possible. The compression is a slow process, and not terribly efficient either but it's a lot better than nothing. You can store lots of pictures in this way. There's a gauge in the status window to show you how much picture-memory you've got left, and you get a warning message if you try and store too much. Using the view command you can add stored pictures to the screen. When you call up the command by pressing the 'V" key an outline box appears on screen, showing you where the edges of the picture will come when it reappears. You can move this box around with the cursor keys so that you can control the final position of the picture. You can alter the colours that the stored picture will sport, or set them to 'transparent'. In this way you can 'trim' the background from some picture element if you want to. While you could do all of this with Melbourne Draw, there are other effects you can get with the view command which are unique to The Image System. When that outline box appears to show you where the stored picture will go onscreen, you can do a lot more than just move it. You can also rotate, stretch and generally distort it. Whatever shape you twist the 'view' box into The Image System will force the stored picture into it. This is extremely ambitious stuff for an Arnold program, but I'm afraid it isn't really very successful. The distortion process is not only slow but also pretty inaccurate the finished picture usually looks quite badly mauled; and tends to be full of little one-pixel holes. VERDICT There are quite a few other features of the package that I just don't have the time to cover in detail. Notable among these are a very nice zoom window, a printer dump routine and the ability to use the various program routines as RSXs from Basic. I don't think these are really relevant however, because to my mind. The image System is fatally flawed. The whole emphasis of the program is on manipulating pictures that you've created. .Unfortunately it lacks most of the features necessary to create these pictures in the first place. The package really cries out for a paint or airbrush function. To make matters worse, those precious manipulation functions are none too satisfactory either. They are really too ambitious for Arnold, and certainly much too ambitious for Mode 0 resolution. You can see it as heroic failure or plain gimmickry, but I don't think it's worth the money - or the effort it would-.take to get the results. Andy Wilton , AA |
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