Hello everyone and welcome to the first ever edition of the new Krita weekly roundup! Krita developers hold weekly meetings in the IRC channel about what has been accomplished over the previous week. We have gathered a team of volunteers to summarise these meetings so that you can follow along.
Halla, Krita’s project maintainer and chief developer, ran the agenda of this meeting and kept things moving forward.
Without further ado, let’s dive in!
Metrics
First, a couple of interesting stats:
- Weekly download count - 77,000
- The krita-artists forum weekly posts - 1,600
- Krita’s Youtube channel subscriber count - 56k followers
- 36 different modifications were done to Krita’s code, changing over 112 unique files.
- Donations to the development fund are up!
What is being worked on this week
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There’s some cool stuff done in Krita this week like fixing a crash when renaming tags under certain circumstances, fixing copy + paste working strangely with animated layers, improvements to layer info subtitles (a new feature coming in 5.2). Take a quick look at this page which captures last week’s commits.
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Talks are underway to switch the donation processor for the main Krita website. Krita loves to keep things open source, but unfortunately open source payment processors are difficult to come by.
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The Krita website is also looking to add a list of notable artist and contributor communities, akin to Blender’s homepage. This will allow new or curious users to find their place within the broader community.
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Speaking of the website, @scottyp is working to migrate the current Krita website to a new website platform and give the website design a refreshing new look.
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To help make testing faster, there were some talks about a way to centralize generating test builds for Windows. The KDE sysadmins are looking into this.
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@halla has published the first release candidate for Krita 5.1 that you can download today! A release candidate means that no new features will be added to this version, but it’s not entirely bug-free and ready for full release just yet. For more information about what all is new in this version, check out this helpful video by @wojtryb over on Youtube.
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Unfortunately the official release of 5.1 had to be delayed because of 2 new bugs which cropped up. They’re both related to undoing, and are currently being tackled by @dkazakov . The first is pretty close to being fixed, but the second is more elusive.
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@tiar has been hard at work improving and otherwise upgrading the drawing assistant tools. You can follow along with the long list of planned changes here and here!
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Halla did bug triaging and bug fixing, and wrote a development update for the website, we would highly suggest giving it a read-over.
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@wolthera worked on modifying the Krita manual for the upcoming 5.1 release, so every artist has a headstart on understanding all the nifty new features.
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@IvanYossi worked on sandboxed macOS builds and investigated some bugs.
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@sh-zam has worked on many Android-specific bugs, and fixed the automated Android builder.
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XuChe continued work on a Google Summer of Code project of drawing pixel-perfect ellipses. You can read more about it on XuChe’s blog.
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@Reinold continued work on a Google Summer of Code project of exporting images to SVG. Here’s his latest blog post.
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@amyspark is working on making Krita code use the most optimized version according to the device you run it on. And it will work on the newer Alder Lake processors without any problem
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There was a discussion of how to better communicate what’s happening in development with the wider Krita community and this post is a result of that!
In summary
As you can see, a plethora of features and bugs were worked on and discussed this week, many exciting changes are just around the corner. You can expect to see the official release of Krita 5.1 in the near future, packed with loads of new features for artists around the globe.
– The Krita Promo Team (@Krita-promo )
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. Maybe asking XuChe to use the before/after on their work on the elipse tool would be nice. I’m sure the pixel artists among us would have their mind blown looking at that comparison.