You;re the one who is making yourself feel like blacksheep.
Deevad role is one I was going to suggest to you but seems that even that is not something you want to do. Its the closest an artist can get to the development but it can be a frustrating position because you are practically testing a not for ready release that is still buggy and you need to be good at quantifyign your approach. Deevad had quite the experience from being one of the main artist in blender open movie and here in Krita and he is not a developer - he is purely an artist.
There is also Ramon. Who does video for krita in the krita youtube.
Adjust a little bit of your perspective and approach. Not all of the things you want will get accepted, even if you concede a point/ you need to learn to let it go, be open to that.
Alot of what people here does can easily be known - if you hang around.
Ramon , Rakurri, Rahagnukath, Grum999, tiar, halla etc… on top of my head.
it lowkey feel you think we are all against you. while we are trying to make suggestion that maybe help address your concern while taking into account the potential pitfall or roadblock.
Edit: I think that role suits you. Be that one artist that can give feedback for animation - as I see that is your expertise. We probably lack those for animation.
Actually the barrier is rather low. You only need to type coherent English sentences (which you certainly demonstrated!) in topics that require feedback or give it yourself. Make sure to follow the guidelines on feature requests. That’s all.
I don’t think anyone sees you as black sheep. They are happy to talk you through this as you can see in the number of comments. Good ideas are always welcome, regardless of who posted it.
The main takaway is to be careful making assumptions, especially in things you are not familiar with. (just watched this Veritasium vid on expertise and predictions/ assumptions and thought it might be aporopriate, see The 4 things it takes to be an expert - YouTube). Anyways, try to stay open to things and adjust bias/ assumptions, because if you act on assumptions that may lead to the assumption becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy to you. And in this topic, that seems to be the main issue in identifying the artist - dev gap if I may say so. Not trying to be rude here
I can definitely feel that, but I fear it’s something I’m going to have to rewire my brain to fix over time. I’ll try to keep my manic episodes less public and instead focus the energy on offering feedback or writing feature requests.
I was told that sort of role is something that is earned not applied for. While I wouldn’t mind doing that, I’m not sure why anyone would listen to my input specifically at this moment as I don’t exactly contribute much just yet.
It all just vanishes into the ether. Like I’ve said before I don’t mind having to argue my case, having to prove to devs something is worth it or necessary from an objective standpoint, and I don’t mind devs saying ‘not right now’/‘no’ with an explanation why. But there’s just nothing, no replies. I don’t know how to contribute otherwise besides the bug reports I’ve been doing for years.
I already suffer through this, I download the latest master nightly before any drawing session and jot down bugs I come across in Sublime to report after.
That’s pretty much how it’s always been my entire artistic career. I’ve had thousands stolen from me from multiple payment providers because of my art, friends have had major corporations try to claim ownership of their characters or works, I’ve been banned from several social medias for my artwork, received multiple death threats, people are just very rude all around the internet if you don’t fit into their box.
At this point it’s battered dog syndrome, it’s easier for me to assume everyone’s an enemy until proven otherwise. Prevents pain. I do hope to overcome this and help make Krita the best it can be, but it might take some time to acclimate. Getting it out in the open with the thread has helped.
Thanks everyone for contributing to the discussion and helping knock some sense into me. It’s clear I have a couple things to work on myself, and a couple things to work on doing better for the community. I’ll see if I can dig up anything I can do that isn’t typing or bug reporting (which is typing, but with logic!).
If anyone has any quick suggestions for ways I can contribute that might not be instantly obvious from the forums, and can point me in the right direction I’m all ears.
Yeah it does get ahh frustrating. lol. but it does help knocking down most of them before release.
I saw your proposal with the brush and its good proposal - pretty concisely presented.
If you ever have any more of those present them the same way or snoop around for similar idea and comment with your own suggestion (this is one thing i do alot). The plugin dev thread is also a good place to hang around you might pick up ideas from there.
You’ll see that mostly if there is consensus on how to implement it gets attention quickly or noted down.
though sometimes some popular request are just kinda um messy and its hard to get consensus [ clipping mask/ inherit alpha is kinda like that last time i check]
@Ralek no worries, you certainly don’t come across as negatively as you may think.
If you feel like it’s worth your time to write down what you’d like to see improved, you should. If you think it’s hurting you not to get immediate feedback on what you’ve written, maybe it’s not your thing. But I can assure you that with patience and some persistence (meaning more patience), you’ll notice people adopting your ideas. If not, you’ll likely get suggestions on how to overcome some of the hurdles you are experiencing with Krita. If it isn’t for this year, maybe you’ll see your ideas implemented a few years down the line. You know the ether is also logging the ideas. And when you experience an issue, it is likely someone else comes/ came across it as well. They can also add their voice in those topics and gain traction.
In Blender, I have noticed that sometimes such topics of mine eventually resulted in plugins that helped to solve my issues. And with plugins, you can also chip-in your feedback. If people hadn’t posted their discontent with something, it would have never inspired someone to create a fix.
What you can do is look at the develop category and if you notice similar requests to the ones you’ve made, you can link people to your requests as well. I mostly respond to topics with issues I am noticing myself or with requests which I would love to see implemented. Other than that, you can look up what’s currently being worked on as that tends to be the thing where your feedback is most likely to end up in Krita.
It also helps if you use the correct terminology that’s used in Krita, that’s what we (the community) and the devs commonly understand. But if it’s a feature from another software, you should also list that name, because that may ring someone’s bell. Or, someone discovers the topic when searching: How to do X like Photoshop in Krita?
I have asked for windows build, I will personally ask for it on the IRC later, you are not on the wrong platform. it is just that the dev working on it is not on the same platform as you.
For direct chatting with developers over IRC, we originally had it so it was really easy to get on. The problem was that it was too easy. It attracted a number of bots and inappropriate spammers that flooded Krita with pornography sites or whatever. The development channel also turned into a user support channel, which made some things difficult like having a planned developer meeting that was constantly interrupted by people asking questions or wanting to discuss other things. It made the channel a user support channel, not a developer channel at that point.
IRC is also a bit too technical for a lot of artists. Most people want more accessible (easy to use) platforms like this Discourse site or Discord for chatting. @raghukamath did a great job getting this site going and growing this community. I think it has been a great resource for people and I wouldn’t want to go back to how we did this before.
@Ralek - Thank you for all this discussion. The developers are on here too, so it isn’t like this site is only monitored by artists. Artists are talking on here, and developer on here too looking at what is going on - and sometimes post too.
I think there are more professional artists using Krita and giving us feedback than you realize. They don’t really tout “I am a professional artist with X years of experience”. If I worked for a big movie or game studio, I wouldn’t want to disclose that. The last thing I want is a bunch of DMs from people asking me to look at their portfolio or seeing if I can get them a job in the industry.
@halla - Maybe we need to give a development update on the krita marketing site. An update that has the current plan with releases, and also the cool projects we want to work on in the next couple years.
There is some neat stuff that is planned, but people sometimes won’t see that. Looking at the 5.1 release notes (Krita 5.1 Release Notes | Krita) which is coming out soon, the changes and fixes are kind of all over the place - so it could appear like the project has no direction. There is a small blurb at the end of this post…but I think that is the most recent direction. Krita in 2021 and 2022 | Krita
I skimmed through the thread cause its a lot to read but i wanted to give my 2cents on the topic though reading through it might be a bit off topic from what was discussed but i still think it’s something important. I do believe there is a barrier in how the krita development is shown to general users.
On discord from time to time people ask if there is a roadmap for krita. And also how they can see what is being worked on. When i pointed someone to this forum as a way to keep track, they said that it was very hard to follow what was being worked as they basically needed to read all posts. i also linked the merge requests page from the git lab but it can also be a bit too technical to understand. So i kinda bridge the information of what is being worked on to people on discord explaining what are the main features being worked, and priorities and if it’s on the nightly builds or will be in the next version.
A lot of people there have no idea how software development works which i think it’s the same for a huge part of the userbase. Which can be very frustrating sometimes.
The weekly reports posts to me held little value to convey the information to most people. To me they felt too technical and written in a way that wasn’t clear for a common user, felt more like the weekly meeting on a blog format.
I think there should be an easier way to follow the development as a whole. something like a blog post or even a thread here, but doesn’t need to be weekly maybe monthly would be better.
But it needs to be easy to find( the current website news part is not really good to find though i know the website is being reworked) and i think it should be able to be viewed inside krita.
I think a good structure would be
Priorities - what are the development priorities, no need to be too detailed a list of features or 3 lines of text is enough
New features being worked on - this is what people want to know, what is coming to krita again no need to be super detailed just a few lines and images/videos or gifs to show the features. A good thing is to tell if the feature is already on the nightly build or not and if it’s planned for the next release or not.
Bugs - just a list of the bugs fixed, and the ones already known that are being worked on. And again it’s good to say if the fixes are already in the nightly builds or not.
I think this could help a lot showing people what is being worked on giving them more visibility on the project. Cause honestly on discord there were people who didn’t even know that the animation was being reworked. I understand that this is will not solve all problems as some people will not read but then the fault will be on them.
This is a nice suggestion. Although I think the release notes on the website on each release do show what is done with gifs videos etc. Doing a monthly blog like that would need a dedicated person.
Pinging @Whikebain was interested in marketing, may be doing a monthly post with layman friendly words is something that interests them
Indeed they do but they are release notes, meaning people only get this information when the new version is ready to use. I think there is some value in showing before the release, maybe could be a way to make more people interested in testing the beta versions or even the nightly builds
I agree that having some information before the release might let people know about stuff the team is working on. But there needs to be a person doing this. I know I might sound like a broken record, but who will do it?
Your english is fine. we can help you to edit it if you need. We can start it on this forum itself. I can create a tag for that post too. It can be in the #develop category
Now that you mention it, you remind me of a couple things. Should have thought of this earlier
Discourse
The first is posting development updates right on Discourse. McNeel does this for its Rhino software, which, I think, a nice way to communicate what has been committed to the ‘nightly’ version of Rhino. It has a dedicated category for it’s forum for development work in progress. So if there was a ‘Work in Progress’ category on this forum, that’s where I would consolidate all topics for Krita’s development.
Inside this category, there’s a pinned topic with the list of features that is used as target for the next version release, see: Rhino WIP Features - Serengeti (Rhino 8 BETA) - McNeel Forum
Each targeted feature is split up into its own topic, when work on the feature commences. These topics are titled: Rhino [version] Feature: [Feature name].
Artists feedback & testing would concern general non-current development topics for existing features and the like, whereas Feature requests, would be for new features.
Roadmap
As for a roadmap, I have always liked the 3ds Max format. It is rather vague in terms of when things are going to be implemented, so it’s nice for indicating the overall direction of the software without over-promising things.
The roadmap indicates delivered features, Work in Progress features (that should be in the nightly build) and future targets. For reference, see: 3ds Max Product Enhancements, Benefits & Roadmap | Autodesk
3ds Max also has this timeline on the website to show feature implementation (could have a splash-screen image there), see: 3ds Max Product Enhancements, Benefits & Roadmap | Autodesk. I think that the main thing I would change to the existing time-line/ roadmap is that it should start from the present and go back to the past. What has recently been delivered/ worked on is more important to the user than the stuff from 2016 or earlier.
In that sense, yes, the weekly reports aren’t that important. It’s the commits that I would like to follow.
@TheTwo said they can help with it. We can all help them in creating that page. I will create a new tag and the post can be directly in #develop or a subcategory called as #development_updates.
