DRAW v2.0.0

DRAW v2.0.0

EFFECTS, ANTI-ALIASING, THEDRAW FONTS, MULTIPLE INSTANCES, DARK SKIN

Released 2026-08-24

The biggest release yet — 353 commits since v1.9.0. A full image-effects
system, an experimental anti-aliasing mode across every drawing tool, asset
Kits, multiple isolated windows, target-aware drag-and-drop, an OS hardware
cursor, live theming, and a large pile of fixes and performance work.

New Features

Effects — a full "Eye Candy"-style EFFECTS menu

• SHAPE effects (WIP - will be improved) (act on the layer's shape/silhouette): Fire, Smoke, Snow, Water Drops, Electrify, Glass, Drip, Icicles, Motion Trail, Corona, Backlight, Cutout, Bevel, Chrome, Extrude, Outer/Inner Glow, Drop/Perspective Shadow.
• TEXTURE engines: (WIP - will be improved) Wood, Marble, Brick Wall, Weave, Reptile Skin, Stone Wall, Diamond Plate, Lightning, Brushed Metal, Ripples, Animal Fur, Texture Noise, Rust — most with type variants.
• RENDER engines: (WIP - will be improved) Render Sky (day/night/space — sun, moon, stars, nebula), Render Grid (endless perspective), Terrain, Clouds & Difference Clouds (fBm), Lens Flare (click-to-place), Kaleidoscope (click-to-set mirror centre).
• Every effect dialog has a split ORIG/ADJ live preview loupe, mouse-wheel sliders, a visual angle dial, a seed, a MIX (blend-with-original) slider, and a Reset-to-Default button.
• Blend/Fade Last Effect exposes all 19 blend modes and an "Isolate onto new layer" option.
• Effects can be clipped to the active selection or run selection-as-shape; effects are multi-layer aware with unified undo and a progress overlay.
• Sharpen is now a full Photoshop-style Unsharp Mask; Mosaic gains cell shapes (square/rect/triangle/hex/voronoi/random).

Anti-Aliasing mode (experimental, default OFF, per-document)

• Soft, coverage-blended edges for Brush/Dot (2px+), Line (Xiaolin Wu), Ellipse/Circle (outline + fill), Poly-line, Bezier, Poly-fill, and all Smart Shapes (strokes, arcs, and fills).
• A soft coverage-subtract Eraser — round brushes (2px+) erase with a feathered edge.
• Toggle from Edit → Anti-Aliasing or the shared Edit Bar Edge-Mode button (Pixel-Perfect ⟷ AA, mutually exclusive; an "AA" status badge shows when on).
• Crisp by design: 1px brush, rectangles, square brushes/erasers, and spray.

Kits — export and install asset kits: ZIP bundles of fonts, palettes, brushes, and themes, with a manifest, per-type item picker, conflict prompts, and headless export/install flags.

Multiple instances — run isolated DRAW windows with a shared clipboard and Copy / Paste / Send Layer between them (Settings → General → Allow Multiple Instances; Ctrl+Alt+N). Background music plays only in the primary window.

Target-aware drag-and-drop — drop an image onto the canvas (stamp onto the current layer, undoable), the layer panel (new layer), the brush bin (custom brush, new page if full), or the menu bar (open in a new isolated window). Hold Shift to center; larger-than-canvas images route through the interactive import flow.

OS hardware cursor — icon cursors via _MOUSECURSOR give render-free canvas moves.

Live theming — a complete DARK theme, instant theme switching with no restart (Ctrl+Shift+F5 to hot-reload colors + icons), a theme picker as the first Appearance option, and a reusable /create-draw-theme workflow.

User-installable fonts — TDF, bitmap, and Color Bitmap fonts installable by the user, with font-preview strips in the Text-tool and item pickers.

Selections — flip (H/V), rotate (>/<), and scale (PageUp/PageDown) now auto-float a marquee selection and persist it on commit.

Picker — Alt+click eyedrops any on-screen pixel (GUI chrome included) via a loupe magnifier.

Also new: --option KEY=VALUE CLI overrides + --options-list registry; OS-enforced min/max window size (_WINDOWSIZELIMIT, HiDPI-aware); pan + zoom in the ANSI export preview; Resize Image with Content dialog (scale canvas + pixels together); brush size control split (Ctrl+wheel = presets 1/3/5/7, [/] = +1 fine step); remote build/test dashboards for the mac/Windows fleet.

Improvements

• Performance: box-blur moved to an -O3 C++ kernel (18.4×, bit-exact) powering the whole spatial-effects menu; -O3 kernels for median/edge/emboss/sharpen/pixelate; the layer blend compositor unified into one -O3 kernel; no MIDI/OPL spin-up at startup when music is off; gradient swatches rebuild only when FG/BG changes; FPS_CURSOR default 240 → 60.
• UI: EFFECTS reorganized into flyout submenu categories; a shared DROPDOWN widget, angle dial widget, and click-to-set-center widget; RENDER/SHAPE/TEXTURE categories marked (WIP) where still growing.
• Clean build — 0 compiler warnings.

Bug Fixes

• Windows/HiDPI: fixed startup crashes on high-DPI displays; deferred-snap window resize for GLFW; _RESIZE echo dimension-match so restore-from-maximized redraws; hide the CMD console flash when launching a new window.
• macOS: native rounded-squircle Retina app icon; hardware cursor sized to the native PNG; headless DISPLAY probe no longer misfires under $IF LINUX (which includes Mac).
• Window/startup: console-only CLI ops no longer flash a window; minimum-size polish (padding, menu-bar fit, dialog cap); opening a flat image no longer resizes the window.
• Cursor/z-order: cursor renders above floating windows; floating windows win the input hit-test; REGION_CANVAS registered as the z-stack floor; pointer no longer vanishes after Alt+1–9 quick-open.
• Text: apron-aware render (off-canvas font layers no longer clip); rasterize before transform; kerning rebound to Alt+Left/Right; close font dropdown on click-away.
• Fonts/dialogs: {NumGlyphs} can no longer crash the font menu; dropdown open/close spasm and wheel snap-back fixed.
• Selection/paint: instant non-destructive scale for all multi-selected layers; Ctrl+Alt clone-stamp edge-drag keeps the selection live; pastes stay in clone mode so committing never wipes the layer; Posterize dither preserves color.
• Other: strip inline ;/# comments from config values; deep hotkey audit across code, menus, docs & manual; restore the AUDIO menu; save no longer leaves a stuck modifier; browser double-click/Enter opens the file.

Internal / Refactoring

• QA harness extracted into a standalone toolkit (DRAW keeps a thin adapter).
• Hardware cursor became the sole icon-cursor path; the software cursor was removed.
• Drop dispatch extracted into INPUT/DROP.BM; z-order unified into one stack for render + input; remote fleet build/test dashboards added.

Breaking Changes

• Toolchain: the hardware cursor path uses GLFW (_MOUSECURSOR). This has merged upstream into QB64-PE (v4.6.0+), which is now the default build compiler — pre-GLFW compilers can no longer build DRAW.
• No user-facing file-format or config-key breaks — Anti-Aliasing is default OFF and byte-for-byte identical to previous output when off.

What's Changed

• Font previews + ANSI/crash/view fixes sweep by @grymmjack in #97
• QA harness → portable toolkit, DRAW KITS, themes, fixes by @grymmjack in #98
• More image effects: new engines, full parameterization, and shared effect-dialog widgets by @grymmjack in #99
• Fix dropdown mouse-wheel scroll snapping back to the selection by @grymmjack in #100
• fix(startup): console-only CLI ops (no window flash) + config-upgrade + auto-scale by @grymmjack in #101
• ci: hardware-cursor cross-platform test workflow (manual) by @grymmjack in #102
• Hardware cursor + -O3 C++ effect/blend kernels + gradient-preview fix by @grymmjack in #104

Full Changelog: v1.9.0...v2.0.0