Dev Blog #2

Celga has been coming along nicely. After extensive optimisation and pressure testing I’m getting closer to locking down its features.

In the last month I cleaned up its feature set by reducing some of the tools and options. There was a Vector tool for creating vector drawings and there was also SVG import/export, but I have now hidden them in the UI because Celga, being an emulation of cel animation, was always intended to be a raster animation application. I lost focus by adding vector tools.

There was also also an option to load PNG files to be used as custom brushes. I hid that in the UI too because custom brushes were never used in cel animation (on the cels themselves). Even though Celga’s paint tool has surpassed my expectations if people need to use custom brushes to paint backgrounds they should do so in a dedicated painting app such as Rebelle.

The Sketch to Image module that uses ComfyUI as the back end will not be visible if ComfyUI is not running when Celga launches. The UI is cleaner that way and users who don’t want generative AI features, even ones that give you a lot of control of the output, won’t have to see it.

I have also added a capture module so Celga users who want to create stop motion films can capture photos directly from a connected camera.

Celga will come with a storyboarding application, a file browser/organiser app and a player app. The storyboarding app was actually the first app I wanted to develop and I had a decent prototype built two years ago but then I realised I could do it differently. The prototype was trashed (actually I lost some prototypes while making space on a back up system) and I rebuilt it from scratch with a much cleaner UI.

I first came up with the idea for the browser/organiser app in 2006 and thanks to archive.org I tracked down a web discussion on a defunct website where I described the idea. Back then it wouldn’t have been possible to develop it because the frameworks and hardware it uses didn’t exist at the time. Since then there have been a number of popular and new applications that kind of used the same concepts but none of them matched the original idea, so I’m proud that I have been able to finally develop it and stay ahead of others after two decades.

Squarespace updated their template system to version 7.1 and I made the mistake of accepting the new system. I’m not a fan of it at all. It forces me to use double line breaks between paragraphs. When I have time I’ll see if there’s a way to fix this issue.