The road to the release
At long last, we're moving into beta, meaning that no more features will be added before the 2.0.0 release, and no translatable source strings will be added or changed (unless absolutely necessary, if a source string turns out to be completely wrong).
This is now the best time to contribute to the translation effort over at Weblate. Translation is not easy, and should not be rushed. It doesn't matter if the translation covers 100% of the strings if 90% of the translations are incomprehensible or confusing. It's better to spend more time to try to make the translations consistent, and as clear as possible (while being reasonably terse, I did say it wasn't easy, right?). We aim for a full release at the end of January, so there are at least five weeks available to work on translations.
If the meaning of a source string is ambiguous, or generally lacking context/clarity, make a comment for that string in the Weblate interface. Make sure that the scope is set to "Source string comment, ..." so we can see it. Even though we won't add or change source strings, we can add source string comments to provide more information to translators.
We don't expect the (many) new languages that have been added to be fully or even partially translated in time for the release (aimed for the end of January 2020), but hope that most of the older major translation will be updated and improved (most of them are at least 75% done, string-wise). The languages that have been continuously updated during the past 5 months have less than 30 new strings that need to be translated.
Apart from the translations, the goal is now to find and fix any bugs we can fix (generally this does not cover input bugs on Windows, unfortunately). If you find a bug *, search for it on the tracker. If you find it on the tracker, make a comment to indicate that it's still a problem, and if you do not find it, report it in a new issue.
* That is, an actual bug - something that does not work, causes an exception or crashes the program - and not missing features you would like to have (for that, you can request/discuss/vote for features on the forums). Do report input bugs, even though we may not be able to fix them for this release.
Changes since alpha 13
Compatibility modes
Anyone who has used the prereleases knows that the 2.0 release brings with it the awesome spectral subtractive color mixing features - allowing colors to mix more like real paint would. They may also have noticed that their old files don't look quite the same when opened with those prereleases, and that painting can be a bit laggy when working with high resolutions.
In order to support working with old files, and for those who don't really need the new color blending (though you should try it out!), MyPaint now supports two compatibility modes:
1.x
When in 1.x mode (indicated in the window title):
- The rendering mode is the same as in 1.2.1 and earlier (sRGB).
- The default layer is "Normal" (configurable).
- The default Pigment brush setting is off (configurable).
- Spectral blending (pigment mode) will not work quite as it should.
2.x
When in 2.x mode (default, configurable):
- The rendering is adapted for the spectral blending (Linear sRGB + non-linear blending).
- The default layer is "Pigment" (configurable).
- The default Pigment brush setting is on (configurable).
- Painting will be slower *
Each document keeps track of which mode it was using when it is saved, but it's also possible to override that mode when opening files. For old documents, which do not have the mode information stored, the mode used can be configured to either be one of "1.x" and "2.x" or opening in "1.x" unless there are Pigment layers present (from files saved in 2.0.0 alphas).
* This will almost certainly be addressed in the future. @briend has already made an experimental branch with drastically improved performance and quality of results. To some extent the spectral blending will always be a bit slower, but it can be made a lot faster than it is today
Other changes
- The new brush settings are now properly categorized. You will no longer see the "Experimental" group, and can find the new settings under the "Color" and "Smudge" categories.
- Painting with the new symmetry modes is a lot faster. The entire area is no longer processed, avoiding the quadratic slowdown. Symmetry mode can still be slow when using the line/curve/ellipse modes, but that might be addressed in time for 2.0. Nevertheless, bear in mind that it will always be slower to paint with more symmetry lines - using e.g. 12 lines with the snowflake symmetry mode is the equivalent of painting a stroke that's 24x as long as the distance of your actual stroke.
- Version information and compatibility warnings have been added, warning when attempting to open a file created with a newer version of MyPaint. There are two separate warnings shown for different levels of incompatibility, they can be disabled separately (and of course, you won't be able to see them at all until future releases).
- Python 3 is now used for the Windows build *.
- Preparations for adjustable symmetry angles - unfortunately this won't be part of the 2.0 release, but will be ready for 2.1.
* In just 11 short days, Python 2.7 will be EOL. In general we'll keep supporting Python 2.7 for MyPaint 2.0 and probably 2.1, but support will be dropped for the 2.2 release (so the code can be cleaned up).