About UltraPaint

UltraPaint is a high- and true-color image editor for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT and so on. It's loaded with many image effects, draw techniques and effects. It doesn't have all of the stuff that more expensive packages like Photoshop come with, but it beats Microsoft Paint out of the water and offers a very cheap alternative to other shareware programs like Paint Shop Pro and LView.

This program was not intended for the novice, although I have included a tutorial to try and help people get started using it right away. Actually, it was originally designed for making graphics for video games, and is currently (3/99) being used to develop a DirectX platform game.

Features Include

System Requirements

This program is a member of a new breed of programs: ones that are cheap, packed with awesome features, and slow. In my hurry to pack in tons of cool features, speed and reasonable memory requirements became a low priority. This program is, as a result, targeted at people with modern, fast computer systems.

Minimum Tolerable System

When using such a system, keep the size of your editing window small. The speed of the draw primatives is inversely proportional to the area of the edit window. So if you maximize the edit window, you will find it intolerably slow. Use a small window if possible.

Reccomended System

Memory usage of loaded images

When an image is loaded into memory, it uses a lot more memory than it does on disk. First of all, it is uncompressed. So JPEG images, which might have a compression ratio of 10:1, would expand to ten times the original size upon loading up. But that's just the beginning. There's also:

By the way, it's not enough to have a lot of virtual memory either. Most drawing operations touch four of these buffers. When you draw a line, for example:

This program is therefore guilty of being a memory hog. Since all the memory is touched, it must be present as RAM; if you don't have enough memory to hold it all at once, there will be incredible hard drive thrashing as all that memory is swapped to an fro on disk. I must boast, however, that UltraPaint does have a good startup time... it even starts faster than the pathetic MS Paint! :)