History of Shades
=================

Before
------

Any image had to be tested in game to see if it has special colors only in the
intended places. Due to the sheer vastness of the material pool manual checks
were impossible, so bugs of this kind were just spotted in releases and that
was it. A particular problem presented both spotting and swatting the stray
pixels - one had to work with a single pixel brush, carefully locating then
from reference screenshot, and keep picking apropriate colors the whole time.

The idea was that it should be possible to spot the wrongly colored places and
then "hit them" with something that would not affect the surroundings. Someone
planned to make this a plugin for GIMP, but nothing remains of that chapter to
be seen today.


Origins
-------

The first recorded explicit mention of a tool with such capabilities is from
3rd October 2005 in an email from Napik (T.K.). Regardles, some archaeology in
my email archives suggests that the idea might have reached some more or less
solid form in my head about seventeen days earlier (16.9.). Exact date is
unknown, but there is a sudden increase in my questions about special colors
roughly at that time.

The first public preview release happened two weeks later:
http://archive.forum.simutrans.com/topic/00500.0/index.html


Concept
-------

The initial plan was simple. Offer a canvas with the image, add buttons to
switch between normal (day), dark (night) and special (highlight) mode. User
creates a few selection-like rectangles covering the buggy pixels, then tells
the program to clean everything inside them.


The name
--------

At that time I called it "SdiEd" - as prissi promptly pointed out,
"Simutrans DIED" comes to mind :-) Then we had a little fun with inventing a
new name. In the end, Stormoog suggested "Shades" and Isaac reverse-engineered
that into "Special Hue And Dedicated color Editor for Simutrans".


Going official
--------------

The first official release intended to be usable and stable happened on
5th November:
http://archive.forum.simutrans.com/topic/00652.0/index.html

And the rest is history :-)


Aftermath
---------

After the initial excitement, dust settled again. The official sets were
cleaned in a few turns, and then the existence of a program intended for
"Simutrans tasks" spawned some other (hopefully) good ideas. Moving mode and
backgrounds for easier aligning of pictures; toolset for painting special
colors...

In short: Shades became an essential in any Simutrans author's toolbox.


Future plans
------------

As it stands now, Shades can do a LOT, even a lot more than intended at the
beginning. Still, there is an ocean of possibilities waiting just to be
explored. I have two (highly) ambitious plans, both of which are a bit "off"
regarding the original intention. Still, Shades represent truly a platform
which can't be ignored as a base structure, shortcut to save lots of work.

The first plan is to create some kind of "Spreadsheet editor for images".
While this sounds like a relatively simple task, the true power of such concept
lies elsewhere than the visual representation. In order to get what I'd like to
see, Shades will have to evolve a lot in the interface - in short, allow
multiple document editing, be it through tabs or MDI or whatever else. And to
achieve this goal, internals have to be reworked first... Once it's so far, it
should be possible to add *something* which could load a whole list of folders
and update the DAT files on the go, as you drag tiles around.

The other part may seem easy, but at the same time represents (to me) another
discourse into unknown. In short, the result should add some kind of
heuristics/AI which will be able to recognize what is in the image and automate
common operations like vehicle aligning, background fixes, fuzzy edge cleaning
for renders etc.
