The Colors! Java Application/Applet

Colors! is a superb painting application, developed by Jens Andersson, for the Nintendo DS. It has inspired many (and sold a number of DSs apparently). You can see examples of what people have created over on the public Colors! Gallery.

One of the joys of Colors! is that the brush strokes used to form the image are saved along with the resulting image. These brush strokes can then be played back showing the process of forming the image.

This aspect fascinated me as much as, if not more than, the quality of the resulting art work (again see the Colors! Gallery).

Therefore I decided to create a Java application/applet that can render the .drw files (the recorded brush strokes) allowing the .drw files to be replayed on the desktop or through a website. This, running as an applet, is now part of the Colors! Gallery.

How to use it

See here.

If you are trying to produce larger images (by increasing the Size scaling factor) you may have to increase the amount of memory available to the Java runtime environment. You can do this using the -Xmx option. For example:

java -Xmx256M -jar ColorsDraw_1_0_3.jar

The bigger the scaling factor the more memory is needed. To generate images with 20.0 times scaling (10240 by 7680 pixels) I need to give the runtime 2000MiB of memory.

java -Xmx2000M -jar ColorsDraw_1_0_3.jar

If there is not enough memory for the requested scaling the application will attempt to reduce the scaling so that it fits within the available memory. This does not always work.

Can I use the applet on my website?

Yes you can and you do not need to ask my permission. It would be nice if you credit me (Ben Jaques) and/or provide a link to this site but you do not have to.

Releases

Version 1.0.3 - 2008-05-16

• Changed scaling limit from 4.0 to 100.0.

Version 1.0.2 - 2008-05-15

• Fixed brush scaling bug - some strokes appeared thinner than expected when the image is scaled up.

Version 1.0.1

Credits

Many thanks to Jens Andersson, the developer of Colors!, who provided me with support and the C++ source of the renderer from the DS application. With this I was able to produce renders that are very close (not perfect yet) to the DS original.

Source Code

The application was developed using Netbeans 5.5.

The Java source code is available through SVN. You will require both ColorsDraw and AviBuilder in order to build the application.

http://masscat.afraid.org/svn/ColorsDraw/

http://masscat.afraid.org/svn/AviBuilder/