mariken

1. the ability to edit how many points a polygonal shape has, forcing you to redraw the shape multiple times until you get exactly the level of detail you want;
2. the ability to move multiple shapes at once, let alone flip, rotate or resize them;
3. the ability to move shapes with the arrow keys (you have to use the mouse);
4. any sort of masking or clipping system (that's right, I had to draw on top of any shape I wanted to shade, making sure to conform to the outline of the shape I was shading);
5. a proper layering system. Instead, you get the exact list of instructions, where you have to click one instruction and then go through the potentially-dense list in a small window to relocate it, and where color and "fill mode" instructions are entirely separate from the shapes themselves.

There are also weird interface issues with RIPaint that interfered with my use of the program. Namely, when you enter the Object Edit mode and then click a shape in order to move it, the upper-right corner of the selection box will snap to where your cursor is, as opposed to the other way around or even just keeping the shape and cursor where they are when you start moving them. This wouldn't be as big of an issue if it wasn't possible for it to trigger when you're not close enough to a vertex to grab and drag it, thus requiring you to pull the shape back to where it was before.

Also, RIPaint's solution to differentiating points you grab to move the whole shape and points you grab to move a vertex on a shape at the low resolution of 640×350, is that you hold the Ctrl key to tell it that you want to grab a vertex and not the shape-moving point overlapping it. The problem is that this doesn't stick after you finish dragging it; you can't just hold Ctrl to grab vertices, you have to press and hold Ctrl for each individual point you want to move.

You may also notice this picture is completely lacking bezier curves, a feature of the majority of vector art today. RIPaint has a tool to draw bezier curves—in fact, one of TeleGrafx's major controversies was that they kept their bezier curve algorithm and the RIP specs closed-source—but you are only allowed to draw a single line with two points of curving. If you want to draw a filled shape with bezier curves, you have to draw separate lines, and then change the "Border" color to tell RIPaint's flood fill function where to stop (lest it flood the entire picture with that color). So besides being a stylistic choice, my sharp and angular style was chosen because I knew I would run into complications if I tried using RIPaint's vaunted bezier curves to draw something with fine detail.

All of this is to emphasize that vector artists have it much, much easier today than they did in the early 1990s. Even putting aside that RIPscrip was a BBS-era format that didn't last long outside the artscene, modern apps like Inkscape benefit from quality-of-life expansions to the feature sets of vector art programs that were simply missing entirely in the DOS era.

If you're familiar with RIPscrip, you might be asking yourself, "Why not use PabloDraw, which runs on multiple platforms?" Because PabloDraw, on account of its artscene creator having never been a RIPscrip artist, only implements the RIPscrip specs and the basic tools, and not much else. It doesn't even have features that RIPaint has, like a snap-to-grid feature (which I didn't even use). And the zoom feature, which works for the ANSI art side of things, does not work properly in RIPscrip mode, which is an issue when you have a 4K monitor like I do (oh, the irony!). And that's why I used a 1993 program to make the previous version, because at least with the help of DOSBox, I could see what I was drawing on a full-screen display.