Settings Window | Retro Sketch Documentation

The settings window has options for retro sketch and how it behaves. You can also find project specific settings located in here as well. You can open the settings window after you've created or selected a project to work with.

To open the settings window, click on the "Edit" menu option in the menu bar and then select "Settings". The following window will be displayed.

You can close the window by clicking the (X) or on the transparent background
You can learn how to use Retro Sketch by clicking the icon in the top left or by clicking on the "Documentation" button at the bottom of the window
This area is a scroll-able list of settings for Retro Sketch as well as for your project

Auto Save

This setting will allow you to set how often your project will be automatically saved while you work. The number you input is the number of minutes to wait before saving again. If you input the number "0", then auto-save will be disabled. Up to 10 auto-saves will be stored at any given time.

You can view your list of auto-saved files at any time by selecting "View" from the menu bar, then clicking on "Auto Saves". This will open up the auto-saves folder.

You can drag and drop any auto-save file into the editor to recover that save. Then you can use "Save As" to save a copy of that auto-save.

Transparent Background

The transparent background toggle is useful for making sure that your file will export without a white background. Since this is typically the case for game development, this setting is on by default. If you wish to have a white background by default, disable this setting. In this case, if you export your image/animation, it will have a white background wherever transparent pixels are found

The checker pattern in the background is a visual queue to let you know that transparency is active. The squares are not aligned to the project grid to prevent confusion.

When you disable transparent backgrounds in the settings, the drawing surface will also include a white background rather than the checker background (mentioned above).

Onion Skinning

Onion skinning allows you to specify the number of images (frames) you in the past or future you wish to be visible while drawing. This is used as a guide to know where an animation is going or where an animation came from. This is a simulation of using a light box as if you were animating traditionally.

If you check the box to use red/green for left/right, rather than seeing a ghost of the previous or next drawings, you'll see a flat red (for previous frames) or a flat green (for future frames). This coloring sometimes helps focus on the larger shape and not so much on the details of the drawings.

Canvas

The canvas section allows you to resize your canvas to be larger or smaller. If you choose to make it larger, it will fit your drawing into the center of the new resized canvas. If you make it smaller, the drawings will be cropped. The blank button to the right of the width/height boxes will lock the aspect ratio.

This will resize every canvas in the entire project as all canvases are required to be the same size.

Frame Hold

By default every frame is held for exactly 1 frame. However, you can change this default to be any number of frames. Any new canvases created will then be held for this specified number of frames. This is useful, for example, if you want to animate on 2s and swap to 1s for fast bursts of smooth action.

Draw With Timeline

The draw with timeline option allows you to view all timelines stacked on top of each other as you draw. If you have timelines stacked on top of each other, the current canvases frame will be completely shown. This is sometimes helpful if you wish to place background/foreground objects on separate timeline tracks. You can then see the whole frame of all timelines as you draw, to make sure you're placing things correctly or matching colors.

Show Coordinates

This option will enable a coordinate view at the top of the window. This will update to show your current cursor location (in X and Y coordinates) relative to the drawing surface (canvas). It's very useful for being precise.

Developers

The developer section is helpers for people developing Lua plugins for Retro Sketch.

Hot reload plugins: This option forces all plugins to be reloaded from the hard drive rather than memory. This is helpful while you develop and test so you don't have to close and reload the window to reload your script.

Note that if you assign your plugin to a global namespace, you'll need to handle the cleanup of that global object yourself.

Retro Sketch

Docs Home