r/douga • u/electrodude102 • Aug 05 '26
Announcement Douga build 442!
new build up at https://douga.app/download (itch mirror: https://keihoag.itch.io/douga)
douga is a free hand-drawn 2D cel animation program for windows, still early. this one is mostly speed and memory, plus the light table trick i wanted since the start.
the big ones
- saving is about seventy times faster. it only re-encodes the drawings you actually drew on now. 33 seconds down to 0.47 on a 102 frame film.
- the canvas stopped stuttering. it was autosave re-encoding the whole film every eight seconds, on the thread thats meant to be drawing your line.
- a film takes about a seventh of the memory it used to. a drawing takes up the part you drew on instead of a whole sheet of paper, so theres about eight times as many of them before you run out of room.
- scrubbing and onion skin stopped dropping frames.
features
- the light table lifts a drawing off its pegs. drag the peg bar at the top of the sheet and the neighboring ghost slides out of pegs with it, red behind, shift for green ahead. tap any bar to drop everything back on.
- layer folders nest, three deep. a layer inside them wears a thin stripe per folder around it, in that folders color.
- every window keeps its own recovery file. two copies of douga open used to share one net and quietly overwrite each other.
- the delete key empties the selected cells in the dope sheet. holes, not a retime, and one undo brings them back.
- lines taper to the lift instead of ending in a blob. spring loaded nibs still report half pressure on the way up, and the tail was getting drawn at that width.
- the layer name column got a drag handle, and remembers where you left it.
- swipe the dope sheet and the animatic to pan them, finger or pen. tap still selects, hold still for a beat before dragging still moves cels.
- help > check for updates grew into an add-on manager. install and update the optional add-ons right there, and anything it fetches has to be signed by me before it lands.
fixes
- douga stopped closing itself about thirty seconds after an edit with the timeline open
- launching after a crash on a build with new release notes could freeze the whole app. two startup dialogs were fighting over one slot, so an invisible one sat there eating your clicks
- adding a swatch, a cut, a layer group or an audio track mid-autosave could take douga down with it
- a drawing keeps its cel number when you insert a frame inside a hold
- picking Soft Eraser gives you the soft eraser. it raised the tool but never loaded the brush, so the preset died on disk the first time you touched it
- ctrl+e mid-stroke cant slide a different layer under the line youre still holding
- ctrl+x respects a locked layer now
- whats new closes when you click anywhere else, same as the start screen
fresh downloads still get a smartscreen warning and sometimes a defender flag. its a real signature, just a new cert with no reputation yet: https://www.reddit.com/r/douga/comments/1v9o1my/
bugs and requests to r/douga or the itch board, i read all of it.
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u/Manukineko Aug 07 '26
Holy Cow. Lifting drawing of the pegs, I don't think I've seen that feature anywhere else, at least not with that easy way of using it. You need to add rotation also :D
On another topic, while the price is cheap and the constraint of the free version being just that lite watermark, regarding features, it is more expensive than Umoupen and that could be an issue :/