Over the past several months (and even before that), there have several requests for new features in the DSiPaint and 3DSPaint Web apps in the community. I figured it would be worth sharing my most recent response to solicit feedback among the membership.

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The problem lies in how art is saved on the different platforms. For DSiPaint, speed and memory of the browser required a smaller resolution pixel-based canvas, but that made erasing fairly simple. For 3DSPaint, the browser lacked support for quick saving of exported PNG images, so art is actually saved as a series of point-coordinates, and it gets regenerated on-the-fly when viewing (allowing for the 3D effect on a Nintendo 3DS browser). In theory, this means that 3DSPaint vector art could be blown up to any size without a degradation in quality, or a tool could be added to the website to playback the sequence of drawing like a movie. Yet, this all has the side effect of making erasing difficult because the browser isn't fast enough to process the entire array of lines to determine where they'd be broken and subdivided to handle erasing line segments within them. For example, if a line is 120 pixels long, and an eraser tool is set to 30 pixels, passing the eraser through the exact center would require the calculations of subdividing the original line into 3 segments- the second of which gets deleted. The 2 remaining line segments would have to be entered back into the original sequence in the needed order as to not disrupt the depth of that layer. This means the entire layer would have to be redrawn by the browser whenever the eraser is moved.

Maybe a new tool could be added to the updated website with more modern features, but I think the path now is to focus on SDK Paint and SDK Spriter for the Wii U (and possibly the NX or New 3DS later) for exporting higher-quality artwork to accounts in this community for avatars, wallpapers, etc. New drawing tools within the community will probably focus more on mailing and real-time chat sketching, enhancing the early forms that already exist. Something like the Nintendo DS' Pictochat would be a fun addition.