Just Bought the software, about 5 hour ago sadly I won’t get to try it out till probably Monday because the ordering system is dumb!
I guess you mean because of this statement at the order pages:
"You will receive a download ticket within 2 business days as a separate e-mail after you have received the order confirmation mail…"
Am I right?
If so then please have a look into your email inbox. You should find a license key there, if your’s was one of the orders I just processed and if it was not stored in a spam folder. The license creation involves some manual steps that also relies on payment info emails from the payment providers. Both can delay 
That’s why the statement at the order pages talks about (up to) 2 business days. We hope to add a fully automated processing this year.
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I just got it, thank you!
Hey Pickle Please try the 3d stereo drawing features they are so powerful and so overlooked.
Hello.
Just picked up the software last night. Had a good time drawing & listening to music. Was a good evening.
Have somewhat a background in drawing but no stylist so if I’m doing it digital, for now it’s pixel art which I really like but really have no experience in.
My first attempt last night loosely following another pixel art sample I found on pinterest. We’ll see where i am a year from now. Hopefully much better.
https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipOCE2ifcRwaCXj474pxq89VNxBvLfaUzNqC8pAf
Watching videos & checking forums now for basic user interface stuff to get use to the program. Like the photoshop like user interface but still fumbling my way around things. For example I was looking for a view canvas type thing to see exactly how many pixels i had after my crop. etc. Simple stuff but I’ll figure it out.
Thanks for the great work Cosmigo
Hey suds79 glad your enjoying the software. Be sure to check out the 3d stereo drawing tools because PMNG is the only one that has them that is a dedicated pixel art program.Imagine drawing in 3d or even animating in 3d the world is truely endless. It’s the next evolution in art and now it’s yours.
You mean a kind of darkened area that separates the result from the croppead part visually? There isn’t at the moment. You only have the crossed rectangles limitingt the area to be cropped to.
Any reason the orders can’t be processed automatically? There are e-commerce packs that could help with that.
Which e-commerce pack supports the inclusion of a user defined license key generation system?
Not sure, but I bet you can find one. Or just change the licensing system to a CD-key like (where keys would be checked against online database on the first run and as such it would be impossible to make a keygen) and then you’d be golden as you could e-mail the key along with purchase. Then you just pre-generate several hundreds keys and feed them to the script to be mailed out.
In any case, the way it is now where you have to manually process orders will become less and less sustainable in the future as more people learn about the software, not to mention having to do it manually takes time away from the actual development of PM.
Online checking can be bypassed easily. The beauty of the current system is that you can even generate licenses that are timely limited etc. . I already created an online version of the generation system and it is soon to be included in a shop system (not in mine though, because I don’t have one, actually). But I plan to connect to the payment systems I use and to generate the licenses online. I guess this will be done this year (sooner or later). The process is only in part a manual one. I just need to import data and hit a button. No problem to do this often, but yet it still needs the customer to wait a bit.
I see. Though when the online system is done it can be put in an automation script that will generate and then mail keys say on every midnight (scheduled task).
As for license files, they could be bypassed easily. All it really would take is for one guy to put PM along with key file on TPB or a warez portal (given that person has unlimited license). Doesn’t even need a crack. Fortunately it seems like no one has done it so far.
The license key contains information about the one that purchased it. Also I could add online black lists.
With ZenCart you could do it via custom plugins (keep in mind that I haven’t used for years, so I don’t know its current state). But my guess is that any ecommerce supporting plugin is just as good.
I’ve setup and managed a few e-commerces in the past, for clients. Most e-commerce platforms (not that there are too many) are in PHP and support custom plugins. Whether you can integrate an automated license generator into an ecommerce depends on a few factors:
- If your license generator is a binary file, then you’ll probably be able to include it via a PHP wrapper, but only if you have full administrator acess to the server machine hosting the ecommerce — as most web hosting servers usually won’t allow custom binaries to be run on a shared machine. But my guess is that you wouldn’t want to put such a crucial piece code on someone else server either.
- You could host the license generator code (regardless of whether it’s a script or a binary) on a small local server (a plug computer, or a RaspberryPi) and write a plugin for the ecommerce that will connect to your local server to validate the transaction and generate the license key.
- You could also setup a dedicated email account for the task, on your machine, associated to an always running app that will check and process emails every hours and generate and send keys (even if your PC is not on 24/24 it will still process licenses every day). Ecommerces usually offer good email interfacing for this. This solution would only require to write a small guiless email client (or a windows service, or Linux daemon) capable of parsing your atuomatically generated email orders (possibly encrypted), extract the data and generate and send the license.
In the past, I looked for dedicate online services for selling software. There are many, and they will handle payments, discounts,process orders and refunds, and even generate licenses. They offer various ways to interface to license generation, either via scripts you could host on their server, or by connecting to an external server of your choice. These services are good, but I’ve found them to bee to expensive for my tastes: there are fixed monthly costs for the base service, plus they take a percentage on each sale. They seem to be designed for selling costly software, and I think they end up bloating the price of a product in order to cover the fixed costs.
Personally, I would advice hosting an ecommerce on a private server, but this also adds maintainance burdens and issues, both for the ecommerce and for the machine. Maybe a middle ground is an easier solution. Setting up automatic license generation shouldn’t be more complex than setting up a PayPal vendor account (the steps are similar).