Green       | High           | -Green     | Red Sand (16) or Silver Powder (16)

Blue        | Low            | +Blue      | Falcon's Bait (224) or Copper (192)

Blue        | High           | -Blue      | Red Sand (24) or Clay (32) or Carrot (32) or Silver Powder (32)

In many cases, it may be easiest to go back and do these three-way tests after you have finished all of your other testing.

### Catalysts

For catalyst to catalyst reaction tests, follow the three-way instructions, as above.

### Finishing Up

When you're done testing your reactions, you can either use the built-in Pigment Lab simulator (`Window > Run Simulator`) to experiment with recipes, without dipping into your precious ingredient stocks.  Alternatively, you can export your reactions in PracticalPaint format.

## Generating Recipes

### What do all these settings do?

* _Minimum Ingredients_ is the minimum number of ingredients the generator will use in a recipe. It's best to leave this at 1 so the simple single-ingredient recipes are included (like 10 carrots for 'carrot')

* _Maximum Ingredients_ limits how many ingredients will be used in a recipe. Ingredients after the 5th will still affect the resulting color, but won't use their reactions.

* _Silk Ribbon Recipes_ sets the generator up to create recipes for silk ribbons. Ribbons use a base concentration of 50 instead of the 10 that is used for paint.

* _Maximum Concentration_ is the maximum recipe concentration. Recipes with a concentration above 10 will still produce a single db of paint, but can use larger quantities of ingredients to make smaller color adjustments. Increasing this will increase the time required to search all the possible combinations.

* _Full Quantity Depth_ is the number of ingredients in the recipe that will use up to the "full quantity" value as the limit for those ingredients over the ingredient's maximum.

* _Full Quantity_ is the maximum quantity of any ingredient to use up to the Full Quantity Depth. For example, with a Full Quantity of 15 and a Full Quantity Depth of 3, a recipe could use up to 15 of each of the first 3 ingredients. After that it will be limited by the setting for that specific ingredient.

## Known Issues

### Slowness

If you are running on a multi-screen system, or a very high-resolution screen, you may find that Desert Paint Lab is rather slow in determining paint reactions.  That's because you have a lot of screen real-estate to scan, to look for the Pigment Lab dialog.  You can speed up the scanning process by ensuring that your Pigment Lab Dialog is as far to the upper-left of the screen as possible. Also see the advanced settings (below) for some additional options that may help.

### Multiple Displays

When Desert Paint Lab asks for the resolution for a multiple-display setup, enter the combined resolution of all displays. Generally the detected default for this will be correct. For example, two 1920x1080 displays in a side-by-side configuration would be a combined resolution of 3840x1080. In a stacked configuration, they would be 1920x2160.

### Retina / High-Density Screens

High DPI screens may be displaying the game at something other than a 1:1 game-pixel to screen-pixel ratio.  These screens didn't exist, back when Desert Paint Lab was created. The current version now prompts you for your screen resolution when it starts to work around this. If you see a crash when trying to capture a reaction, it's likely because the resolution is incorrect. For example, Snoerr's MacBook Pro has a retina screen with a resolution of 2880x1800. Mono (and therefore DesertPaintLab) detects it as having a resolution of 1440x900. He enters his resolution as 2880x1800 and sets the Game pixel width in screen pixels to 2.

## Mac user FAQ

Q: How do I find my native screen resolution?

A: You can find it by opening up "About this Mac" from the Apple menu and clicking on the "Displays" tab. That should show the screen size and resolution to enter.

## Advanced Settings

* _scanarea.min.x_ sets the starting horizontal offset when searching for the pigment lab. This is useful in multi-screen setups to skip any leftmost displays. For example, a dual-screen setup with two side-by-side 3840x2160 displays where the game runs on the right screen would set this to 3840 to bypass scanning the left display.

* _scanarea.min.y_ Like scanarea.min.x, but skips the upper section of display

* _scanarea.max.x_ defines the rightmost edge of the area to scan

* _scanarea.max.y_ defines the bottom edge of the area to scan

* _logging.verbosity_ sets the verbosity of the logging between 0 and 3. The higher the value, the more detail is included in the log file.

## For Developers

This application is written in C#, and it uses the [Avalonia UI Framework](https://avaloniaui.net/). You can learn more about getting set up to use Avalonia [here](https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/getting-started/).

## Older Versions

The old [Desert Paint Lab repository](https://repos.malkyne.org/ATITD-Tools/Desert-Paint-Lab) is still publicly available, in case anyone wishes to reference the old code, or tinker with it.  However, it will no longer be maintained in any way by Afrah.

                        WriteLog(LogVerbosity.Normal, "Failed slice test at {0},{1}", x + _swatchWidth - borderXOffset, y);

                        break;

                    }

                }

            }

            if (!foundSwatch)

            {

                if (!_lockedSwatchWidth)

                {

                    // Reset our guess at swatch width.

                    _swatchWidth = MinSwatchWidth;

                }

                return false;

            }

            // WE FOUND THE SWATCH!

            // Now we know where the color bars are.

            _lockedSwatchWidth = true;

            int redPixelCount = pixels.LengthOfColorAt(x, y + _redBarSpacing, PixelColor.IsRed);

            reactedColor.Red = (byte)Math.Round(redPixelCount * 255f / _swatchWidth);

            int greenPixelCount = pixels.LengthOfColorAt(x, y + _greenBarSpacing, PixelColor.IsGreen);

            reactedColor.Green = (byte)Math.Round(greenPixelCount * 255f / _swatchWidth);

            int bluePixelCount = pixels.LengthOfColorAt(x, y + _blueBarSpacing, PixelColor.IsBlue);

            reactedColor.Blue = (byte)Math.Round(bluePixelCount * 255f / _swatchWidth);

            WriteLog(LogVerbosity.Low, "Found the color swatch at {0}, {1}. Color={2} Red={3}px Green={4}px Blue={5}px", x, y, reactedColor, redPixelCount, greenPixelCount, bluePixelCount);

            return true;

        }

        public async Task<bool> CaptureReactionAsync(IProgress<float> progress)

        {

            _canceler = new CancellationTokenSource(); // You can't re-use these, sadly.

            return await Task.Run(() => CaptureReaction(progress, _canceler.Token));

        }

        private bool CaptureReaction(IProgress<float> progress, CancellationToken cancellToken)

        {

            PaintColor reactedColor = new();

            IsCaptured = false;

            _recordedColor.Clear();

            using (var g = Graphics.FromImage(_targetBitmap))

            {

                Debug.WriteLine("Scan starting at [" + _screenX + ", " + _screenY + "]");

                g.CopyFromScreen(_screenX, _screenY, 0, 0, _targetBitmap.Size, CopyPixelOperation.SourceCopy);

            }

            Pixels pixels = new(_targetBitmap, _pixelMultiplier);

            IsCaptured = false;

            if (!_firstRun)

            {

                // If this is not the first run, let's check the last location, to see if the UI is still there.

                if (TestPosition(_lastSwatchX, _lastSwatchY, pixels, ref reactedColor))

                {

                    IsCaptured = true;

                    RecordedColor = reactedColor;

                    return true;

                }

                _firstRun = true;

            }

            int patchTestSize = ((_swatchHeight - _swatchTopBorder - _swatchBottomBorder) / 2) - 1;

            SettingsService.Get("ScanArea.Min.X", out var startX, 0);

            SettingsService.Get("ScanArea.Min.Y", out var startY, 0);

            SettingsService.Get("ScanArea.Max.X", out var endX,   _targetBitmap.Width);

            SettingsService.Get("ScanArea.Max.Y", out var endY,   _targetBitmap.Height);

            startX = Math.Max(2, Math.Min(startX, _targetBitmap.Width - 2));

            startY = Math.Max(2, Math.Min(startY, _targetBitmap.Height - 2));

            endX = Math.Min(_targetBitmap.Width  - 2, Math.Max(2, endX)) - _minSwatchWidth; //  + patchTestSize;

            endY = Math.Min(_targetBitmap.Height - 2, Math.Max(2, endY)) - (_blueBarSpacing + 10); // + patchTestSize;

            Debug.WriteLine("startX: " + startX + " endX: " + endX + " startY: " + startY + " endY: " + endY + " with patch test size of " + patchTestSize);

            int xSpan = endX - startX;

            int ySpan = endY - startY;

            int total = xSpan * ySpan;

            for (int roughX = startX; roughX < endX ; roughX += patchTestSize)

            {

                int xMark = roughX - startX;

                for (int roughY = startY; roughY < endY; roughY += patchTestSize)

                {

                    progress.Report((float)((xMark * ySpan) + (roughY - startY)) / total);

                    cancellToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();

                    if (!pixels.IsSolidPatchAt(roughX, roughY, patchTestSize, patchTestSize)) continue;

                    Color patchColor = pixels.ColorAt(roughX, roughY);

                    WriteLog(LogVerbosity.Excessive, "Found a solid patch of {2},{3},{4} at {0}, {1}", roughX, roughY, patchColor.R, patchColor.G, patchColor.B);

                    for (int x = Math.Max(0, roughX - patchTestSize - _swatchLeftBorder + _pixelMultiplier); x < roughX; ++x)

                    {

                        for (int y = Math.Max(0, roughY - patchTestSize - _swatchTopBorder + _pixelMultiplier); y < roughY; ++y)

                        {

                            WriteLog(LogVerbosity.Excessive, "Searching for potential swatch at {0},{1} after found square at {2},{3}", x, y, roughX, roughY);

                            if (!TestPosition(x, y, pixels, ref reactedColor)) continue;

                            RecordedColor = reactedColor;

                            _lastSwatchX  = x;

                            _lastSwatchY  = y;

                            _firstRun     = false;

                            IsCaptured    = true;

                            return true;

                        }

                    }