Transmission from RustForge 🎙️
This latest update brings highly requested features designed for massive artistic projects, alongside deep engine refactoring to support a wider range of hardware. Whether you are painting a gigantic mural across multiple signs or tracing an intricate design by hand, this update delivers the ultimate artist's toolset.
Patch Highlights
Multi-Canvas Image Splitting: You can now seamlessly divide a single, massive image into multiple interconnected canvases (defined by rows and columns). This allows you to easily paint gigantic, unified murals across multiple connected signs in-game.
Manual Tracing Overlay: Added a brand-new click-through overlay directly to the Main Form. This acts as the ultimate manual artist's toolset, projecting a translucent ghost image onto your canvas for you to trace by hand with an on screen opacity slider toolbox.
Resolution-Aware Brush Suggestions: The dynamic brush suggestion engine has been heavily upgraded. It now calculates the 3D pixel density differences between 1080p, 1440p, and 4K displays to recommend the brush size needed to prevent specking on your specific resolution.
HQ Supersampling Overhaul: The supersampling pipeline has been completely rewritten. This enhancement now greatly improves image quality by melting away blocky artifacts and tightening the image into crisp boundaries before painting.
Legacy Hardware Refactor: Completely overhauled the CPU Compatibility Mode setting to perfectly handle older CPUs and machines experiencing micro-stutters or missed inputs.
Timelapse Aspect Ratio Fix: Resolved a bug where the timelapse output aspect ratio would occasionally fail and default to a stretched resolution.
Balancing & Logic
Manual Tracing Overlay & Canvas Re-alignment
The Challenge: Sometimes, you just want to paint something by hand. Additionally, if a server restarts or you relog while halfway through a massive auto-paint, your in-game physical position changes. This makes it incredibly frustrating to re-align your Canvas Rect to finish the job.
The Fix: The new Manual Tracing Overlay solves both. It projects a translucent, click-through ghost of your image perfectly onto your canvas. You can use it as a stencil to hand-paint masterpieces, or use it as a visual guide to quickly and perfectly re-align your Canvas Rect with a partially painted sign after a server restart.
Resolution-Aware Brush Sizing
The Challenge: A 1080p monitor has fewer physical pixels than a 1440p (2K) monitor, meaning a 1-pixel mouse movement translates to a larger physical jump across the 3D in-game sign. A brush size that looks perfect at 1440p will leave unpainted specks at 1080p because it simply cannot bridge the wider gaps.
The Fix: The Smart Brush Suggestion feature now detects your screen height and dynamically compensates. If you are on a 1080p or sub-1080p display, the engine automatically calculates and adds a compensation value (e.g., +0.15) to the recommended brush size, ensuring flawless, speck-free coverage across all hardware.
Compatibility Mode Refactor
The Challenge: Older CPUs or machines running over high-latency networks could struggle with the aggressive microsecond-precision hot loops of the primary EvoEngine, leading to thread-scheduling conflicts, stuttering, and missed inputs.
The Fix: We completely overhauled the CPU Compatibility Mode. When enabled, the engine now utilizes a "Light" loop architecture that politely shares resources with the Windows OS scheduler. This guarantees smooth performance and accurate input delays for older rigs without pegging the CPU to 100%.
📈 Known Issues
HD Canvas Scaling (Zooming): While the new Smart Brush Suggestion feature combats the Moiré effect, if you zoom in/out heavily while painting on canvases like the Large Banner on Pole or the XL Picture Frame, the engine's scaling will change and your paint strokes will misalign. Fix: Do not zoom in or out while mapping/painting. If you absolutely must zoom, manually increase your Rust brush size slightly to bridge the newly created gaps.
Contour Tracing & Smart Pathing (Resume Limitations): With how Contour Tracing and Smart Pathing calculate the most efficient omnidirectional paths for curves and fills, it is mathematically impossible to resume a paused painting from the exact pixel you stopped at. Instead, the engine will resume from the currently painting color, and begin from the start of that specific color layer to ensure nothing is missed. This is an intended feature of these advanced methods. It may add a few minutes to your total paint time if paused and resumed, but this prevents missing structural chunks of your image.