Transmission from RustForge 🎙️
This update doubles down on quality-of-life improvements and massive under-the-hood pipeline refactoring. I have completely rewritten how sessions, ETAs, and memory streams interact with the main engine. Whether you are managing multiple distinct canvas projects simultaneously or pushing extreme high-resolution images onto signs, this update ensures ultimate reliability, absolute data safety, and blistering rendering speeds.
Patch Highlights
Live-Updating ETAs: The estimated painting duration label has been completely overhauled. When you pause a live paint, the engine instantly recalculates your session data to display the absolute real-time remaining duration needed to finish the active canvas.
Unlimited Named Sessions: The Session Manager has been deeply upgraded. You are no longer restricted to simple static overwrites; you can now create, name, and store an unlimited number of custom save sessions for effortless management across multiple overlapping base murals.
10-Slot Rotating AutoSaves: Added a persistent historical buffer to the AutoSave system. RustForge now safely holds your last 10 sequential emergency autosave states. This completely protects past canvas states from being overwritten if you rapidly switch to testing a new image layout and an autosave is triggered overwriting your current save.
Zero-Loss HQ Supersampling: The scaling engine pipeline has been redesigned as well. Smaller images mapped to massive frames receive spatial edge-smoothing logic to eliminate pixelation, while massive multi-megapixel source arrays bypass stream inflation to downscale directly into ultra-crisp target layouts.
Transparency Outlining Fix: Eliminated standard gray/white/Magenta rendering ghosting around transparent PNG boundaries and images by locking outbound bit arrays natively to the drawing matrices.
Balancing & Logic
Infinite Custom Session Architecture
The Challenge: Serious sign painters rarely work on just one piece at a time. Switching back and forth between multiple ongoing designs or separate server commissions meant wrestling with active config paths or overwriting your solitary session save state.
The Fix: I've rebuilt the storage logic. You can now save an infinite array of custom named project session states. Jump effortlessly between entirely different image sessions, restore exact configuration coordinates, and pick up right where you left off without risking loss of progress.
Historical 10-Slot AutoSave Buffering
The Challenge: If the VoidWatch Sentinel triggered an emergency save due to an unexpected disconnect, your current progress was safe. However, if you subsequently loaded up another image accidentally, and an AutoSave was triggered, the system would immediately overwrite your primary AutoSave file, destroying your hard-earned progress.
The Fix: The engine now handles emergency storage dynamically. AutoSaves roll sequentially across 10 distinct, timestamped backup slots, with the filename included. If an emergency save triggers, your precious base mural/art remains completely preserved in memory across multiple historic project rollbacks.
Native Bit-Locking Supersampling Optimization
The Challenge: Crushing massive multi-megapixel source files (e.g., 2k, 4k+) down to smaller canvas sizes often introduced memory encoding latency, causing short system hangs, crushing valid alpha channels.
The Fix: I completely stripped out the old compression streams. The engine now feeds uncompressed, raw images directly into the scaling engine using. This instantly eliminates processing hesitation, unifies line tracing paths to keep painting times low, and guarantees that authentic PNG backgrounds remain 100% crystal clear.
Sub-Pixel Mouse Movements
The Challenge: In standard integer screen spaces, casting calculated mouse pathing across non-standard DPI desktop grids often resulted in truncation errors. The underlying rendering engine would occasionally round off fractional mouse jumps, resulting in dropped paint specks, or erratic diagonal stepping.
The Fix: I implemented strict multi-monitor double precision mapping. By reading exact global virtual screen metrics and injecting coordinates with localized half-pixel translation compensations, the input packets target the absolute dead-center of the engine's physical input buckets. Resulting in far more accurate paint strokes.
📈 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 new Artist DLC Canvas' 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 in or zoom out, manually increase/decrease your 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.