Progress Update: 10/31/26 - Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween everyone! 🎃

So, I'll start by saying I have been stumped. Doesn't happen often but it does happen. This time I almost thought I was going to have to remove some features to make other ones work. Luckily, patience prevailed and I am back on track.

The issue was, with RCS and the row shutoff. As most of you know, vanilla stamps the ground solid, so detecting already processed areas is simple. You just don't do anything where the area has already been stamped. The only reason vanilla doesn't look like it shuts off is because it changes the angle over the already planted ground to match the direction you are travelling. That makes it look like it's planting over planted areas when it's really not.

For RCS it gets more difficult. Now you have stripes with untouched areas in between. Nothing changes in the between areas, so nothing to filter on. Every tick the area that overlapped last tick's area gets hit again and again and again, only ever filtering over the parts that actually got painted - the rows.

With RCS being just in planters, and painting solid lines, it wasn't too bad to extrapolate out the areas that needed to be included in the row shutoff zones. Where it originally got tough was when you added within row spacing (i.e. spacing length) to the equation. Now, you not only have untouched areas between the rows, but in them too. How do you shut off those pixels in the row without preventing a future tick from putting a plant there if it needs to?

That's why I removed spacing length and started doing the solid painted rows. People have been requesting I bring that feature back, so I did. And the shutoff problem came back with it lol.

To add to that, now you have other implements that can do the RCS (like in the video) and spacing nodes, where you can put the rows exactly where you want them. Normally, the paint points are all along the front of the work area. Being able to place them anywhere added to the challenge. Now you have a grid of pixels that can be any spacing both between rows and within rows and those pixels are no longer a set spacing width apart. You have what is called a "lattice grid". And that is where I have been stumped.

Trying to figure out how to shut off not only the pixels that have been painted, but also the pixels that will not be painted in future passes has been a challenge for sure. Shutting off the whole work area is out, because next tick that same area might hold a node that was just too far back last tick to paint a crop, and shutting off the area would have blocked that node from painting.

What I ended up doing is calculating current + future passes and coming up with a system that only shuts off areas that will never receive a plant. The good news is I think that is going to work. So far so good

I have also added some code to address most "misaligned work areas" automatically, so you will no longer see those messages. The pop up menu showing wrong settings is also being replaced by detailed log warnings letting you know what is wrong. They are disabled right now, because I can auto-correct a lot of that too now. I only need the messages for the things I can't touch with the code, so I am working all that out yet.

Finally, RCS will now automatically fix the allocReg issue, PF Config will no longer be needed - unless you want the other features it provides. PF Config will also fix the allocReg for other things and 16X maps, it's more that RCS will no longer require it to run.

The video is just me testing things to make sure the new stuff is working the way I want. This is on a 4X messing with a RCS cultivator and planting over that area to make sure nothing the cultivator is doing messes up the planter. I used a no-till planter because I'm still working on my one with the spacing nodes, and I couldn't line up on those strips without knowing where the rows were going to be (might have to do something about that too lol).

At the end I just quick threw in some sugarbeets to see how the shutoff and everything worked no-tilling them into stubble like that. Finally, just the beans all grown to make sure the growth was working correctly.

Slower than I anticipated, but I really have been stumped for a bit now and have also had other things pop up here and there, giving me little time to breathe at times. I do anticipate having the next WIP ready very soon now, though. Not going to give an exact ETA, because I have learned that anything can pop up at any time, which always throws my ETAs way off anyway. I really do think soon, though. Not a whole lot I need to do yet before I would call it usable. I can dial things in while everyone is testing the new stuff out.

But that's all for now! As always, I will keep you guys posted. Happy Halloween! 🎃🎃🎃