Build 509 is progressing really nicely and will have a good crop of features to show for it. As of right now I've got most of the new appearance stuff all implemented in the language, the server, Dream Seeker, and Dream Maker. (Appearance features are a bear in Dream Maker. But I did manage to fix an ancient bug with animate_movement in the editor while I was monkeying around in there.)

Color matrices, by the way, are super fun to play with. They can be animated, so I was messing with things like turning an icon to grayscale and back. I'd really love something like client.color or world.color where I could do a matrix cast over a whole scene, for cool lighting effects, but I foresee a lot of problems with that. (For instance, what if I wanted to throw moonlight over map objects but not HUD objects? Should HUD objects always be immune? I can see arguments for doing it either way. Altering the matrices of each individual icon drawn is actually way easier than post-processing, which would allow for a HUD exception. Or I suppose I could add something else into appearance_flags, but gads is that tacky. I'm way open to suggestions here, though.)

I also implemented the new read-only client.bounds on request from Ter13, which can tell you information about the viewport in pixel coordinates. It's not friendly to isometric maps or to client.dir values besides the default NORTH, but it serves its purpose for most games. If you need to convert screen_loc coords to an exact pixel position in other modes, for now you're on your own. I may decide at some point to add something client-side that simply throws another set of coords into the mouse messages. But I can foresee other uses for this feature beyond coordinate conversion, so in it goes.

The new appearance features still have to be added to the webclient (this actually shouldn't be hard) and documented. There are also several other issues I'm looking at, so at this time I don't have a firm estimate on the first 509 release. However, I absolutely want to get the first 509 out next week, and the earlier the better, but a lot depends on how much deeper the feature creep goes.

One bit of cool news: I was contacted this week by a university professor who's using BYOND in classes. It was pretty awesome. I hope to see some interesting stuff out of that class, especially if any of them make use of the webclient.

My thanks to those who've been contributing to BYOND by becoming Members or making donations. If you have a friend who hasn't yet, help them shake out their couch and then write an awesome game together.