I started coming down with a cold last Friday, and after a fairly nasty week it's finally starting to clear. In spite of that, progress has continued on the engine and 509 is nearing stable release.

The newest build is 509.1310, which is up now with several big fixes for the webclient along with some things I discovered regarding color matrices. It turns out working on my own game a little helps this process, as one of the fixes was only discovered when I tried to snaz up some of the effects in Scream of the Stickster II.

I'm hoping to look into libcurl pretty soon, as should be able to handle the secure connections needed to download files from https sites, and hopefully that will also make it feasible to host the webclient via https on a machine that has a certificate. (That may end up being necessary for integrating with some sites like Facebook.) I had a nice chat with Tom yesterday about some ideas, and we talked about how it's important to get more people using the webclient.

One of the things I want to do especially is get back to more testing with the SS13 community, especially if I can convince some of the big server guys to run the webclient themselves. In that way I hope we can find any areas where the webclient still needs a few touch-ups, and what they may need to change going forward. (Mostly that'd be stuff like outdated or broken HTML in some browser interfaces, which work in IE but won't in real browsers.)

Halloween is coming up very soon, so keep working on your spooky games. If you send notes to Higoten I'm sure he'll be happy to feature them in the next Within BYOND, which ought to be this coming Wednesday night.

Thanks for everyone who's donated or bought a membership lately. Your support is appreciated!