This week I took the long-overdue step of updating the libraries used by the webclient, in the hopes that it would improve FPS. This turned out to be a huge pain in the butt, because the new StageXL library relied on a new version of Dart, and the developers of Dart stopped supporting their editor. They suggest instead that people use an editor called WebStorm--which uses a horrifying subscription model at prices that would make Adobe blush if they had shame--or some other third-party option. So now I'm using Sublime to work on webclient code, and it's... interesting. I miss having a debugger built in, but Sublime seems pretty cool.

The good news is that all that hassle paid off. In spite of all the headaches dealing with breaking changes in the newer StageXL version, I got the webclient working and early reports are that performance has improved massively. Yay!

PLANE_MASTER hasn't been implemented on the webclient yet, but I'm getting there. My goal is basically retooling the display code a bit so that planes work more sensibly. Currently the webclient draws in a view "sprite" clipped to the map, and a screen sprite clipped to the HUD which can be bigger. Screen objects get drawn twice. This is every bit as awful as it sounds, and it's one of the reasons I changed the layering behavior in 510 so that HUD objects go on top of non-HUD objects in the same plane (with BACKGROUND_LAYER and EFFECTS_LAYER still able to influence that). That means with the webclient I can create those big container sprites as needed, and plane masters will just be another kind of container sprite. No more double-drawing.

I noticed that somehow the Canvas2D drawing mode isn't respecting atom.color anymore. Probably some weirdness with the filters and the way those have changed in a recent version--that had to be modified when KEEP_TOGETHER went in. I'll get to that eventually. But if your browser's falling back on Canvas2D, you may have bigger problems.

Of course the main software hasn't been forgotten during all of this. There were a few important fixes, and I'm also trying to work on some performance tweaks. But looming on the very near horizon, I need to buckle down and work out a solution to the dreaded big icon visibility problem; it's a much, much bigger deal in 510 due to the enhanced capabilities.

The dreaded V-Day is upon us! Here it comes with single-digit temperatures all weekend, but fortunately I have a wife and an electric throw and several cats. (If you're single, go buy an electric throw and then binge something awesome, like Farscape. Cats optional.) And for heart-candy-day's sake, throw a little love BYOND's way with a donation or Membership if you haven't yet.

There's talk of a possible game-in-a-week contest coming up, so sharpen your wits. Check out some 7DRL contest results if you're looking for early inspiration and ideas on how to organize your project; having more Roguelikes would be awesome.