It appears that 510's issues with the new map chunk system have finally been licked, bringing us closer to a stable release.

This week several lingering bugs got fixed, and the new build 510.1332 appears to have taken care of the remaining problems. In the process of all this, a system that Space Station 13 was relying on for wall-mounted objects broke, so I introduced TILE_BOUND to combat that. TILE_BOUND basically makes objects that would try to display from farther away only show up if the tile they're on is visible; in other words, it makes objects behave, for display purposes, like they did in older BYOND versions before even big icons were added. It can be set on a per-object basis.

With this behind me I can get back to dealing with some webclient stuff, including pre-loading icons to avoid any hiccups in gameplay. (And possibly, moving to a texture atlas setup.) I'm looking into an issue that was reported with the browser cache not keeping files as long as it's supposed to, but so far I'm not seeing it. Lots of little things like that are on the plate, including the promised improvement to the play/embed page.

I also noticed map chunks caused some problems for big-icon display in the webclient. That kinda figures, because it's not doing some of the calculations DS is for whether the object falls on a visible tile, so that's very high on my to-do list. (So is making sure that extended turfs get displayed.) The trick will be caching this for best performance. TILE_BOUND has to be implemented there as well.

On the site front, I came within inches of doing a holiday theme for St. Patrick's Day. Ultimately what stopped me was being too busy on the other stuff. But it'd be nice to bring holiday themes back eventually.

The fund-o-meter is looking a little sad right now, so please rifle through your couch cushions and show BYOND some love with a Membership or a donation if you haven't yet. Those of you in school will probably have an Easter or spring break coming up, a good time to play games or maybe get a lot of work done on your own games.