Happy Canada Day to our friends in the Great White North. The timing this year means this is a three-day weekend not just for them, but for us here in the USA. Our turn for fireworks will come soon enough. And for all of us 'Mericans: happy Independence Day. (But not happy Independence Day: Resurgence, apparently. I heard that was a bomb.)

I've made some really good strides on version 511 this week. Mutable appearances are in. I kinda hate the type path /mutable_appearance, so I'm still trying to figure out if I have any good alternatives. I had some doubts at first about how to go about this implementation; the easiest way seemed to be making them a special type like /list or /savefile, but then I thought: No, that's stupid. I want to move away from that direction. In the end I decided they should derive from either an atom type or /image for easy access to all the vars, and I went with /image.

As part of that, I did look a little bit into the notion of eventually moving /list into a datum realm, so they could have user-defined vars and procs--even overridden procs. The short answer on that is I'm still not sure how it'd work. I don't see it as a 511 thing, but I'll keep an open mind.

Independent client-side FPS is in. You can now set client.fps to something higher than world.fps, and you'll get smoother results for animations and gliding while keeping the server ticking along at a lower rate for performance. Setting client.fps or client.tick_lag to 0 will tie it to the server's FPS, like it always was before. (Edit: One thing I still have to do here is add a glide for pixel-movement environments, so that when sliding it doesn't get all jumpy.)

I've also done some work on an age-old thorny problem that SS13 has in which verbs that are exposed to the client, then removed, cause problems for statpanel displays and right clicks. Basically when trying to build a statpanel verb list, verbs that the client knows about but have been completely removed from accessibility still get checked--on every stat tick. This accessibility check gets slower the more objects are on the screen, and the more verbs it can't find. My new concept includes a var that says the verb may be accessible, and if no object on the client is found to have it at all, the verb is marked as not in use, and won't be rechecked until a map update that has an appearance using that verb. Result: removed verbs should only cause a slight slowdown one time, rather than on every single stat tick.

Per the ongoing discussion in the last news thread, it's clear that filters are still way too much in flux syntax-wise; I don't think they're going to be viable for 511, not with the goal of getting it out at a good time. It's actually time I start pruning down the list of potential features and start saving more of them for 512, although quite a number of them are doable after the first beta and can still go into the 511 series. One of the ones I still want to target for the first release, though, is 200% map zoom. There are also a few bugs on the list I still want to look at in the hopes of incorporating those into the first beta.

As things stand right now, I need to get back to the task of buttoning up gamepad foo. I'd like to setup some kind of rudimentary mapping interface that people can use for their gamepads, and during the beta I'll solicit results from people on their different gamepads to build up a default map file.

Ideally, I want to get the first 511 beta out this month. I think that's a reasonable goal, especially with the inevitable shunting of some issues off to 512. SS13 is waiting on a number of upgrades, and I know EPΘCH and Lux are pining for gamepad support. So the sooner I can get those in, the better. And I think going with a smaller set of new features than 510 had is probably a good idea all around for stability's sake--there's still plenty of new feature goodness.

Here's hoping everyone has a great weekend. Get your fill of fireworks and barbecue, and while you're avoiding your extended family be sure to get your game on. If you get any good fireworks pics, share 'em here.