ID:2162736
 
Hey ho! (I don't know why I went there, but it felt right.) This has been another no-release week, but all in all a pretty good one. It's looking like I'm on target for a new release Monday.

After a lot of head-banging, I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for webclient gamepad support. I got map-to macros working, and also several gamepad commands that I've tested. There's still more testing to do, but it's at the point where I think it's nearly ready--and that's one of the last big hurdles before 511 goes stable. Sadly I have no way of fixing the Chrome bug that screws up recognizing a gamepad that was already plugged in, so users will have to yell at Google about that one.

I've also been looking at world.Export(), because there appear to be some lingering issues there. Users have reported problems with persist not working, and while I'm not seeing a code reason why that should happen, I did realize that there's a problem in the way requests are handled on a persistent connection. Namely, the whole request-and-reply system was built around only handling one request at a time--and when waiting for a reply, it would open up a whole new socket rather than waiting its turn for the next request. So I'm overhauling that system with the hope that persistence issues won't be a problem anymore, and even non-persistent requests should behave better.

While I'm looking at that, there's also a known issue with world.Export() being used for HTTP requests, in which sometimes the wrong request gets a reply. That's one I really want to get to the bottom of, but it's hard to reproduce.

Another big milestone this week was that while I was looking into--and fixed--an unusual Dream Maker crash, I found one of the causes for high object tree generation times. I did a massive overhaul of the way images are handled in the map editor and the object tree, and this translated to much better times. That's gonna be a huge boon to the developers of big projects, so that's something you can look forward to for the next release.

Web-side webclient stuff is still high on my radar, so that's gonna get a look very soon. Also, the SS13 folks have mentioned that SEE_BLACKNESS isn't 100% compatible with their mouse foo, so I'm gonna see if there's anything I can do for that within the 511 time frame.

Congratulations to Darker Emerald, who got The Last Conflict green-lit on Steam. You do the platform proud. [edit: Whoops! I missed that Yut Put got another game green-lit this week too. Congrats to Yut Put as well!]

Thanks again to everyone who's become a Member or donated to help BYOND, and a special shout out to the SS13 people who've chipped in in recognition of the features that were put in to help them out. They say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but it never hurts to grease the engineer.

On a serious note, Halloween is coming soon, and for the last few years I've been on a one-man crusade to stop helicopter parents from endangering kids by parking roadside with their headlights on. This backlights the kids and makes them harder for other drivers to see, so if you know people who drive kids around on Halloween, tell them not to do this. They can see the kids fine, but oncoming traffic sees only the headlights. And needless to say, anyone who does it with high beams is a bad person. Better alternative: glow sticks and reflectors, which increase visibility without blinding drivers. Please spread the word.
This is all great news. Thanks, Lummox! I'm glad to hear about the image handling improvement, and it's really cool to see another BYOND game on Steam!
Wait, so you congratulate some dude named Darker Emerald, who has no relevance on BYOND at all, but not praise the almighty Yut Put for launching his SECOND BYOND game on Steam???

Just because Yut doesn't promote BYOND through his games doesn't mean you can be salty about it and not mention him. He's the only one on BYOND who makes good games!

Yut Put is legend. All bow down to his Puttiness.
In response to TheWorldIsFree
TheWorldIsFree wrote:
Wait, so you congratulate some dude named Darker Emerald, who has no relevance on BYOND at all, but not praise the almighty Yut Put for launching his SECOND BYOND game on Steam???

Just because Yut doesn't promote BYOND through his games doesn't mean you can be salty about it and not mention him. He's the only one on BYOND who makes good games!

Yut Put is legend. All bow down to his Puttiness.

Yut Put is cheating. He makes games with mechanics. That's not fair.
In response to TheWorldIsFree
I just figured since Yut Put already posted about it recently, everyone knew about his game being greenlit. But yeah, always awesome when another game made with BYOND gets greenlit! :)
There can only be one special little snowflake. >:(
In response to TheWorldIsFree
Oops! Somehow I missed that thread. Editing!
Lummox JR wrote:
Another big milestone this week was that while I was looking into--and fixed--an unusual Dream Maker crash, I found one of the causes for high object tree generation times. I did a massive overhaul of the way images are handled in the map editor and the object tree, and this translated to much better times. That's gonna be a huge boon to the developers of big projects, so that's something you can look forward to for the next release.

Oh very nice. This was one of the two issues we had with our 64x64 experiment, this and image replacement. Nice to see it get fixed.
I've personally experienced some of those issues with the object tree generation. Definitely a nice fix

TLC is a great game, I'm sure it'll meet success in the outside world. It's a bit old, but I think I read somewhere they're doing a overhaul to improve some of the rough bits.

Out of curiosity, What happened to improved cursor support? Did that get cut or was that put in awhile back?
Cursor improvements went in several versions ago.
Looks like today will not see a release. I got into something big while working on world.Export() foo and it's looking like I'm likely to quash a number of bugs at once with an overhaul.
In response to Lummox JR
Lummox JR wrote:
Looks like today will not see a release. I got into something big while working on world.Export() foo and it's looking like I'm likely to quash a number of bugs at once with an overhaul.

Sweet!
Still in testing on the new webclient gamepad foo. It'll be ready when it's ready, but hopefully that'll be tomorrow.
I await anxiously