Why is this week's development news early? Why indeed, but it is. There will be a couple of early ones in November too.

Yesterday I released version 511.1361, which brings the webclient completely up to date with all of 511's features, now that gamepads are supported. Oddly, I ran into all kinds of weird bugs in Chrome when testing with my gamepad--like the GamepadFace3 button being stuck on for no discernable reason, even when it worked fine in a test page--but oh well. I got map-to macros all setup for it, and everything should be working including the fairly new GamepadRaw macro. This means I can finally start buttoning up towards a stable build!

A couple of bigtime issues were resolved in the new release. One of them was that object tree generation in the compiler took forever when using icons larger than world.icon_size. The reason for this: Dream Maker's image handling is somewhat archaic, and when I implemented big-icon support I tried splitting the icons up into pieces rather than simply planning to use them whole. In hindsight my old design was a spectacularly terrible idea, but in my defense that was a nasty, nasty project. (Worth doing, but still nasty.) Anyway my new solution is only slightly less archaic, and works a whole lot better.

The other big issue--maybe more of a collection of issues--was that world.Export() had a number of old problems. The persist value was deactivated back in 487 due to other bugs, and not only did I forget about that (in spite of a great big comment in the code staring me right in the face!) but it never got documented. Plus, with or without it there were still all kinds of errors like double returns and whatnot. No more! I think I definitively solved those issues, and with it I was able to re-enable persistent sockets. Also I'm pretty sure the issues I fixed tie directly into why world.Export() was crashing in multithreaded mode.

Does this mean a return of limited multithreading? Good gads no. At least not yet, anyway. But it does resolve what I think was one of the big problems with it.

In the near term I have some web priorities to get to, so those are gonna take more attention over the next few days.

GiaD is ongoing right now; I forgot it was coming up, or I would have mentioned it last week. Oops! If it's not too late to get in on it, hey, what a great opportunity to hone your skills and creativity. But in the meantime you can always try out the competitors' games and see what's fun.

Do you have your Halloween candy yet? Are you, like me, planning not to give it out and eat it in the dark while pretending not to be home? Then you should take the opportunity to fire up some BYOND games and make it a gaming night, especially with all the new GiaD games that will be finished by then. And in the meantime, if you're not a Member yet, it's a good time for that too. I can say with complete confidence that if you support BYOND, you will not be tormented by angry ghosts when the witching hour comes.