This has been another non-release week. I have in fact been working on some software issues here and there, and have a number of bugs to look through, but my primary focus this week has been web foo that needed looking after sooner rather than later. Most of that has been due to changes to our ad provider, which is why users who were astute enough to notice--but not enough to become BYOND Members--saw that the pregame ad screen now features a countdown timer when no ad actually shows up. But this also means dealing with the webclient.

For the last few days I've been working on the web side of the webclient frontend, which is to say stuff like the login system that was so iffy before. This has been an interesting process, because working in JavaScript and HTML/CSS again is such a different animal from the normal software work, but it's turned out to be a nice change of pace--and really, very much overdue.

The webclient now properly supports a splash screen image, although it'll require the upcoming software version to work properly. Turns out that while the parameter for the splash screen was coming through, limits on what HTTP requests the webclient server would accept were causing the image never to show up. That, and a number of frontend problems got in the way too. But that's all working now.

Today I'm trying to button up as much of that as I can, with the hope of getting it ready in at least a partial form (that works) right away. For this reason, I'm not planning a release until at least Monday. I'm hoping that next week I can start off by going through a number of bug reports that I have test projects for, and getting those taken care of for the next release.

One of the things that's been on my mind for the software is the string tree. This week I fixed a bug related to the tree, that only comes up when the tree is way, way out of balance. (I'm talking about 1000 layers deep.) But it's actually very easy for these kinds of imbalances to happen, such as when loading up a dictionary or using sequential numeric identfiers, leading me to think there must be a better way. If the string tree could be balanced more often with only an ultra-minimal impact on performance during adds and deletions, then it's possible that performance would improve across the board. Food for thought, I guess. I'm always on the lookout for ways to optimize. I can think of some methods that would at least reduce long chains by trying to ensure every node had two branches whenever possible, but that wouldn't be very effective at solving the overall problem.

Thanksgiving is less than three weeks away! This is one of my favorite times of year for playing and developing BYOND games, especially fun little one-offs like in the 4K competition days of old. Why not use the month to make something amazing, or even just simple and fun?

Don't forget, in the US we turn the clocks back this Sunday. Why this Sunday and not back at the end of October like it used to be? Because the US Congress of 2005 was a bunch of morons, that's why. But even they look like geniuses next to the current crop; and on that subject, Election Day is almost at hand too. Now is an excellent time to take up praying, drinking, or both.