Once again we've come to the rare Wednesday development update. Thanksgiving is here! Those of you who have a four-day weekend, make the most of it. Last weekend we got a big helping of snow for our first fall of the year, so the Christmas season is well and truly upon us. Break out your sled and find a good place to use it.

Today I released build 511.1364, bringing us closer to the 511 stable release. I'd probably have considered making it the stable build, except 1) I made some new changes that I'd like to see through a test run first, and 2) the last time I released a new stable build before Thanksgiving, Avast crapped the bed and then I had to deal with the fallout all weekend. So screw that; we're doing this thing later.

The new changes include a number of webclient fixes, plus some tweaks to enhance performance in Dream Seeker and avoid stack overflows in the server. The performance stuff really took up most of my time this week, because I was trying to figure out how to get decent time measurements--in the end I had to settle for decent percentage measurements--and then how to do anything about them.

One of the major places I was able to improve performance in Dream Seeker, in the hardware rendering engine specifically, was that I found out the process of going from icon ID number to sprite was kind of atrocious. The code was converting an icon ID to an info structure pointer, then looking up that pointer in a hashtable to find the loaded sprite (if any), instead of using a simple flat array to go straight from ID to sprite. Yeek. Changing that chopped about 11% off the rendering time in a particular game I was testing. Some other work with not bothering to change transform matrices all the time shaved off another few points. The overall improvement in rendering isn't dramatic, but it's significant.

Likewise on the backend, I found some code that was re-reading the HUD dimensions every time that big icons were rendered to the HUD. It was doing this after getting the list of icons. Honestly I have no idea why I ever did that, but I've axed that code. Which is one of those changes I'm not 100% sure about, but it makes sense. That shaved an even bigger chunk of time off of the backend pre-rendering code.

The web-side frontend stuff for the webclient is still on my plate, and I have to look into an issue with link() messing with login credentials after that. But that should be quite soon.

Now, it's time to revel in fun BYOND games while avoiding relatives! I have a good mind to play some Draggin' Ballz myself for nostalgia's sake. (If you've never played it, it's a hilarious parody of the community itself. It won first place in a 4K competition, the same one where Scream of the Stickster took third.) I'm still leaning towards setting up a 16K if I can find people willing to judge the thing, but we'll see how that goes.

Thanks again to everyone who's become a Member or donated this month so far. Your contributions really mean a lot. And for those who haven't yet, why not throw a few bucks BYOND's way while you're doing your Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping? You can always donate a gift Membership to your favorite SS13 dev, or make a newbie's day.

My annual Macy's parade live blog starts tomorrow at 9 AM EST. If you haven't baked any pumpkin bread yet, or a pre-Thanksgiving pie, you'd better get started now.