ID:2287253
 
I have tasted of sirloin tips and mushrooms, of deep fried mashed potatoes and mac & cheese, of Dippin' Dots, and of cheese curd. And the tasting was good. Next up: roasted corn, fried cheese curd, fried Cadbury creme eggs, and the fried fluffernannernutter. (They don't call it the fluffernannernutter; I do, because it's one of my favorite comfort sandwiches when it isn't deep fried.) And maybe a chicken spiedie.

This week I've continued some of the late 512 features. Since I still have no clear direction to work with on preload_rsc--the JSON idea, as currently floated, isn't clicking for me--I might have to push that off. But I did decide to add operator overloading at long last, which comes with a new pair of operators to test for equivalence. All arithmetic or binary operators can be overloaded, as can all comparison operators except == and !=, and any assignment-with-side-effect, and list reads and writes. That leaves out only =, ==, !=, !, logical operators like && and || and the ternary ? and : pair, and the dot/colon operator family. A bunch of these still need more testing, but so far this is looking pretty decent. As a bonus for overloading, with comparators like ~= and < and > you only need to overload one of a pair for its inverse (~!, >=, <=) to work.

Filter-wise, I think I'm settling on just having four filters to go with the first release, but the new byond_build feature means I should have more flexibility with adding new stuff later. The four filters are blur, outline, drop_shadow, and motion_blur.

There are still some bugs on my radar to look at, and I'd like to take a closer look at an issue with isometric FPS. Plus I'm still hoping to get proper topological sorts in place.

An interesting discussion on threading has been going on recently. While I'm not keen on revisiting the thread experiment from past releases (though it's never completely off the table), I might be open to eventually looking at ways to boost certain parallel-friendly tasks with helper threads, blocking on the main thread till they're complete. That of course is very conjectural so it's something I'll probably look at down the road rather than right this minute.

Overall, 512 is still chugging along quite nicely. I've been turning some attention to documentation, always an important aspect of new features. It's been suggested that I add some images to the docs on filters, but I think I'll do better to outsource that and let you guys come up with some images for a later round.

Thanks once more to everyone who's donated to BYOND or become a Member. Next week marks the return to school for many college students, and in civilized parts the week after that opens school for the younger folks. But back-to-school time is maybe the best time of all to goof off with games, and getting started on your next great game now will mean that you can use development as a stress release. Just please don't add punching bags to your game, whatever you do.
Punching bags relieve stress!
*renames all instances of "punching bag" to "training log"*

This is better, right?
That's the only logical route for experience gain? Don't tell me how to dev >:(!