512 is finally here! Which means, of course, that a slew of new bug reports were bound to come in, and did.

One of the bugs on my radar that hasn't been figured out yet is that sometimes big objects are disappearing prematurely from the map. This has been very intermittent even with a test project for me, and I haven't yet managed to get it to happen in the debugger--which is the only way I'll be able to actually tackle the problem. So needless to say, that one is a thorn in my side at the moment.

On a related note, I've noticed that because of the way object bounds work, objects with filters can suddenly appear or disappear because of map culling. This is a bad thing, so it's something I'll have to look at to see if I can figure out a good method of estimating the extra space required by filters and handle that at both the client and server ends. (I probably won't try to factor animation into that calculation, because that just gets way too complicated.)

Filters themselves had a few weird headaches, but while I was fixing a filter issue earlier this week I ran across a bug that truly had me scratching my head. And as it turns out, the bug I was finding was not new, just manifesting in a new way. The debugging I had to do on that was painstaking, but after putting in a lot of elbow grease I was able to get to the bottom of it.

The improved map editor also proved to have a few hitches that didn't show up in my initial tests, so subsequent builds have fixed those.

And then of course the new screen_loc parsing was somewhat broken, owing to an old line of code that didn't get deleted. If anyone still has issues with other screen_loc stuff since that was fixed, though, please do post new reports in Beta Bugs.

So far so good on a lot of this, though; for the first week of beta it could be worse. I expect 512.1389 will likely be out late tonight or sometime Saturday, depending on how things go with outstanding reports.

Thanks everyone who's donated to BYOND or become a Member this month. If you haven't done either of those things in a while, or ever, please do! BYOND needs your support, which is what makes all of this possible. And don't forget to get started on your killer Halloween games, because October is nearly upon us. Happy coding!