It's been another one of those weeks where I've gone after different little things that caught my eye, but some big and kind of longstanding issues were involved and I did some research into some stuff for Dream Maker, so good times were had.

The biggest fix in today's new release is that cursor flickering is finally done for--I think. In my test project which is loaded down with just about every control type, I did some testing and was pleased with the results. This has been on a lot of people's wish lists for a long time. What was the cause of it? Well, you basically have the fact that Windows can set a cursor actively, but only temporarily, and also that it has a message for doing a passive set when the cursor goes over a certain control. The latter wasn't as good as it could have been and the former was being done in situations it shouldn't, when the engine thought there was the possibility of a new cursor having been set, which ended up being like once every timer tick. Now the whole thing is a lot more aware of where the cursor is and what control it's over, which helps it decide whether the active or passive setting is even appropriate.

I got to fix some display issues in Dream Seeker, too, basically both related to filters. One of them was a bug Yut Put asked me to look into, because he saw some transformed icons weren't applying PIXEL_SCALE properly, and it turned out this was a rare situation that occurred because of the particular way filters and color matrices were being used--although I think it's possible it could have appeared with just a color matrix. The other issue I found on my own, and it was a problem with the drop shadow filter and how the resulting filtered icon got positioned.

On the Dream Maker side, there was a recent laundry-list post on some wish list features, and one of them was relatively low-hanging fruit so I went ahead and did it. I tried to do another one, namely adding icons to the tabs to show which file type each file was, but 1) I didn't like that it cost so much screen real estate, and neither would users with a zillion tabs open, and 2) I couldn't actually get the icons working right away, so I decided to bail. I do think however that some of the icons in DM could use some revamping, including the layout icons I made for the skin editor that are, frankly, really outdated.

High on my near future list is getting in some kind of client-side profiling capability, to help determine things about how the screen is rendered so authors of demanding games can use that info to goose performance.

Big thanks to everyone who's become a BYOND Member or donated this month. I love you guys, and I keep working on features to show it. And if you'd rather set up a fire-and-forget monthly donation, even a small one, that works too--just visit our Patreon.

Next week is gonna be actual spring! Zoo weather is coming, although I won't get a zoo day yet because I can still hardly freaking walk. Dang it.