Happy Friday to all. We're back up after a down period, which thankfully was settled quickly once I was aware of it. Sucks, but Halsey happens from time to time.

This week I've split development between 512 and 513. A lot of time had to go into profiling 512, and I really, really hate profiling. But Crazah's isometric game had a weird stuttering issue and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I got... well, to the middle. The actual low-level profiler turned out to be very unhelpful, but when I added more information to the Dream Seeker client profiler (just in debug mode) it actually spat out very useful information. I'll go into more detail on what happened on the Patreon post, but suffice it to say I eliminated a major source of the stutter and got performance back on track. This might potentially help other games, but I think this was a weird case.

A couple of other issues are fixed including another animation bug with big turfs (there is no report for it yet however). I did not release a new version of 512 yet, because there are a couple outstanding issues I want to look at and, well, it's Friday now and we all know what that means.

The Unicode stuff is proceeding, though it was hard switching gears back to that. In testing I discovered a problem with the DMString class that I had to fix, so that fix will go into the next 512 build even though I believe it affects zero code there. Working now on the editor in DM because it interacts with a lot of the encoding issues I talked about in last week's Patreon post, so we'll see how that goes. The plan is that once this upgrade is done, you could even use stuff like emoji in strings without a problem. The reality... we'll see. Actually the DM Editor is really a good place to work on all this because I suspect I'll find some minor issues with the fact that it now uses UTF-16, where a Unicode character can still be 2 16-bit characters (that is, it's not strictly 1:1 and that impacts stuff like string positions that matter a great deal here), and if so I'll have to address them.

Thanks to all our Members, donors, and Patrons for your support! I'm working to make BYOND better all the time and hope to see great things from this new version.