Ahead in the word count, behind on the pacing. Isn't that always the way? In fairness, I challenge you to get a heroine into a bad situation when she's smart enough to see most trouble coming, without handing her the idiot ball.

This week I dealt with a nasty bug in vis_contents, but because it's the only pending fix right now, I haven't gone ahead with a new release just yet. Instead I've been taking some time looking into a couple of outstanding issues like scheduler efficiency and seeing if there's any way at all I can decrease the proc call overhead. My look into this isn't complete, but one major thing I found was that even after accounting for debug code, the compiler was not clearing certain values in a nice, quick way. I suspect there are improvements I can make to this in multiple places, including in some frequently accessed routines that handle var assignments.

In the process I also found that the proc structure was less packed than it could have been, and also that the interpreter was allocating space for variables it seldom needed. Trimming some fat in this area means certain games (SS13) will be less prone to stack overflow issues.

Work on the webclient proceeds as well, although not as speedily. I think the speed gains I'm looking to achieve on the server are really worth the effort, so they're getting the bulk of my attention. Also, I think this is really a good time to look again into the isometric case and finding a way to speed that up too.

We are now less than one week away from Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving weekend has always been my favorite time for gaming, especially on BYOND, so grab that leftover turkey and stuffing and get to playing or coding while the rest of the family fights over politics. And don't forget to chip in to support BYOND if you haven't, because your support matters and is much appreciated.

Short week next week. Rest up and prep your stomach!