ID:2421722
 
The promised cold snap finally arrive, so I get to look at snow outside my window now. Yay! The bad news: It's cold up here.

This was a strange week as far as development goes. It started on a sour note where I had to pull away from development, or more precisely take some time here and there, to deal with a different situation. My intention was to work on bug reports part of the time (I do have a couple to look into) and get a new 512 release out, while continuing the work I'd begun on 513. Instead, because my time was more divided than I'd expected, I opted for just the latter since the 513 work is so direct I can literally do it in the middle of the night when my head isn't in it.

Late in the week I finally reached a point where I'd done most of the conversion to DMString that I needed to, or so I thought, and could start trying out compiling stuff in Unicode mode. (There's really more to it than that, but that's the starting point.) Well of course there were bound to be issues there too, so I've been sorting through them. It appears byondwin is now totally in the clear except for some file stuff, which is great, and I'm making my way through Dream Seeker now, with Dream Daemon, Dream Maker, and the pager all still to go. The others are all done up to the point of the first conversion, but need to try compiling in Unicode mode to show up where I missed stuff.

It's hard to describe the scope of this update properly, because everything is so interconnected that you can't really just change one file at a time. This code has been built around 8-bit strings for so long that a lot of waters have gotten muddied, and BYOND is such a big project that a lot of files impact a lot of other files. But you may recall I've done major updates like this before: like the 2- to 4-byte update for most limits, or for that matter the backend string refactor I did a few months ago in preparation for all this. So at least doing a big change like this isn't entirely unheard of. I'll talk more about this on today's Patreon post.

I want to thank all the Members who re-upped so far this month or joined for the first time, and those who've gone the extra mile via donation or Patreon. SubscribeStar is still trying to get their ducks back in a row but they're available too, for those interested in supporting BYOND that way. Your support is greatly appreciated and as always I hope to deliver good things in return.
oh bro, ur work is amazing! icon edit is great!
I agree! I really like the new Icon Editor. The old one was good, too, but I'd say the new icon editor is even better. I really like the delay feature, and the ability to see the icon animated while editing it.

If there is one thing I'd like added to the icon editor, I'd like a way to scale the image; I don't think that exists; but it's no issue, as I use GIMP when I need to, and in most projects scaling isn't needed very often, once the icon size is decided.

Overall, the icon editor is one of the best I've ever used for creating pixel art for games. Very well done!

My hope is that we'll someday get an equally excellent update for the Dream Maker map editor! It's good, but could be a lot more intuitive and faster, perhaps with more ability to use hotkeys to select different types of atoms, additional care for instances, etc.

The icon editor is really great, now. I say keep up the good work!
ur worthless coder lummox