ID:2433191
 
Since I'm ostensibly part Irish (although I lose points as a Protestant) I'll appropriate a little culture and wish everyone a happy St. Patrick's Day and all the luck in the world. But I won't do it with a cheesy fake accent. It's a special holiday because it also celebrates the patron saint of BYOND.

This week has been another mixed one for development, splitting my time between 512 and 513 alike. I've been looking into a few bug reports, although a couple of them have been frustrating because some are hard to replicate, and one of those reports doesn't seem to be verifiable at all.

One of the main things I did with 512 this week was make inroads on a dark theme. To be honest I spent way more time on that than I should have, but I plead this excuse: people really, really seem to want it. I thought it would be a relatively straightforward project but unfortunately there's a lot more to it than I thought, so to make a long story short that won't be in place for the next 512 release, which I hope to put out early next week. I'll explain more on the Patreon post because that's where I like to get technical.

For 513 I've been adapting a lot of the text routines to handle UTF-8, so that soon I hope to be fully done with the Unicode project, except of course for testing. I know I've talked a lot about emojis as part of that, but really the big-deal reason for all of this is that BYOND has a number of users from countries outside the Anglosphere, including a big chunk from Brazil, and even some from Russia or parts adjacent who have had trouble getting their pagers to work with Cyrillic characters in their system paths. Some developers are working on localization for once 513 is ready. Plus, moving to Unicode is way overdue all on its own. This was worth doing for sure.

I think I'll wrap up there without going off on a tangent about a bunch of other mini-projects, but suffice it to say 513 is moving forward, and it's doing so because of all your support. Thanks to all our Members, donors, and Patrons for what you do to keep BYOND going. And for those who haven't hit the tip jar yet, hey, it's a quicker route to good luck than flying across the Atlantic to kiss a rock. ☘️
O.O
Since I'm ostensibly part Irish (although I lose points as a Protestant)

The Troubles intensify