I'm back into development proper this week, although it got off to a slow and rocky start and I've been hung up on the regex thing--but not for much longer!

First we begin with a tale of heroic sacrifice on my part. As you know I was sick last week, and I was on the tail end of that through the weekend and the early part of this week. Saturday night I went to sleep on the couch to avoid waking my wife with my coughing, and only went to bed proper when she got up to feed the cats and stay up awhile playing games. Not long into that, she woke me to tell me my phone was showing alerts that the hub was down.

I dragged my exhausted self upstairs to get right on it. As it happened, one of the nastier forms of hub crash had resurfaced, which meant that when I attempted to reboot the machine it got stuck, as it had once before, requiring intervention from the host. When the machine was finally back up, I realized the situation was likely to recur in the near future and redoubled my efforts to find the cause. Mind you this is after months of not knowing the cause or even finding much in the way of clues, but in this case I finally succeeded despite sleep deprivation and feeling like crap. I discovered that a service was crashing occasionally, in fact much more frequently than I thought, and when it crashed it was leaving behind ginormous junk files. Once I knew where those files were and therefore what service was having these problems, I was able to not only delete the junk files and free up loads of space that had been steadily disappearing (which was causing the crashes), but also I could finally remove that service which wasn't needed, preventing any future issues.

All of that is to say that under physically very difficult circumstances, I fixed the main cause of the server issues that have been plaguing the BYOND hub and site. A lesser cause was fixed a couple weeks ago, so now hub stability has been radically restored. Occasional hiccups may still happen, but more in line with what I'm used to seeing in the past and probably even less than that--nothing like the ongoing nuisance we've had to deal with over the last few months.

The development work has, as I mentioned, been mostly focused on regular expression code to bring it in line with the new Unicode stuff. I'm pleased to say that despite a few wrong turns, I think I'm basically out of the weeds and all that should remain for that is to test it extensively. That means the Unicode portion of 513 is mostly done. And yes that has taken most of the week.

I've also spent some time working with some members of the SS13 community on a couple of reported crashes: one that happens semi-reliably with explosions, one that seems intermittent and is in a different codebase, but they appear to have the same underlying cause. While I don't have a solid lead on that yet I'm gonna continue to suss it out. It's hard to tell if it's a semi-new issue or not, because it looks very much like an issue that was fixed in 512.1466 but the problem goes back to at least 1454 and probably further.

Even though the Unicode project has taken up a lot of time for 513, I still want to get in more features if possible, weighing that against the fact that 512's glut of features made for a very long bug shake-out. Right now 513's feature list looks a little thin and it definitely needs some sprucing up. I know I won't get to everything on my list, but there are still some big-ticket items I very much want to do.

Thanks so much to all our Members, donors, Patrons, and sundry who've made a difference by supporting BYOND, and again I have to specially call out the SS13 community for their contributions. I know releases have been fewer and it seems like 513 is taking its sweet time coming, but it is coming!