It's been an interesting week, mixing grunt work on 513 with a flurry of miscellaneous fixes for 512, but overall it's been a pretty good one.

I started out with testing of 513's regular expression upgrades, which revealed some problems early on—but solvable ones. This in turn led me to do something stupid, which was to refactor a few parts of that engine to improve efficiency. I suppose "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" doesn't necessarily apply if you haven't finished testing, but I do think that even though this made me spend more time on the project, it was the right call.

Then I did something smart, and started implementing unit tests to help me find problem spots in the engine: mostly borrowing from other unit tests I could find online, plus adding some new ones for the Unicode support. This took a lot of time, but it was well worth it because it highlighted a few problems I hadn't realized were there—which required still more fixes. Some of those unit tests covered things this engine absolutely can't do. I also discovered one really complex, weird case that failed badly and would be way too complicated to fix, but let's be honest: only an absolute sociopath would try to use that pattern, so I couldn't care less.

Of the fixes I got in for today's release of 512.1467, the biggest deal was one that should stop a bunch of intermittent crashes that have been plaguing certain SS13 servers. This turns out to be a very, very old bug, that started cropping up more often as BYOND matured due to, ironically, improvements that made it possible to handle higher stress. The short version of this is that changing the overlays lists of a bunch of turfs at once was the quickest way to trigger this issue, and it was happening because of a subtle oversight in the way new "unique cells" (I've talked about those before) get added to the map. I'll talk about that more on the Patreon post.

Other than the above, I'm definitely looking forward to other 513 features and getting this Unicode monkey off my back. Visual stuff is high on my list here, especially new filters and rendering concepts.

Big thanks to everyone who's helped support BYOND through Membership, donation, Patreon, etc. You keep the lights on and keep development moving forward, and it's hugely appreciated.

Easter is nearly here! Stock up on criminally undersized creme eggs and get the ham pants out of storage. And never forget: friends don't let friends buy spice jelly beans. Who eats those?