ID:2458990
 
Slight interruptions perforated this week, though I guess you could say that's par. A doctor appointment nearly turned into an odyssey when my radiator fan died on the way home with lunch and a few groceries, and the next day I attempted to do some server maintenance and the BYOND server straight-up died on reboot—which turned out to be a corrupted BIOS, fixed by our wonderful host. (The corruption may have happened the last time there was a server outage, which happened for unrelated reasons.)

Now that the regular expression tests are basically done and I think the Unicode stuff is probably at a good place to set down, I've moved forward onto other 513 work. Specifically I know this release needs a "wow" visual feature, and I think my earlier-described concept of render sources and targets fits that description. So I've been working on that, getting in all the ground work I need before the actual display code—which is where I'm at now.

What's the use of this render target/source stuff? Well in short, it should allow for more complex visual effects, in particular by allowing you to group planes underneath one another. This may also make an alpha masking filter possible, which I'd like to include in 513 as well because it's been requested. I'm still finalizing some of this, which I've already mentioned in a past Patreon post.

I also solved a very odd rendering bug that will be fixed in the next 512 release, reported by Kaiochao. It seems that alpha was not being used correctly in KEEP_TOGETHER groups this whole time, because of the premultiplication monster. BYOND's icons so not premultiply alpha, but any time a temporary canvas is used like in KEEP_TOGETHER or plane masters, premultiplied alpha is always on the resulting canvas. The rendering rules change for this kind of thing, so when rendering that temporary surface, the color applied to it also has to be multiplied by its alpha value. That was not happening, with some visually weird results.

I want to most sincerely thank all of you who've helped support BYOND this month as Members, donors, or through Patreon or SubscribeStar. Your support is everything and I literally couldn't do this without you.

Leaves are actually budding on the trees! Stupid trees don't know we're in for some rough nights for the next week or so, but hopefully they'll do all right. Spring sure is taking its time to get here. Grill a beautiful steak for me, 'cause it's gonna be a little bit till I can have another.
Springs late for you? We basically didn't have a proper Spring here on the east coast. It's been upper 70s and 80s for nearly two weeks now, and rising. :p

Good stuff! Still excited for 513!
intriguing subject title.