The leaves are turning colors, school is back in session, and prime game-making season is upon us.

This has been a short week with the holiday, but development continues. I've been mainly working on 513 of course, but I'm keeping an eye on some pre-bug report developments for the current builds that have come up as unconfirmed reports, so I'll be looking into those soon. Nothing really serious as far as I can tell, which is good.

Over the weekend I found some issues in the 513 pager that will require me to get the beta testers a new release shortly. While trying to hunt down a nasty but elusive one, I ended up overhauling some stuff under the hood that will hopefully make conversion from UTF-8 to Unicode and vice-versa a smidge faster. And in the end, it turned out the nasty bug I was chasing wasn't new at all, in fact very very old (I think there might even be some bug reports about it, but not confirmed), and it was apparently only reliably happening in 513 by complete coincidence.

While I've been looking at the pager I decided I also need to give it some love. I'd like to redo the message feature to follow more modern sensibilities, meaning a different chat layout. I realized a lot of space is wasted when you're not going back and forth with each message, which is pretty common.

So that's really the long and short of development this week. I'm hoping to get more feedback shortly from the beta testers if they discover any issues, because I'm sure there are still some things to work out before releasing wide.

Again I'd like to thank everyone who's contributed to BYOND as Members, donors, or through Patreon or SubscribeStar. If you're not one of them yet, or lately, I hope you'll riffle through those couch cushions because it doesn't take much at all to show your support for the platform and it makes all the difference. BYOND 513 is coming to you soon!