ID:2516803
 
Hooray! After a number of delays, BYOND 513 is finally out in public beta. It took a while to get here but I'm glad it's finally out and in all your hands to be prodded at. Naturally a few issues have been found already, some more serious and some less, and I'm working through them.

I forgot to mention a couple of minor features when I did the release notes (and in one case, also forgot to document it), so that will be corrected when I release the next build.

One of the major issues that came up, which doesn't have an official bug report yet, has to do with the way characters are transcoded from ANSI (which in this context is really just a generic term for 8-byte characters in a given locale) to Unicode. The locale-specific nature of this is something that honestly didn't occur to me before, although with the benefit of hindsight it probably should have. Yes, character 0xE3 is going to be different in an English code page than a Russian one, and that fact completely messed me up. I'm going to need to handle that carefully and it will require some thought, so the fix won't be in 512.1491 but in a later build—probably several of them. Obviously this is a huge deal to our Russian users so it's high on my list.

A tester who was in on the private beta also discovered something interesting about alpha masking, namely that it wasn't quite doing what he wanted to do with it. I've made some changes to the alpha mask filter to allow for some more complex stuff, but it still doesn't go quite far enough to get this done, so that's another puzzler for me to work on. In this specific case, he wants to take an icon, mask it by the icon it will be overlaid on, then overlay it. He was trying to use rendering targets for this, but of course that approach won't work when the overlay is part of that same rendering target to begin with.

I expect the little and big bugs to both keep rolling in, so this is the time when it's fix-fix-fix all the way along. There are some lingering 512 things I haven't really forgotten about, things that should have been taken care of but somehow still fail in some edge cases, etc. But overall, so far so good I think. I'm glad to see people playing around wih the new feature set.

Thanks everyone who's been contributing to BYOND as Members, donors, Patrons, or on SubscribeStar. Your support is everything and it's what allows this development to keep going.

Here's hoping for better weather soon, for fall anyway, and a chance to grill again before the year is out. Stock up on candy; I finally got weak and bought some myself. (For the record: Take 5, Baby Ruth, and some of those chocolate-covered orange marshmallow pumpkins because I freaking love those.) Get your leaf-pile jumping on and light those campfires, and don't forget you have less than two weeks to Halloween to finish your holiday games!
When the dust settles I hope to see a "features in brief" post for 513, following the skeleton of the 512 one(http://www.byond.com/forum/post/2416188) and improved with a brief explanation of how it affects the design or development of a game, where it can be mentioned.

For example, when I asked about the benefits of upgrading to CEF in the future, last week. I think the more information you put out, the better it would look and the least software engineer minded can understand it more and get excited for things.

EDIT: And I think not having Dream Maker and Dream Daemon show up after you install BYOND and agreeing to have Desktop Icons is a very bad decision.


Keep the good stuff rolling!
cool stuff lummox!
I'm ready