It's gray, it's rainy, local foliage is pretty much at peak, and trick-or-treaters are waiting anxiously for the opening bell and their fill of candy. Me, I'm back on the IR, severity to be determined.

This was a week chock full of bug fixes, with multiple reports coming in for the now-public 513 beta. Overall the tide hasn't been as bad as I had feared, which is good.

One of my major goals this week was to fix an issue in which the user's locale wasn't respected when converting between ANSI and Unicode. My attempt to fix that in 513.1491 was unsuccessful, but I finally sussed out the cause of that and there will be a new fix in 513.1492, likely coming later today.

Some new features got added to 513.1491, including a different way to handle alpha masking. I was trying to make it possible to do a mask-and-overlay but my approach ended up not quite getting there, so I expect to be adding a new blend_mode to cover that case in the future.

Development is possible because of our Members, donors, and Patrons. If you're not one of those yet, or lately, it doesn't take much at all to support BYOND and it helps a lot. And for those who are already helping support the platform, thanks!

Halloween is less than a week away! Get your spookiest seasonal games ready for the weekend and let's see what you got.