Back from the holiday, but now in a mad crunch to get Christmas shopping done, I've been keeping busy working on a number of bug reports that either piled up just before the break or came in at the last minute.

A fair number of fixes showed up in the newest release, 513.1502, which dealt mainly with more Unicode issues but also with a couple of icon editor things that have been with us since the new editor in 512.

Despite the number of Unicode issues I feel like those are really settling down, and faster than I anticipated which is nice. I discovered that the byondexe tool was failing in some surprising ways since the 513 change, and there were a couple of server-side issues—one of them, of course, impacting Cyrillic. Also Dream Maker had an interesting issue with Cyrillic, impacting the search feature on the frontend. Turns out when you tell a Windows string to convert to uppercase, it kind of nods and smiles at you if the characters are non-English and then does nothing. Well not anymore!

Also, there's an undocumented—because I don't know if it will work—potential fix to an issue Russian users have been experiencing with the output control, where it starts gobbling up spaces between words. I managed to improve that slightly already, but I believe the actual cause of the bug is some hacky code I had to add to deal with a bug that appeared several years ago, when upgrading to new development tooling. I somewhat reverted that code, which is to say I made a change that's closer to the old behavior but may represent an improvement, and so far I have not been able to reproduce the old bug. But in fairness, I'm not sure I know how to reproduce the old bug, so maybe I'm in for a nasty surprise. Anyway my hopes are that the Russians will get a big improvement here and no one else will see a regression.

There was a brief lull however, in which I decided to do more reference work. This new change doesn't appear in the Dream Maker reference window yet, but if you look at the HTML reference included in the release, you'll see a new filter dropdown that lets you filter help topics by category. I wanted to also add a swanky search feature to improve on the existing method of Ctrl+F and hoping the browser does it right, but time constraints didn't permit that.

I've also begun—only begun—the task of getting some build tools set up so I can try to compile CEF, and therefore begin a long project to switch BYOND to use CEF as its browser. I don't know when that project will begin in earnest but I'm kind of eyeing beginning it before the Christmas break. My plan is to do that development as a side branch while bug fixes for 513 move forward.

I want to thank everyone who's been helping out lately to support BYOND, whether as Members or donors or through Patreon or SubscribeStar. Your support means everything and I'm grateful. That's why I keep working to move things forward.

Feels like there's so little time left before Christmas! Time to get those last-minute acts of good done for the nice list. But more than that, it's time to bake and frost cookies, put up the tree if you haven't yet, send out cards if you're so inclined, and do more of the aforementioned shopping. Also in the more immediate sense, some of us have to keep moving a cat who's decided the mousepad is a good place to sit.