It's an early news week, and as weeks go it's also been a weird one. I'm still working on 513.1514, which I could release now but I have a small list of bug reports I want to get to before that release if I can. A couple of reports have waited a bit. Unfortunately I'm at that point where these are mostly annoyingly difficult bugs to diagnose, typically requiring a great deal of intensive testing, so it's hard to simply knock them out one by one.

For instance, there's an issue with parallel animation of pixel offsets that's pretty nasty, and although I have a test case the only way I think I can make headway on it is to output a bunch of debugging info and analyze the results—and even then I'm concerned the fix could break something else, because these animations are tricky. Another bug involves the Unicode stuff but it's been devilishly difficult to reproduce on my end, may require hard-setting the locale to Russian, and also requires compiling a codebase from SS13.

I confess another reason development was slightly derailed this week was that the topic of shadowcasting came up, and I did my best to try to figure out how to handle this because I very much want it in 514 if possible. The closest I've come to so far is really unworkable, but I feel like there's a solution hiding somewhere.

The skin editor update has been going really well, though, so I think that part at least is ready for prime time and can go into the 513.1514 release. This will mainly be useful for people who wanted to get control of saved-params and the various on- events without using a text editor, but it's also good for me because once everything's in place I can gut a lot of code that's been making Dream Maker slow to compile. (That is, it's slow to compile Dream Maker itself.)

Thanks everyone who's stepped up to contribute to BYOND as a Member, donor, Patron, or via SubscribeStar. You guys keep the lights on and I'm always working to push new features and fixes to help your games be the best they can.

We're at the point in March where nature is messing with us on a daily basis, so chin up and be ready to seize the day if we catch a break. In the meantime since it's likely your house is drowning in Girl Scout cookies by now, stay home and make games while you make unhealthy choices.