As I write this, a considerable amount of wet snow is coming down. Some has stuck, and it's all slowly melting because the temperature is actually above freezing. You know who likes snow in April? Nobody, not even me.

So just as last week, this week I was still mostly wrestling with the big-ticket items of topological sorting and animations. There were other bugs I worked on as well, but those were the big two. I think, though, that I might be nearly out of the woods on one and totally on the other.

When it comes to the sorting issue, I was not able to track down the cause of any infinite loops, but I was able to streamline parts of that code and eliminate some cruft that I feel might have had the potential to cause problems, even though I couldn't be sure that cruft was responsible. I'm still going to have to have someone stress-test it to see if this is ready to go.

Animation was very tricky to overhaul, as I brought up in last week's Patreon post, but I think the latest changes I did finally locked that down—on the client. That however is still going to require considerable testing to make sure everything is all right, and although I've fixed all the client-side logic, there's still a bug from Nadrew that I know is going to remain a problem and I'd like to get that one fixed as well. It's just a lot more complicated to deal with this stuff at the server end, and the server-client communication part which is where that particular bug rears its head.

But as I said I've been looking at other bug reports as well, so I fixed some more issues with the skin editor and peeked into some miscellany. For instance, testing the animation stuff involved a test project I've worked with that has really odd use of the layer filter, and that test case actually appears to visually lock up when those layer sizes reach a certain stage, as the GPU basically gives up. I'd like to work in some logic to make it easier for the rendering stage to release temporary surfaces it no longer needs (such as render targets that have already been used as sources everywhere they were going to), and make use of surfaces that might be slightly larger than it needs if it's only going to need them briefly.

All in all I think I'm closing in on the next release, but because I still need to tie a few things down, and because it's Friday and we all know about the Friday curse, I'm not going to put out 513.1518 till Monday at least.

Thanks everyone who's helped support BYOND so far this month! I'm grateful for all of you who've chipped in and I'm working right along for you. I know the past couple weeks doesn't look like much on the surface, but development is like that sometimes, and that's why I have these weekly posts to keep everyone in the loop.

Since grilling is out of the question and a big Easter dinner with ham and mashed potatoes isn't gonna happen because of social distancing, may as well make the most of it and gorge on bacon. As it happens that's not just my default position, but I have actual bacon I need to cook up this weekend. As consolation prizes go, bacon is kind of hard to beat. For candy I have successfully avoided jellybeans, and surprisingly don't regret not buying any Cadbury eggs even though I don't understand why; all I bought were some Reese's eggs to put in the freezer, which were harder to resist. Have a happy Easter, everyone!