A new month begins, and thank goodness because April was the absolute pits this year. Not that May's looking a whole lot more promising yet in any aspect.

This has been a week of really deep bug fixes, mixed with some icon editor work. I mentioned before that the new proper topological sorting probably still had a hang in it somewhere that I couldn't replicate—well NSBR found a way to replicate it. Through painstaking debugging I was able to resolve the flaw in the underlying code, and now I'm confident that the fix will hold. It is still, of course, possible to construct various situations on your map that will freak out SIDE_MAP or ISOMETRIC_MAP and create cycles in the drawing order, which means sorting will be resolved inconsistently. However, those cases will no longer hang the client.

Another major bug that's been on the docket for a while is one Nadrew had with Spires of Agartha, where a mob that should be blocked from view was still visible because of an attached lighting object, even though TILE_BOUND was in play. This ultimately turned out to be a problem with the way client-side visual bounds were handled, and specifically it was related to a particular combination of the KEEP_TOGETHER and KEEP_APART flags. I'll go into that more on today's Patreon post.

And on top of that, thanks to a really good test case I discovered why right-click verb menus can sometimes be so slow to pop up. Quite some time back I fixed one aspect of this problem, but the test case highlighted a different one and why it was happening. I was also able to put in some changes that could potentially impact verb panels to make them a little faster, but I still lack a test case for reported slowdowns on those.

For the cherry on top, there's some new palette management options in the Dream Maker icon editor. You'll now see a little menu icon you can click to access palette options directly, including new sorting options, and you can drag and drop colors to move them around or delete them altogether. The default size of the palette color cells has also been increased, although this does mess up the harmony of the 18x12 layout for the default BYOND palette. It seemed a worthy compromise.

To everyone who supported BYOND last month through their Memberships, donations, and on other support platforms, I am extremely grateful. The fundometer was healthier than I've seen it in a while, and that means all the more with what's been going on.

Stay healthy, everyone, and let's work to get those zoos open. For... uh... the kids.