The old adage about taking two steps forward, one step back comes to mind this week. On Wednesday I was able to button up pending changes for a new release, which had a lot of anticipated features: the new improved gliding, fixes in the icon editor, and even some minor rendering speed improvements. With that also came an undocumented tiny optimization for some server code routines, most notably list access, which got rid of some redundant type checks in situations where the server already knew it was dealing with a number.

The good news about 513.1523 is that it had a lot of positive benefits, and the simplified rendering code really seems to have paid off. The bad news was that a couple of small but nasty bugs got introduced on the client side, and on top of that I wasn't able to find NSBR's hang issue before that release. Fortunately the new bugs turned out to be quick fixes, and the hang finally revealed itself—making me very confident that hanging on topological sorts is behind us. So version 513.1524 is looking mighty good.

But we're not at the stable version yet. I'm still looking at a bug report, that I moved to features for now, regarding render_source and render_target and how the mouse interacts with them. Truth be told, although I hadn't planned on the individual atoms from a render_target being mouse-accessible it makes way more sense than the alternative, so I'm gonna look to change that but with caution. Also FLOAT_LAYER seems to have some weird properties with visual contents as I discovered working with Poplava last night, which needs a proper fix. Minor things like that are still on my plate, but we're pretty close to calling 513 ready.

That means 514 feature considerations are coming back to the fore. I have a short but interesting list of features I want to put in, and maybe this time I can keep it short.

Again I have to give great thanks to all of you who've helped out BYOND with Membership and donations, and through other channels like Patreon and SubscribeStar. You make all this ongoing development possible, which is all the more reason I'm pleased when I can deliver a performance boost or a new killer feature. Keep those ideas coming for 514!

If you've been blessed with nice weather, stop bragging to us unfortunates and go out and enjoy it while you can, to whatever extent you can and maybe then some. And if you happen to have photos of sunshine on lush grass, or red pandas, I could use a fix.