After a long wait, but thankfully not as long a wait as 512 had, 513 is finally out of beta! Yesterday I released 513.1526 as the new stable build, and of course I'll keep doing maintenace releases on that while I work on 514 features. It should be a bit before we see the first 514 beta because new features will demand various internal changes, but at least that process is already underway.

This week I got the ?[] operator in place, and what an adventure that was. The null-conditional operators are pretty weird animals because they effectively have two different levels of precedence, but I'll go into more detail on that in today's Patreon post. Suffice it to say it was an adventure.

I'm still looking for a good syntax for approaching particles, but probably before I get there I'll have to get some rudiments of the display engine in place, so there's time yet. Another thing in the near term is adding return types for procs, which will help with resolving types for the dot-chain operator at compile time, and hopefully I can come up with some other uses for it as far as optimization.

This is the current feature wish list I'm looking at for 514, which is still wide open to expansion, and I think obviously not all of these will go in but some are higher priority than others:

+ := operator (id:2534755)
+ ||= and &&= operators (id:2571455)
+ ?[] operator (id:2411099)
- Particle systems
- world.movement_mode (id:2546225)
- time2text() with time zones (id:2572752)
    - Possibly also world.timezone and client.timezone
- Possibility of multiple statpanels? (id:2576496)
- Return types in procs
- Add identifiers to animations so they can be matched later
- Upgrade SQLite
- Add extensions to SQLite (fs5, what else?) (id:2217693)
- Sound animation
- Automatic sound environment position (changes with player)
  (id:2534538)

Inherited from earlier wish lists:
- Pause feature (single-player games only)
- Maptext clipping/scrolling
- atom.play_rate ?
- GetFlatIcon() and/or ability to convert appearance refs to
  bitmaps in client browser
- Z linking

As you can see that's a lot to look at, and since I don't want to go nuts with 514 it's likely a few of these will stay on the wish list. But just because there's a lot to look at doesn't mean new ideas aren't welcome, so pile 'em on. New filter ideas? Things that are tedious in soft code that could benefit from hard code? Some of the best features we've had in recent versions have come from your imaginations, not mine.

Thanks everyone who's helped contribute to BYOND to keep things going, via Membership and other channels. I'm grateful for your support!

Now wish summer in full swing, let's make the most of the nice weather while we can and the rest of the time, hide from the heat in the comfort of air conditioning and play and make some cool games.