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Things got a little off track this week. While I did more work on 513 bugs as planned, I also followed detours into some 514 concepts and looking for possible optimizations, which is always a sure-fire distraction. Throw in a bit of medical misfortune (grilling a teriyaki steak went so-so on Sunday, but the leftovers Wednesday were more dangerous), and well, that about sums it up. When I'm not feeling well I tend to focus on studying code and possible improvements more than fixing bugs or building out new features.

I'd actually really like to get 513.1529 released next week, so my goal is gonna be to power through a few bug reports early on and get it right out. Maybe I'll get ambitious and throw some time at it over the weekend.

In 514, I've finally got particle threads behaving properly and I'm building out more functionality for those. In fact one of the detours I mentioned earlier was that once that threading was in place, I wanted to examine the code to see if I could get a benefit from threading anywhere else. (So far the answer is maybe.)

Related to the new visual stuff, I also still want to merge several structures that are used internally so they can copy more data directly in the pre-render (skipping if/else checks and such) and are therefore faster, so I spent some time looking into that. I'm not sure if there's as much gain to be made there as I thought, but I'd like to try. One thing the current code doesn't do the best is handling transform matrices, which I'd like to improve for multiple reasons: one of them being it would be nice to eventually support 3D transforms.

Anyway as you can see a lot of the above is speculative, but delving into speculative improvements has typically been a good thing for the engine, so it's worth a little detour.

Thanks everyone who's been contributing to BYOND as Members, or through other channels like Patreon or SubscribeStar. You support means everything and I'm grateful to all of you for it.

Summer is coming to a close soon! But this is my favorite time of year for developing and playing BYOND games, which isn't too surprising because my BYONDiversary is coming up. Now's the time to play with new features and new gaming concepts, to challenge yourself to make a type of game you've never made or work on pixel art in a limited palette and then make that art playable. So put that imagination to work! I'm already goading my imagination to make something out of this awful virus-blasted year with my upcoming Fair-at-home project: it involves significantly fewer fried foods, but it has the advantage of being a lot cheaper.
*Thumbs Up*
o.o