ID:2608567
 
A surprising thing happened last weekend: I got somewhere on the CEF project. It wasn't much of anywhere, but it was just enough progress to convince me I can limp forward, and limp I did. I spent some time this week trying to get BYOND to compile with CEF and to be able to startup the library and shut it down again. My results were mixed, which is to say I have not yet achieved that modest goal but I'm getting there.

513.1529 was released this week, rather overdue, but apparently a nasty bug snuck in so there's a new release out to deal with that. It escaped testing by cleverly involving maptext that was nothing like what I was testing at the time, and through my other typical tests not involving maptext at all.

Although 514 stuff took mostly a back seat this week it's still underway. I'm trying to figure out a reasonable way to make something like snow doable in the system, by being able to change a particle's direction (or just velocity) slightly over time within certain limits. There's a surprisingly small amount of good information out there on how others have done this. Snow isn't my only concern here, as other wind-driven particles and fire embers are obvious candidates for this feature as well.

But I've also spent some time digging into the guts of the system again to see if there are any places I can improve performance. After some client profiling I realized the render time is really way worse than it should be, compared to all the work the pre-render is doing. I can't help but think some of that is the sprite-handling wrapper that our DirectX display code uses, and maybe there's a way to stop using it in favor of something lower-level. But also there's a lot of branching logic in there I just don't like: no good way around it yet that I can see, but if I could manage to get rid of it that would be amazing.

Huge thanks to all of you who've come out this month to support BYOND through Membership, donations, etc. You keep the lights on and keep the development coming. This is the season of my BYONDiversary so I tend to wax nostalgic and sentimental this time of year, so forgive me if I get overly sappy.

Speaking of this time of year, the Fair is on! ...in my mind. Apparently this year just before they canceled it, they went ahead with a bonehead plan to extend it by five days, so last Friday was officially Day 1. When I found out last weekend, I made fudge. I've been trying to do a little to honor my Fair-at-home project but I haven't really gotten into it in earnest by taking time off or (yet) cooking any of the special non-fudge things on my list. Hopefully that last part will change within a short time of this post. But if you have any weird ideas to share along those lines, feel free to toss them my way.
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