It was a short week because of the holiday, and because I've been so sleep-deprived I haven't been able to remember my own name half the time. Not sure what's up with that, but hey, we press on.

My first concern of the week was some 513 bugs on the docket, and it appears animation transitions were still an issue; the server was re-sending animation info, which should have been recognized by the client. 514 will improve on the ability to detect if an animation sent by the server is one the client already recognizes, but that new code wouldn't have fixed this issue. Turned out the animation was being recognized correctly as one the client knew, but the client was then going on to handle it all wrong and creating a transitional animation state it didn't need. Oops! This probably fixes some other open bug reports too.

Also a very, very odd case of recursion came up between images and vis_contents, which should have had code in place on the server to prevent it but didn't (the client does).

I've spent the rest of my time dealing with 514 changes, adding more to particles. My next milestone is to hopefully get something like snow going, so I'm adding a whole bunch of vars that will help in that regard. One of the new vars, fade, also will have pretty generic use because it lets you specify a fade-out time for particles.

Color gradients are also being worked on, so you can give the particle set a gradient and specify color as a number, with color_change being the movement along that gradient. You can change the particle set's gradient over time but it won't impact existing particles, which keep a reference to the old gradient. I kinda think color gradients are a useful enough concept that I'd love to be able to put them in some other part of the display engine (sans banding, because I hate it when nobody accounts for that), but one thing at a time.

For those of you who've helped support BYOND through Membership or donations, thank you! We also have Patreon where I do a weekly post that's usually more technical and under-the-hood, which Patrons get early access to, and I tend to post biweekly on SubscribeStar for supporters on that platform, where my posts are more personal/journaly about the development process.

Raffile mentioned something about a game jam coming up in October, and he's really been doing some cool stuff with BYOND lately. I always think this is a great time to work on Halloween-themed games, because horror and mystery, or hyperactively hoarding candy, can be fun to explore. Seriously, why don't we have a trick-or-treat action game yet? Imagine goals like collect X of a certain kind of candy or TP so many houses, bonuses for full-size candy bars and other rare treats, a trading mechanic, costume changes to maximize your haul, eggs for houses that leave the light on but don't answer the door, dodging traffic... Sorry, getting a bit dark there, but pretend the players are indestructible. Anyway, get to it!