Fall temperatures are upon us, and about now the furnace is on for the first time since June. That's right, June, because June was seriously messed up. So was my sleep this week, so I've been operating at half power most of that time.

514 was finally back to center stage this week, at least whenever the curtain was up. First out of the gate, I worked some more on particles. Trying to isolate a crash I was having, I made some changes to the structure that handles a whole group of MapIcons so that it could more easily hold onto things like color matrices, filters, etc. it would need to remember. That was quite a little reorg project in its own right.

That reorg was worthwhile but it failed to fix the crash, which I was convinced came from the particles' threads in some way. This was made even weirder by the fact that it never happened when the particles didn't display. But in the end I did find the bug, and it was unbelievably stupid: I was post-incrementing a var I should have been pre-incrementing, which caused the vertex buffer to overflow and was blowing up the heap. Oops!

Anyway, with that out of the way I've been working as best I can through brain-fog on other features that were in the queue. world.map_cpu is now in place, which helps measure the CPU usage dedicated to arranging map info for messages to players. That's been on the SS13 request list a long time, so I'm glad to finally make it available.

Some of my more ambitious projects are gonna have to wait, but I can at least get back to color gradients and testing those for particles, now that that crasher is fixed.

Thanks everyone who's helped support BYOND through Membership and donations. You guys are the best, and I keep working even through the fog for you.

While I wait for the smell of burning dust to settle, I put the question to all you game devs: What are your Halloween plans? BYOND needs some awesome Spooktober fare and I think it's high time we saw more of it. Meanwhile Talk Like a Pirate Day is tomorrow, and that's a reminder we need more good pirate games too. So put on that idea cap and start creating!