It's been a tumultuous few weeks but finally I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel. That means I've been able to get back to work on the important stuff, like getting in testing for the little I could do last week and attending to some bug fixes and feature stuff.

That testing revealed that I made a major mistake in some simplification of the skin structure routines, which was an absolute pain in the butt to track down—in part because I had forgotten about making the seemingly small change that screwed everything up. This is the kind of thing that happens when your schedule gets blown up, but at least it's settled now.

Another major thing I wanted to get to, and do for the next 513 maintenance release, was improving the way external .dll/.so calls are made by the server. Previously, the code was looking up function addresses on every call, and that's the kind of thing that gets old fast. A lot of inefficiencies were baked into that code for a long time, and newer internal structures I've added to the code made it a lot easier than it would've been in the past to deal with all of those. All told, there should be a significant improvement in performance there.

Right now I'm brainstorming some of the last features for particles, like attractors and, if possible, simple obstacles. By simple I really mean very simple, but it'd be nice to have some ability for sparks, for instance, to bounce off of a floor. I still also want to work out how to make icon particles; however I don't think it'll be feasible to mix icons and simple points in the same particle set.

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Halloween is coming, so keep plugging away on those theme games! The temptation to buy donuts increases exponentially every day. But in the meantime, I leave you with a high-protein life/menu hack: At McDonald's, order the sausage egg McMuffin with extra cheese and add bacon. You're welcome.