Getting mostly back into the swing of things this week, my intention was to work on particle stuff mainly but I diverted onto another project for 514 instead. I mentioned in the past that I wanted to improve how browse_rsc() works because there's a problem when too many files are sent that can cause quite a large delay before the browser window appears. I'll discuss more of that in today's Patreon post, but this was a huge issue for many SS13 servers and it had even been a problem for other big games as well.

Aside from work on some small tidying-up mini projects here and there, I also got swept up into some bug investigation. And in fact, I have more bugs still to investigate, a whole new crop of them, although many thankfully appear to be minor. But one that was quite annoying was a problem one game was having with the byondexe tool for standalone games. These are the absolute worst to diagnose, but I finally found the issue and it was in the CSS the game was using. However, that broken CSS was boilerplate from the default distribution, so something changed at some point that caused the original CSS to stop working correctly: probably the addition of meta and doctype tags that kicked embedded IE out of quirks mode. The weird thing is the developer insists the change was in a very recent version but I was able to confirm otherwise; it's not at all clear when this started behaving differently.

It's strange because I know I've been busy all week, but the previous paragraphs basically sum things up, so I've apparently been doing a lot more tidying (and as always, searching for optimizations) than I thought. I know some of that time I was mucking about the rendering engine because there's a lot of old code there regarding color matrices that frankly I don't understand anymore, and I wrote it, so I've been culling parts that don't do anything and I'd like to radically simplify the logic further if I can.

A weird thought occurred to me the other day, that one of the features I want to add to the particle system might allow me to totally replace an animated icon I created for SotS II, or even several animations. That sounds kind of fun. I'm still thinking through some of the new features and how they'll work. I really, really want some kind of simple obstacle thing in place but I can't think of how to do it, and icon-based particles are still very high on my to-do list.

Thanks to everyone who's helped out BYOND so far this month. But if you're not one of them, there's still time to curry favor with the Great Pumpkin by contributing as a BYOND Member, donor, or on Patreon or SubscribeStar.

And speaking of time, time is ticking down before Halloween weekend which means you'd better get your spooky games in order. And continue to be wary of those bags of candy!