Things took a weird turn development-wise this week, where my intention was to strike a path forward on 514 but I got diverted into investigating some more 513 performance issues, and then I got physically sidelined.

One of the performance issues I started looking into turned out to be partially a wild goose chase, trying to track down evidence that could explain why performance was degrading in a specific situation. It turned out I didn't have the whole story. As more pieces came together it became clear that while there is still an issue to investigate, and it's still going to be very annoying to hunt down, there is also a viable workaround that sidesteps the whole problem. In essence, a big part of the issue stemmed from failure to keep client.screen tidy and clean up objects from secondary maps that were no longer in use, but I still have to investigate why the presence of those objects caused hiccups.

I also looked at the renderer some more because I can't get away from it. I reactivated some old internal profiling code I had, and updated it, to see if I could get new insights into the renderer and how I might improve it. This led me on a quest to redesign how some of the rendering stuff is handled, so I spent a good chunk of time making changes under the hood that were incomplete and buggy, but would have shown me if said changes were a step in the right direction. They showed no difference, so I had to yank all that code back out. Time wasted? In a sense yes, but it also gave me information there was no other way to get and told me what not to try. I still believe that changing some of the rendering internals will help, but not in this particular case.

Then the end of the week was shot all to crap by a nasty medical test that took me pretty well out of commission for anything serious. A big problem of where I'm at right now is that I need to sit down for a decent stretch of time and have full concentration, and that simply wasn't possible. Don't worry though, it's getting better now.

As many of you know now, Higoten is stepping down from the Within BYOND column, and he has my sincerest thanks and admiration for all he's put into it. He's passed the torch on to Spevacus, who we think will do a great job with it going forward.

I also thank all of you who've helped support BYOND via Membership and the donation channels such as Patreon and SubscribeStar. If you like to be in the know on the technical side and see under-the-hood stuff, Patrons get first dibs on those posts. On SubscribeStar I post at least twice a week, usually quick journalish entries.

Next week is Thanksgiving! It's gonna be a weird one, especially with the Macy's parade being a not-parade this year and Black Friday... wow, so much to unpack about Black Friday. But it's still a holiday nonetheless, so expect a short week and an impending turkey coma. We now have three radio stations locally playing all-Christmas music, which means like it or not the Christmas season is here early. Get ready, everyone!