Phil screwed us again this year, but with the way 2021 is starting out like 2020 on meth, winter is the least of all our worries.

BYOND 514 is finally out in beta as of this week, a few days later than I had hoped but not too bad overall. A number of bug reports have cropped up already, which is why we're now up to 514.1545, from 1543 where it all started, in just a few days. I expect this to accelerate as more SS13 servers switch over.

So far the growing pains have been pretty normal things for what 514 does. I missed one issue in testing that impacts the .dmb format, so that had to be changed in the latest build; the reference had a number of small issues; and I'm looking into some more reports on particles. The biggest source of concern actually turned out to be the new texture atlases which had some problems, but with those apparently resolved I expect they'll help out a number of games.

Altogether things appear to be progressing well so far, so it's just a matter of keeping up with the fixes and trying to sneak in more new stuff. Some additional Steam support is very high on my priority list right now as well, for which there are some undocumented (for now) new routines in the code that don't yet do much of anything.

Thanks to all our Members and donors who helped end last month with a bang. Your support keeps all this going and I'm grateful for it.

Next week the dreaded V-Day arrives. When I was a kid my mom would shield us from the horror by making a two-layer heart-shaped cake for the occasion. But if you can't have cake, you always have new features to play with.