It's been another productive week for the 514 beta, with several bug fixes going in and a few small new features. I was planning to get out 514.1547 this week but I have a few irons still in the fire and want to give everything a proper once-over before I put that out.

One of the main things concerning me is I just fixed a major issue with render targets from plane masters being included as visual contents of another object. These were being positioned incorrectly, even in 513. However there's another bug on deck with those that I still have to look at, and on top of that I want to consider a better way of handling how render sources are anchored. Right now the render source centers itself based on the original icon size, but a more intuitive BYONDy way in keeping with large icon handling is just to anchor it to the lower left corner. So I'd like an option for doing that.

Also it's been brought up that particle vars being expressed in terms of client ticks instead of standard BYOND ticks is problematic. This makes sense to me, so I'll probably redefine particle timing in the next release so they're easier to handle.

All told though, 514 has shown some really impressive stuff out of the gate, and the work some users are doing with particles is absolutely incredible. F0lak has particularly impressed me with an amazing fire effect using three particle sets.

Thanks everyone who's been helping support BYOND through Membership or on our other donation platforms: Patreon and SubscribeStar. For those not in the know, on Patreon I post weekly with an early-access post that usually goes into under-the-hood technical details. On SubscribeStar I typically post twice a week, with short-form journal style posts. I've also been keeping the SS13 subreddit in the know for some time with Friday news posts as well, with the news distilled to bullet points and a little story vignette.

Stay warm, everyone, unless you're near the equator or in the southern hemisphere in which case try not to overcook yourself, and when you grill your next steak eat it with gusto for all of us who can't. The dreaded V-Day is upon us, so deal with it however suits you and be sure to have some cake. Hopefully we'll thaw soon.