Earlier this week I put out a big bunch of fixes for 514, which ended up including some fixes from non-beta versions as well, and after a productive week I have some new ones in the pipeline. Progress! Where I've made less progress, which is to say none yet, is the Steam stuff I was going to look at, but that's still high on my list because I know it's time-sensitive, so I want to do a hard push on that next week.

The latest edition of Within BYOND shows off several uses of particles and other visual effects, and I think it's awesome to see what people are doing with the engine. Even more awesome is seeing SS13 get in on these updates too. It's great seeing more engagement here.

Speaking of particles, I'm currently looking into optimizations for them. I know it's early days yet but there are some cases where particles are slow, and I'd like to address that now rather than later. To that end I've added more entries to the client profiler, and I'm using that to look into some of the slowdowns. There are of course limits to how far a crapload of particle sets in use at once can be optimized, but I know we can do better. Currently I'm especially looking at the way the threads are organized because I have a hunch I'm hitting way more overhead with those than I need to be.

If you love all this influx of new features and the continued support via bug fixes, don't forget to hit up the tip jar. Becoming a Member is the easiest way to help out, but you can also (or instead) use Patreon or SubscribeStar to show your support.

Good luck to everyone out there dealing with arctic temperatures right now, especially those who can't read this currently because they have no power. Yikes. Keep warm everyone, and keep safe.