ID:2665462
 
It's cold, it's rainy, and it's Thursday. That's right, it's an early news week. Although I'm not strictly taking tomorrow off, I'm preparing for tomorrow to suck.

Multiple fixes are waiting in the wings for BYOND 514, so later today—even though I think this qualifies for the Friday curse in spirit—I plan to get out 514.1550. It's been too long a wait and people need their fixes.

One of the more experimental things in this next release that I shouldn't have done, but I did anyway and tests are showing it's fine (somehow even after I tested with SS13 I'm convinced they'll find an edge case I missed), is that I altered the way strings are handled internally so they would store length information. This should have no negative impact on performance whatsoever, and may help some games that do a lot of text processing.

The reference should transition from light to dark a lot faster now, and I've added a new section called "Understanding the renderer" in the special notes. This should help explain the sprite stack a lot better. It could use some graphics, but I didn't make any yet; maybe another time.

Again I want to extend my thanks to all BYOND Members and supporters on other donation platforms who make all this development possible in the first place. And also those who've helped out in further ways, like how Spevacus has been handling Within BYOND and Higoten did it before that, or others promote contests like GIAD.

Hopefully next week things will warm up around here. But development-wise I think it's going to be even more disrupted than this week, because a lot of things ended up colliding into the same short time span. Don't worry, we'll get through it.

Wow. The reference's dark mode transition looks very smooth now. Nice job on that!