In this first full week of April, we were treated to some glorious weather, and yesterday was a textbook perfect zoo day. But was I at the zoo? No, I was not. It still beats Friday last week, though, when I had to sit in a hospital waiting room for hours. They made me watch the View.

Despite the zoolessness the week was still somewhat fragmented, and that didn't work too well for the big gliding project I was still stuck on. Yes, I said still. Where I stood last week was that when the virtual eye transitioned from a stationary position to following the player, there tended to be a sudden lurch. Fixing that caused a whole bunch of headaches. But then, stupid me, I had to go test this with a 514.1552 server to see if everything still worked the mostly-okay way it did before without sync info, and oh boy did it not. Thus began a wild adventure comparing the new cold to the old code, and trying to figure out what I screwed up.

The short version of all that is that the gliding stuff seems to be all right now. I'm still vexed that I had to make the code more complicated instead of less because the new sync code doesn't replace the need to make do without it when an older server is in play. But the new sync stuff is so much better, I think this should shut down eye discrepancies for good. I really wish I'd included all that in the messaging long ago.

There was some non-gliding work, though. I fixed a compiler bug where combining the ?. and ++ operators (-- as well) caused a spurious warning, and other miscellany. I think 514.1553 is on track for a release soon, but not today because of the curse. The biggest question mark holding me back is that I've had word of a crash issue I'd like to take a look at, and I don't have the information yet to investigate.

Overall though I'm very happy with 514's progress in beta. I do however want to add one more big thing before wrapping up the beta if it's feasible: SendMaps() profiling. We have world.map_cpu now and it's helpful, but I think with a little bit more granular data the servers having high map cost would be able to determine where the problem is, and maybe they can even point me towards future refinements.

Thank you to all the new Members and donors who've helped support BYOND lately, and to BYOND's supporters on Patreon and SubscribeStar, for pushing development forward!

Grilling season is not quite here yet, but it's time to get ready! And while we're waiting on better days, this is the best time for gaming, so keep pushing those pixels and coding till the break of dawn. See you next week!