The 514 beta series has been chugging along with some behind-the-scenes stuff this week, but that's been so interrupted it's been difficult to keep everything tidy, which is a problem when you have a release due. There are important fixes waiting to get out, but the code hasn't quite been in a state where I could have that ready. My goal was to get out a release around yesterday, but pretty early in the day I realized that wasn't happening. So I think we're probably looking at Monday.

514.1553 is going to focus quite a lot on not just fixes, but new forms of metrics. The SS13 guys have been asking for SendMaps() profiling for a while, and other big projects like Eternia are also in need of it. That's finally ready I think, although it has no nice windowed UI like the other profiling does. The UI I have for that sort of thing is less extensible than I'd like, but basically this is very similar in style to the client render and pre-render profiling so I can probably reuse that UI in a later release with a few changes.

But also, after a long discussion trying to understand how and whether atoms were being grouped together, I realized it's really time we had a way of getting better details about how items are grouped and sorted on the map. So I also did some work on a new system that tries to turn the list of icons into a JSON format that can be examined in a browser. There are some things it doesn't show easily, like for instance icon info has been reduced to a simple frame number, but mainly I think it'll help a ton for telling how things are grouped and sorted. This could be a very useful tool for anyone trying to figure out why things appear the way they do. That tool is in place as well, but it's super primitive and I want to improve on that over the next few releases.

Folks on the Patreon Discord (it's a perk for SubscribeStar too) have been doing their level best to convince me to implement a feature that's been requested forever. I've never been fond of the idea, but considering the people asking the loudest right now are contributing to the platform, it's kinda hard to argue with that. So I plan to look into it, although I doubt it's something I can shoehorn into 514.

And the subject of support: Many thanks to those who've shaken out the couch for loose change to keep the lights on.

Looks like another week of crappy weather ahead, so everyone brace yourselves. It's still April after all and this is how it goes. Stay inside and keep gaming!