I mentioned last week I wanted to get 514.1555 out the door early this week. Obviously that didn't happen. The main thing that got in the way was health issues, and it kept me from really spending the time I wanted to button everything up. I'm doing quite a bit better now than earlier in the week, so that's good.

I've kept working on the code regardless though, and have been looking into even more optimization options including some very tiny ones like optimizing how binary tree traversal is done. (I still need to do a much larger project for associative lists, where I can find a way to allocate tree items in batches and hopefully keep them close in memory. I think it'll be a huge win, but it's a project for another time.)

So it's been one of those weeks where not a lot gets done directly, but a lot of little things get done to prep toward other stuff. After this release I really need to get back to particles and I'm working out how I'm going to handle the biggest request of all, which involves creating temporary client-side objs. The idea of temporary objs is a powerful one that will probably allow me to do some cool new effects (and maybe also move missiles to that system, losing some annoying old code), but since objs and mobs have IDs and these would not, that presents a bit of a problem. I'll go into that more on Patreon.

I sense 515 is looming and would like to solicit more feature ideas, although I also know the big thing in 515 I want to tackle might take up a lot of time: namely updating the renderer to stop using the fixed-function pipeline. That's gonna be a big-deal change for sure. But I already have some language requests in, and man is it time to get proper stacked-appearance-to-flat-icon conversion done.

Thanks to all the BYOND Members and donors who've been contributing to BYOND lately; your support means everything and I really appreciate it.

It looks like grilling weather will be upon us this weekend, but after the week I've had I'm scared to go out and buy a steak. Probably silly, I know, based on what the numbers are telling me, but a little caution is still warranted. So if your weather's gonna be nice, do up something succulent on the grill so I can enjoy it vicariously.