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This week has positively flown by, though at least 514.1561 finally turned out to be pretty stable and I wasn't chasing bugs from 1558 anymore. Although I've been hard at work it feels like I've barely made a dent in anything, largely because much of my work has been either on planning or investigating small bugs that were supposedly new but turned out not to be, leaving me at a loss as to how to proceed. Nevertheless I did make headway, particularly in adding particle.fadein which was one of the final items on my agenda for 514.

I spent way, way too long trying to figure out how to make the renderer a smidge friendlier to independent particles so I wouldn't have to half-ass them. You would think the logic for planning out the steps to render, working that in such a way as to make grouping the rendering steps simpler and even speeding it up a little in DirectX 9, would be kinda straightforward. The implementation might be harder, but the logic should be simple, right? Unfortunately I found that not to be the case, and I think the reason is I'm too far in the weeds. I've been really floundering there and I need to step back from it for a short while so I can figure out the rest. The fix here may involve some temporary structs to simplify the whole process; I'm still working that out. But anyway for the moment I'm going to take a short break from it.

But, I will delay 514 no longer. Independent particles have some underpinnings in place, but some is where I'll have to leave it. It's crazy to let this hold me back and I can get it done better later. It's time to move on to 515. And so I'm going to redouble my focus on other bug issues and button up 514 as the new stable release either next week or the week after.

One of the major topics on my radar for 515 is of course revamping the renderer as I've mentioned before, so that project I'm putting on hold right now, I won't actually be putting on hold all that long. I really want to be able to move away from the fixed-function pipeline rendering we use now and on to a more future-proof setup that will also perform better.

Also I have some compiler thoughts in my sights, and plan to look into those pretty soon since compiler stuff tends to make for interesting new things to look at for a new major build.

So anyway, it's time to gear up your 515 feature requests or dust off existing requests you think need a second look.

Thanks to all who've supported BYOND this month. If you haven't done so yet, there's still time to show the fundometer some love. There's also Patreon or SubscribeStar if you'd prefer to show your support a different way.

We're headed into August next, and hopefully we'll finally dry out a bit and have some proper summer before it's gone. Make it count, people!