One of my local radio stations is already playing Christmas music, some light snow is in the forecast for this weekend, and retail employees are being chained to the oars. It's coming, friends. It's coming soon.

This week as promised I pivoted a bit to some 514 reports that had stacked up, but several of them are rather involved. The biggest one on my plate now is a slowdown happening with a large enough number of moving atoms in play, but that's going to require a lot of profiling and such so it's a big enough project I didn't really feel comfortable tackling it with the spotty interrupted blocks of time I've had lately. I want to give that a good hard look before the next maintenance release, to see if I can do anything there.

Some of the bug fixes led me to do some more code cleanup, which will only accelerate with 515 because I've been doing a lot of refactoring there. I'm looking ahead to Z linking and really want to consider it as a feature, so to that end I've started sneaking in code here and there to help. Last night I was looking at the view/range code and how its turf lists are put together, and found that the current routine is actually not too bad for Z linking, but it's absolute crap for general performance, so I want to improve on that anyway.

A lot of parts are in motion right now and I still need to sit down and figure out how to organize them better, but progress is still ongoing on all fronts which is a very nice thing. I don't really feel "stuck" on anything at the moment, and the RenderIcon() stuff is mostly buttoned up except for the need to suppress blend_mode. (Okay, so I'm stuck on one thing. I'll talk about that more on Patreon.)

All of this wouldn't be possible without the support of BYOND's Members and those who contribute on other donation platforms. Thank you so much for your part in keeping this project moving forward.

It won't be long now before the snow flies, turkeys are on the table, and once again I live-blog a parade. But until then, we have a last gasp of proper fall before the Christmas season. Make it count.