This week did not start off well because I've still been dealing with bronchitis. It's gotten a little better throughout the week, so that's good, but it's hard to accomplish much when you're half asleep. On top of that for the last few weeks I've had some family things to deal with, which takes priority, so if it seems like anything has slowed down all of that is why. In fact that's part of why the news is a little late today.

But I did get an early start on things by putting out a new release on Sunday, anticipating Monday was gonna be a mess. The 514.1576 release had more regressions than just the one I found in 1577, so a few more fixes had to be thrown in. So far 1578 has been holding up nicely, so that's a big relief.

For 515 I've focused mainly on low-hanging fruit features. I've implemented ftime() for grabbing a file's modification or creation date. There's a new noise_hash() proc for getting a number from 0 to 1 that's based on a hash of the numbers put into it, which I plan to augment later with an internal noise proc that can be used for stuff like fast Perlin or Worley noise. Finally I've added a new version of block() that can take direct x,y,z coords instead of atoms, which should make a lot of things easier than they currently are while also playing into future support for Z linking.

My road map from here is to figure out what I want to do with the rest of the noise stuff, do some documentation and testing, and then get back to the map editor for some things. At that point I'm gonna try to shoot to get 515 into beta. The only caveats here are that I'm not sure how much I want to try to add to the map editor in the first pass, and also I might want to try to add some noise-based "rendering" filters. But I'll give more thought to those and decide how to proceed.

Big thanks again to everyone who's contributed to BYOND recently to help drive development ever onward. I'm grateful for all your support.

February is coming, so hit the gym and grease up the heart-shaped cake pans. We are now firmly in the suckiest part of winter, where we're all done with the snow but the snow isn't done with us. Keep warm, mak gam, and lead your spessmen to victory against some clowns.