This week started with the best of intentions and momentum, but unfortunately things took a turn when I got sick again on Tuesday. A cold hit me out of nowhere and it basically messed me up for the rest of the week. So if you were wondering why there wasn't a maintenance release as I had planned, that's why.

That maintenance release, when it comes out, will include a fairly ingenious optimization (suggested to me; it wasn't my idea) that should make istype() and typesof() a bit faster by reducing lookups to O(1) time instead of O(depth). Considering how much istype() is used internally, this has some interesting potential. That change has been ready for a bit but I still need a feature request post to close it out.

Still I've somehow managed to get some stuff done, mainly on 515, in particular with savefile updates. Although I decided map saving is just not in the cards for 515, I have added some of the underlying stuff that'll be needed for that, which should also slim some files down a bit. In particular, savefiles can now save appearances in a different way that's cleaner, and there's a dedicated format for matrices. (It occurs to me now however that the matrix change has a flaw, and that might actually prevent me using it as cleanly as intended. Savefiles are tricky beasts.) Importing and exporting as text is working with those.

Related to this, I'm also working on a way to create mutable appearances simply via new/mutable_appearance(base_type_or_appearance, var1=val1, var2=val2, ...). This can potentially improve a lot of setup that they use. I'm kind of also thinking of a proc for mutable appearances, maybe called Apply(), that can take a list of named args and apply them to the appearance in one shot; this can be done in soft code, but tediously.

Unfortunately that's about the extent of my prowess here. It's been a dreadful week. I was actually less sick in January from a worse virus, although maybe that set me up for problems like this. Anyway I think I'm turning a corner so hopefully I'll be mostly myself next week.

Thanks everyone who's helped support BYOND through your Membership or donations, including our other donation platforms. The fundometer is a bit behind this month so if you haven't done anything yet yourself, your contributions can set that right.

Yes I made a cake last weekend. This weekend: no cake, hopefully just some good solid recovery for a change. Let's try this again next week, without the virus part.