As planned, for once, I finally got the first alpha build of 515 out to several users on Monday. I was planning to pivot to 514 maintenance fixes while people tested, but a number of issues came up straight away that needed investigating. That wasn't too unexpected, but I did think it was gonna take longer for reports to flood in.

Thankfully the way it worked out, I would be working on fixing one issue when a new one would show up, and so I had a steady stream of things to work on for a bit. A crash and a hang were the biggest problems, but also in some games the map loading was excruciatingly slow, and the pop palette could also be sluggish when first changing to a new tab. But all of those were easy enough to deal with, and as a result of the testers' early efforts, I got a second alpha release out later on and they're working with that now.

Most of the feedback coming now is in the form of tweaks. A couple of those were planned, like adding a left splitter to enlarge the palette area, which I've been trying to work on since. The select tool is going to change to stay on the select tool but act like the move tool if you click within the selection. And the pop palette needs some kind of quick filter/search to make it easier to find pops in a large list, which is something my testing really wasn't equipped to reveal.

For the end of the week it's been massively hot and that's hampered development somewhat. The start of next week is looking that way too, and also next week is a veritable deluge of appointments. We'll see what that means for development, although primarily it means nighttime.

I am, as ever, grateful to all of the BYOND Members and other donors whose support makes all of this possible at all.

At home we're reaching the tail end of a holding pattern that's been going on for a while, and things are about to get interesting in a bad way. I honestly have no idea how the month of August is gonna pan out in terms of scheduling or anything. But for now enjoy the summer and make it count, and if you know any Lego fans please send them over to my project in the next three weeks and have them bring about 750 of their friends.