Boy 2021 has been a crazy year. I'd like to say it was better than 2020, but in a lot of ways... woof. Sure you could buy toilet paper and for a while masks weren't a thing, but way to end things on a sour note. Let's all hope 2022 is better for everyone.

BYOND 514 saw two maintenance releases earlier this week, and one at the very last minute today, which under the circumstances counts as taunting the Friday curse. It all started with a bunch of fixes in 514.1573, but then 514.1574 had to go out because a regression slipped in as a response to one of the memory leak fixes. The regression only showed up in certain code, and as it happened the high-stress code I'd been testing with didn't produce it—but a new version of said code did. Then today I got a report that futzing with the high-precision timer caused a noticeable loss of smoothness in some games, but since the game in question was Space Station 13 that was kind of a big deal. So I had to do a new release just now, finding a happy medium between 1574's timer code and 1572's; I couldn't leave it like that for Christmas. As usual it's three steps forward, two steps back, but it's all good.

For 515 I've been mainly working on small features since the time has been so short. One of them I just added is a world.Tick() proc that runs before sending map data to clients, which should be helpful for a number of things including hijacking it as a movement loop, which is kinda cool. I do have to do a round of testing on a lot of new procs, but that'll be a January problem.

To all who've helped support BYOND this year, whether through Membership or other channels like Patreon or SubscribeStar, you have my sincere thanks. I appreciate all you do to keep this train on the tracks. For those who haven't hopped on yet, there's still time to get in good with the big guy.

Whatever your plans are for the holidays and however they may change, stay safe and be well. I wish all of you a very merry Christmas and this time, Lord willing, a truly happy New Year.