A 13th-hour bug report last Friday ended up diverting my attention for a lot of this week back to 514 issues. Specifically, a number of problems were reported regarding Unicode. As a result of this, I did a deep dive into the code for that and made a number of changes to shore it up. Truth be told, I discovered a lot of the code underlying our UTF-8 handling was less than ideal.

This led to a new maintenance release on Wednesday, which solved those problems and so far has been looking good—except that I've had an unconfirmed report of issues with findtext() or replacetext() from the new code. It's not at all inconceivable that something got jarred loose as a result of the changes, but so far I don't have a test case to go on. So... that kinda sucks.

Personal-life stuff got in the way later in the week with some minor disasters at home, so since the release came out I've been working on small bits of code that aren't related to any 514 or 515 stuff. In particular I've been looking at the support code for potential future on-map text input/output, which I hadn't touched in a while and feel I need to keep working on more steadily. A few other non-code items are on my plate currently for BYOND so those also need to be addressed.

Again I want to thank everyone who's helped support BYOND lately with their Memberships and donations. It really means a lot and it makes it possible not only to keep developing but to stay sane in the face of all the annoying day-to-day crap that gets in the way.

Spring is finally starting to show up in a limited way, and slightly early. I know this means we're in for a rough snowy/rainy/nuclear April because we can't have nice things, but I can never not hope. Keep hope alive, and I'll be back at it next week.