We're still in the calm before the storm phase here at home, but it's less calm than you'd think because of all the preparations we have to make. So there's been a lot of running around for stuff, but this week has been a smidge calmer in that department. (The weekend, probably not so much.) So the good news this week is that I've been very hard at work, but the bad news is it's aggravating my carpal tunnel.

I did a little bit of work on some bug fixes for the next 514 release, but I'll probably make that a higher priority at the beginning of next week. A few issues are still outstanding in that area, but the major thing I addressed already for the next build is that there was an issue with some mouse parameter changes in 514 not behaving as they should.

The properties pane in the map editor has improved dramatically, where now you can work with enums for vars like dir, named bitflags for vars like appearance_flags and vis_flags, an actual interactive list of overlays and underlays, and as of last night you can live-edit filters too. There are more improvements to be made there but I'm really pleased with the progress.

Actually a lot of yesterday involved refactoring stuff on the backend. The frontend was still making itself responsible for way too much parsing, and that's entirely antithetical to how it should work. The backend should have been doing the heavy lifting on that all along. And worse, it was doing that lifting in a very convoluted manner. Now some of those convolutions are way less convoluted, and a lot of code has been able to be yanked out of the frontend.

Somehow testing has still managed to move forward and things are still getting checked off the punch list, although new things keep piling on. But it does feel like the massive tangle of this project is finally getting untangled and I'm nearing the finish line, which is nice.

I really want to thank everyone who's helped support development by becoming BYOND Members or through our other support platforms like Patreon and SubscribeStar. It means a lot.

With all the negativity swirling about right now I'd like to end today's news on a positive note, and when it's such a beautiful day out it honestly deserves no less. So I wish all of you a happy weekend and whatever brings you joy. For me, I'm glad the Orville is back and it's fantastic. Here's to you all, and I'll be back at it next week—and probably over the weekend a little, too.