Leading up to the holiday weekend I've been working on a little of this and a little of that: investigating 515 alpha issues, working on a feature while I wait for some feedback, and also dealing with some 514 bug reports that had stacked up.

First for the 514 issues, there were some memory leaks involved with filters and mutable appearances, along with a crash when saving certain filters, which have been dealt with for the next release. There's another issue with pathfinding that I've figured out, but it kind of involves a rethink because it's essentially not a bug so much as a compromise that was put in to deal with failure cases. I think that compromise needs to be rethought, and long-term I think pathfinding needs to be rethought more broadly. Additionally, there's a report of some compilation problems in Linux but I haven't been able to confirm the details yet, because it appears to be highly version-specific and there's no reason Linux should be behaving differently than Windows in this regard.

On the 515 side, the alpha release currently has a potential showstopper in the /tg codebase of SS13, but I'm waiting on more information. It sounds like it's a relative of the issue I fixed with static vars last week, but until I have more data I'm stuck spinning wheels on that one. Hopefully by Tuesday I'll have enough info to track down the issue and solve it.

I've also been at work on a new operator in 515. There are some aspects of it that are experimental, but I solved a major hurdle with it and think it has the potential to be pretty helpful.

Hopefully despite everything going on, we're really close to a 515 beta release. First I plan to get a new 514 maintenance release out, but I kinda think it won't be too long after that that 515 will be in beta.

Thanks everyone who's contributed to BYOND, as Members or through other donation channels, because you keep all this work going. I appreciate the support deeply.

Since it's Labor Day weekend, I'll be back at the grind on Tuesday. Cider and donut season is nigh, and since Halloween stuff is already on the shelves that means you should get started with your spooky BYOND games for Halloween too.