I'd need some guidance on the use of shaders and such, because I have zero experience with them. Theoretically there should be limited ability to do this kind of thing with the webclient too, I think.

I'm hoping they'll be a little less minor than that. I mean you can expect new features and such from time to time; I won't simply be doing tiny tweaks and bug fixes. The software will continue to evolve.

But I plan to leave things the same in terms of the software being free, etc., if that's what you mean.

Grats on the promotion, Lummox.

Since everyone seems to want to take this opportunity to grab at your heart strings, I think I'll take advantage, too.

The try/catch error handling is an awesome step into what I hope to be several leaps into the path of improving Byond for devs. Something as simple as a "Compile done" type of sound would be a nice touch for us when we're making lots of small changes and need to compile them repeatedly (http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1814990). The big projects like SS13 can take several minutes to compile, so having a notification while we're tabbed out waiting for it to complete would be an excellent convenience and would actually speed up development considerably. No more, 'Did I compile it yet, or did I forget to? Shit, gotta compile it again to be sure.'

Another recommendation I'd make is to assign someone to have the DM Guide and DM Reference pages combined and made more user-friendly with a search feature. This could be accomplished by having an official Byond Development Wiki, and your community would be doing the work for you.

Food for thought.

Also, Lummox, now that you're in power, is there any chance that bitcoin may become an option for donations/subscriptions in the future?

Bitcoin is still in way too much flux, both in value and in terms of where it stands on the market, for my liking.

Well the impression I got from your post with Tom was that you are very detail oriented and focus on very small features rather than big things.

So it created a picture in my mind of Byond updates being a series of bug fixes and developer tweaks rather than full-scale evolution.

Hi Tom, this is Masterdan. Just wanted to say how much I appreciated your role in founding this bit of software. I still believe that BYOND has potential to be very successful.

People take this project lightly, it has some flaws but I have never had more fun developing hobby projects. Now I don't even have enough free time to make even simple things with the engine, and I find myself missing it immensely. I am sure the addictiveness of this project has a much stronger and more heartfelt pull for yourself and I know this has to be a difficult decision. I do think Lummox will do a good job, but I do hope you guys bring on some new talent and take some risks by trying to raise some capital and growing your team.

I've heard good things about lynda.com; I'll have to check it out sometime. Of course that's OpenGL, and BYOND doesn't use OpenGL. (Not for lack of trying--it turned out to have some really nasty issues I couldn't figure out, but I might revisit it eventually.) I'd need to know how to put shaders to work in DirectX, although as I understand it the shader language itself should be the same.

Tom can still help if something were to come up.

I wanna see Tom just AFK on anime games and shit post on the forums. Let freedom reign.