Memorial Day weekend is upon us! In the US this is about honoring our fallen veterans, but also it's the unofficial start of summer. (Here in New York state, schools don't actually let out until the end of June, because our school system is stupid. On the other hand, other states send kids back to school in August, which is a hundred times dumber.)

This was a week of transition. I spent Monday doing last-minute bug investigations for 510, in preparation for making 510.1345 the stable release. That went up on Wednesday, and now 510 is officially the new stable version, paving the way to work on 511 with minimal distraction.

Although 510 is now stabilized, I do intend to continue doing maintenance releases on it while working on 511. There are a couple of fixes already in the pipeline, and I won't be ignoring the webclient while all this goes on, either.

So far I'm in a frenzy of adding new features. I mentioned previously that chaining assignment operators, like a=b=c, was implemented, and that's now set to go for 511 except for the documentation. Now I've also implemented pixel_w and SEE_THRU, which need testing, and I showed the Dream Maker map editor some love by adding a long-desired feature to make the nudge operation use pixel offsets instead of step offsets. All of this needs testing and documentation still.

The mutable appearance code has come a long way, although the tying-in part still needs to be done. I'm going to call it /mutappearance, largely because I have no illusions anyone wants to type out /mutable_appearance. (I'm open to other suggestions.)

I'm also forging ahead on the gamepad stuff. I changed my mind about Xinput, and instead I think I'll stick with DirectInput, possibly allowing for Xinput as an alternative down the road. Right now I'm mostly in the tedious part of defining structures and classes for all of this.

Also, early next week I want to work on the var access improvement that SS13 has been wanting for quite a while. This is a potentially important performance upgrade for big games like that, so I'm hoping it'll work out without any nasty surprises.

And while it's not on the list, I did some profiling on Wednesday and discovered that the code that handles the HUD is really horrendous in certain places--in particular, anything that tiles all the way across the map using something like "SOUTHWEST to NORTHEAST". That can potentially add a lot of tiles to the map, which have to be generated (without caching, another problem) and sorted. I want to address that legacy code at some point and give it a serious makeover, but in the meantime developers would be well advised to replace "M to N" screen_locs with a single one and use transform instead, when feasible; you may potentially see big performance gains, especially with high-FPS games.

So it's been a pretty busy week, except for Tuesday.



And now the race to get 511 out to you guys as soon as possible is on.

If you've liked the cascade of new features from 508 onward, please consider showing the fundometer some love with a donation or by becoming a BYOND Member. Since we're going into a holiday weekend, why not now?