Winter has struck early, and it has struck hard.

But the good news is, this week I got in some important bug fixes for 512 and was able to get out a couple of very important releases. This week saw a fix to an issue with complex chaining operations using the dot operator, which necessitated a change to the way a couple of instructions worked and also added a couple of new ones (one of which might not ever see actual use; it's complicated). As a result of this, people using the new chaining behavior for the dot operator, or who use the conditional dot operators, should recompile in the new build. This introduces a cross-compatibility problem both ways between compiled code and the server where one uses pre-1394 and the other post-1394, so just do the right thing and update--to 1395, which is out today.

A number of other fixes went into place regarding visual contents and filters. Also in 1395, we have long-awaited support for text-shadow in maptext. You can apply the shadow to just one piece of text; the only restriction is that it's a single shadow. I want to add a separate outline capability, but CSS doesn't have that officially; there is a -webkit-text-stroke which is highly unofficial (although it oddly works on Firefox), but for obvious reasons I don't want experimental browser-specific CSS attributes to be officially supported by BYOND, so I'll come up with something else.

512 is getting a lot more stable, which is really good news. It looks like we're on a good track here.

If you're not a BYOND Member yet, give yourself an early Christmas present by becoming one. Your support means everything, and heck, Thanksgiving weekend is an awesome time to play games. See you next week!