As you know, the upcoming version 510 is a feature extravaganza. It's actually a huge release in terms of new content and potential for games, so there's a lot on the to-do list. That list has been clearing out gradually, and I'm really in the thick of things now with the new visual changes. I'm almost at the point where I can work on the rendering end of the new KEEP_TOGETHER and PLANE_MASTER features, at which point I expect I'll be tearing my hair out for a few days. (Hence the title of this post. Just as my car is buried under a couple inches of snow, I'm working through the deepest parts of the atom grouping stuff right now.)

One of the tasks I had on my list--an important one--was getting a lot of the new additions documented. Some of them are not yet, like the aforementioned flags and also list.Join and savefile.Flush (which both need to be tested). But I've added reference entries for all the new text procs and for regular expressions.

While I was at it, I decided to divert--as a mental distraction from slogging through the atom grouping stuff--some attention to the reference's appearance. I thought the web reference can be spruced up a bit to replace those awful [-] and [+] expansion links with graphics, and that it'd be nice if instead of showing the entire reference in the right frame, if only the currently selected article showed up, just as it does when viewed in Dream Maker. And in both, it occurred to me that DM syntax highlighting would be fairly awesome, and I happened to have a JavaScript DM syntax highlighter I was working on. So the reference for 510 will have syntax highlighting, and I plan to make the JavaScript code public so anyone can reuse it.

Last week I mentioned being on the fence about whether replacetext() and replacetextEx() would be needed. I'm on the fence no longer; they're in, and documented. When a regular expression is not in play, they'll work as a replace-all--because there's really no good way to say "replace once". I might be persuaded to add another argument for a single replacement, but I suspect that's not important. Whether you're using a regular expression or not, a proc can be used as the replacement value.

For the atom grouping stuff, as I mentioned there's a bit of a slog factor. It's not easy, the change I'm making, because so much of the code is built around the concept of icons being individual, not so much grouped. But that being said, I'm making steady progress. However, I think it's unlikely that this feature will make the cut for the webclient in the early beta versions; that's because I want to get this out in beta as soon as possible, so cutting-edge users (I'm looking at you, Bravo1) can do awesome things with it and I can get feedback right away. On the bright side, some of the concepts I'll need--like icons that are parents to other icons--are somewhat easier to manage in Dart, so while there's a slog factor even for the webclient I know I'll get there.

There are a few bug reports (and a couple of features) on my short list, and I'd like to assure everyone that I do plan to get to the ones I've taken notice of, but I'm putting special effort into 510 to get it ready sooner. I'll probably try to knock out a few webclient bug reports next week, though, and I'm sure some of the items on my list will get attention during the 510 series rather than first thing. (One of the minor features I want to get to before release, though, is for a tick completion percentage var that might help certain proceSSor-1ntensive gam3s manage their big-impact operations better. Some of them are doing this now with a helper .dll, but there's been some call to make this native functionality so I'm looking into it.)

A couple of little web things are on my list too: nothing major so they probably won't get attention in the super-near term, but they are on the List. (And the List is an actual text document I have to help me keep organized.)

With all this winter weather going on, let's see some winter-themed games! Or heck, you could build a bit of winter into an RPG for flavor. And get ready building some assets for lighting, like circles that start out white in the middle and fade out to black, because 510 is coming.