This week has been mostly dedicated to tying up a lot of loose ends in 511, to get it closer to release. Time was short because of the four-day week, and also because the heat was around 90° this week and past a certain point in the afternoon, the A/C just wouldn't cut it anymore. Some of the new features that had not been tested much yet got more testing and also got some documentation in. But I did find time to address two longstanding feature requests: extending flick() to areas and images.

The addition of an enhanced client frame rate last week led to a new and interesting problem: Step changes should, when within the limit of step_size, cause a glide to happen on the interstitial client frames. This new concept of "pixel gliding" ate up a lot of time, because every time I mess with the gliding system bad things happen. However it's now looking pretty good, as of some late-night work last night. I did have to modify the existing glide system so that when an object has glided (or glid, as it were; that ought to be a word) more than one tile but not more than two, it will jump to a one-tile distance rather than trying to simply speed up its glide. This had to be done for the pixel glide system not to mess up, but in testing it looked absolutely fine.

I'm finally getting in a Gamepad Setup dialog for DS, and I plan to put it in Dream Maker (probably) and maybe the pager also. This dialog is not for using the new "mapping" macros (that's already in place), but for mapping your specific gamepad's buttons to a standard layout. For instance, my old Logitech gamepad has everything a PlayStation controller has, except for analog triggers (and of course the PS button); but its button layout is stupid.


I figure everyone will have to make these sorts of little adjustments for the most part, but I can build up a set of some standard options once the beta is out and people setup their own mappings. That's right, I'm gonna crowdsource it.

As of this moment, this is the list of what's in for 511 (minus the webclient, which doesn't have any of these yet and won't in the first release):

• Assignment operator chaining (id:1225436)
• pixel_w (id:2002425)
• Nudge as pixels in map editor (id:1316027)
• SEE_THRU (id:2080439)
• Gamepad support (id:2005012)
  • Further testing on some features is required
  • Gamepad setup dialog still in progress
  • Needs documentation
• Parallel animations (id:1935102)
• Variadic macros (id:1516476)
• Var access improvements (id:1988878)
• Sound fallbacks for Dream Seeker
  • Was added to DM language in 510, but only supported in the webclient until now
  • Needs further testing and documentation
• Mutable appearances (id:1813930)
• Enhanced client frame rate (id:1860613)
• Fix: Verb removal caused slowdowns during parsing and statpanel updates (id:2084104)
• flick() for areas (id:98387)
• flick() for images (id:116655)

I still want enhanced map zoom in DM on that list, so I'll get on that next week and see what I can do with it.

For other features, many can still make it into the 511 series but don't need to be in for the first beta. Some others, like filters for one, I'm pretty much set on pushing back to 512.

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