May is here, but it feels an awful lot like March. It's a good week for staying shut-in and playing BYOND games.

This week I diverted some of my attention away from 512 and web foo to jump on some bug reports from 511 to keep the stable release, well, stable. There were a few really difficult-to-diagnose issues, one of which didn't show up in debug mode at all, and so the bugs ended up being big time sucks this week. Next week should be back on track.

At the moment there's not much to report beyond that, except to say that the new release today, 511.1382, contains a few fixes and features scattered across the suite.

I think in 512 I'm going to have to tackle getting the map editor to use DirectX like Dream Seeker does, and maybe finally jettison software rendering mode. Software mode just doesn't work right on newer systems anyway, I've noticed, and it's antiquated and hard to work with and holds everything back. Like for instance I know 3D transforms have been requested before, and software mode is the only good reason not to support them. Well screw that. Nobody should be having trouble with hardware mode anymore now that the right files are included in the installation, so I think maybe the time has come.

Another minor project on my wish list is to clean up some code in the default Move(), which has some really awful bits that could be massively improved, and I'd also like to finally see about maybe having Enter() take an optional list that procs can interact with for the sake of returning the actual object(s) bumped, if any, when Enter() is denied. Maybe it's time to consider letting Exit() and Uncross() do some bumps too. Yes, what got me thinking about this was the area bump feature I just implemented in 511.

Thanks to everyone who's become a BYOND Member recently or hit us up with a donation. Your support is important, and greatly appreciated. Don't forget to check out the "Show me what you got" thread in On Topic, where developers are doing some really cool stuff with the engine. Bl4ck Adam is back at it, Rayjt9 is working on something special with some awesome pixel art, and Ter13's been playing with platformers in 8x8. Go check them out, get inspired, and get in on some good old-fashioned one-upsmanship.