This week I've been buttoning up 512 features pending the coming release, and so far it's been going reasonably well.

HUD objects have a huge makeover in this build, thanks to the addition not only of the new control-edge keywords LEFT, RIGHT, TOP, and BOTTOM (these don't count letterboxing as available space), but also percentages and decimal offsets. Yes, you can now say WEST+1.5 with no problem. To account for legacy stuff, the size of the icon is only taken into account when using the control-edge keywords, and in that case it will also impact percentages. This means on a practical level that WEST+100% is nearly the same as EAST (except the +100% is a pixel offset, so there's no risk of stretching the bounds to create a border if the icon is large), and LEFT+100% is exactly the same as RIGHT.

Yeah, the documentation had to be expanded for this, and it could probably use some improvement after the first release.

Although I haven't added visual contents to images--and I'm still on the fence as to whether I will--I have added a new feature where if multiple turfs are in visual contents, they're offset relative to the one with the smallest x/y values. That means if you have (10,10,1) and (11,10,1) in an item's visual contents, then (11,10,1) will have an appropriate pixel_x offset. This should greatly ease certain special effects. This change has to be documented still, but that's not a big deal.

But while working on that, I also discovered a problem with turfs going out of view impacting the visual contents of anything holding them, so I'll keep investigating that. I'm trying to improve the whole system in which the client decides which turfs it needs to hang onto and which it can let go of.

So far so good, and we're pretty close to the first 512 release. So close that I think early next week may be on the table.

Huge thanks to everyone who's continued to donate to BYOND or help out by becoming Members. Your support really means everything. With this next release I hope to pay it forward for you all. You can put the cool new feature set to work on some awesome Halloween games. 🎃👻🦇💀🕷🥓