It's been a week of ups and downs, the downs being the part where when you've just made a change, suddenly something that was working stops working for no apparent reason. And then you find the reason and fix it, and can move back to the ups. (To name one of the downs, some code I'd put in to prevent reentry in a possible recursive situation turned out to not so much work the way I had expected. It did prevent recursion but it also kept something else from working.)

So the render target stuff is pretty well set now, except that I've got to throw in some changes to the mouse hit handling to cover it, which presents a minor can of worms—in no small part due to a pending fix in 512. But I'll deal with it! The problem of whether to display an atom with render_target on the map (what I call a pass-through), or only render it to the slate but not the map, has been decided in typically hacky-but-it's-probably-the-best-way fashion: if the render_target starts with an asterisk, the object will not be drawn to the map. In some ways I'd prefer a separate var, but on the other hand... nah.

Some 512 issues warranted my attention this week as well, and I realize I need to do another release soon, but it will not be today. I think I'm gonna shoot for Monday. I'm in the middle of working on an issue that impacts mouse hit coordinates and refactoring all that code, which has ramifications for how I handle mouse hits in 513. In the midst of this I'm strongly considering adding some new mouse params per a feature request, to handle scaling issues.

One of the issues I tackled dealt with a fairly large number of objects on a turf at a time, and it turned out there were some rather annoying inefficiencies on the client side that wreaked havoc. In fact there were several of them that worked in concert. Normally I'd discuss the technical details in this week's Patreon post, but I had something more forward-looking in mind for that one so I'll be discussing another possible last-minute 513 feature instead.

And I do mean last-minute! There are a couple of minor things I'd like to throw in once the render targets are wrapped up, but 513 is getting closer and I don't want to hold it up any longer than need be. Because of the sweeping nature of the Unicode change, I'm considering going with a private beta for the first few releases, to iron out most of the big problems.

Some features I had hoped for for 513 are not gonna make the cut, unfortunately, but that's just how it is; I can't make you guys wait forever. Not to worry! They're still on the list, and it's possible some minor things will get thrown in during beta. I also have a very very bad idea brewing for 514, and I mean bad idea for me, not for you, because I'm the one who'd have to implement it. If I go through with it, I'll let you know who to thank/blame.

I can't thank our Members, donors, Patrons, and SubscribeStar supporters enough for your part in keeping BYOND going. It means everything.

But no more mushy stuff! It's Friday, which means that weather permitting—it isn't here—you should be cooking meat on a grill and warming up your fingers for some epic gaming. Throw back a cold one, whatever your cold one of choice is, and let's do this weekend right. This is dress rehearsal for next weekend, which here in the US is a 3-day event. Get your game faces on, people! The official unofficial start of summer is nearly on top of us.

...If, you know, it ever warms up and stops raining.