I'm back to work this week, although as I expected this foot is gonna take its sweet time healing. I'm hoping all will be well again long before the Fair, but anyway I'm getting up and down stairs with the good old "butt scoot" technique (ask your dog) and the worst seems to be over.

The first order of business, that I got to over the weekend, was to satisfy my curiosity regarding some ideas I had for improving performance. In proc setup, I discovered some branching code and a nasty division that were both mostly unnecessary and not handled well, plus some inefficiencies when it came to handling named arguments—which should translate to some small gains for proc initialization time. In var reads I believe I've made a minor improvement across several different common types of reads (proc vars, proc args, global vars, and a few others), and as you know those happen a lot more often. Plus, loading constants from the proc code (strings, numbers that can't be stored as simple integers, etc.) should be a teeny bit faster. I have absolutely no data on any of this, but I figure these should definitely show an improvement and any improvement is good, no matter how small.

Looking into a filter animation bug led me down a rabbit hole, in which I decided I had to revamp the way filter references work in 512, not 513, even though it means a change to the message format which I didn't want to do. (Fortunately, the byond_build vars make that possible to handle.) I've been at that for a few days, and I'm mostly done with it. I say mostly because, well, I'm not done with it: an issue came up in testing that has me stymied, and while it's less of a problem than the original bug, it's still a problem. I'll go into more detail on the Patreon post.

I have some more bugs in 512 to look at before getting back to the main show proper, even though I'd hoped to do so this week. Oh, well. Eventually I can get back on track, and in fact I think when all this 512 cleanup is done it shouldn't be much longer.

Thanks to everyone who's showed their support via Membership, donations, Patreon, and SubscribeStar. It means everything and I'm working to get that new version out to you.

...Except today. I mean the thanks part is always in force, but I'm not working on anything else today because the heat index has spiked to a point where I might well spontaneously combust up here. Anyway, all the better to rest my foot. I'll be thinking through that filter problem in the meantime and trying to come up with a solution, which I honestly don't see happening today anyway. Good luck to everyone else caught in high heat. Get in the air conditioning and stay there, and if you don't have air conditioning, invade a friend's house. Life pro tip: lots of people will tolerate any short-term house guest who springs for food and drinks.