The snow is finally back in earnest, and I don't mind!

I had some changes pending for 513.1511, like more mouse fixes and whatnot, but didn't release until yesterday because a number of other issues came up that I wanted to jump on, and I was also waiting on some stuff. I'm glad that 513 bugs at this point appear to be mainly based around the new graphical features; the Unicode switchover hasn't popped up anything new in quite a while.

This week was mostly about skin, specifically game skins and their features, and how they're edited. I may have mentioned some time ago—or, I may have entirely failed to mention it—that I've always been unhappy with how the skin editing code is handled in Dream Maker. Basically we have at least one custom dialog for each control (representing one tab of the interface) along with a special class to handle it, and this has historically made changes difficult. Most of the on-xxxx parameters can't be changed in the editor, nor can saved-params. For a long time I've wanted to change the way this works, but it was deemed too projecty; however it's now clear to me that has to change, so I dove in and started writing code. More about that on today's Patreon post.

I also did a little bit of side work cleaning up some proto-code I was working on for 514, specifically the addition of particle systems. I'm not entirely happy with the way I've set up some of the initial condition stuff, which amounts to being able to set min and max random values for most parameters along with some limited info about how the randomness will work; mainly it's because that code is messy and uses more memory than I'd like (though we're not even talking kilobytes), but I don't see a way to make it much better. I haven't even begun to puzzle out syntax for how this will be accessed in DM; the stuff I'm doing right now is all engine.

No, I haven't forgotten about the CEF project, but it takes a lot of mental effort to dig into that code.

Big thanks are owed to everyone who's come out strong to support BYOND this early in the month. Instead of the usual spiel I'm just gonna keep it short and say again: thank you all for keeping development going.

The long slog through long-February begins! Stay in those pajamas and get to game-making, because it's cold outside and who wants to risk coming down with 2019-nCoV anyway? Phil says we're in for an early spring, which would be a nice change of pace considering the last two were so late, so enjoy the winter while you can.