It's been another week of mostly bug fixes here, and it seems some of them have been very persistent, so that even this week's release of 514.1557 hasn't nailed all of them. Nevertheless I feel good about those fixes.

I did manage to start some work on the particle upgrades, mainly that I'm beginning to implement a new system for fake objects on the client and I eventually plan to fold missiles into that, which should improve some inefficient backend code I've wanted to change for a while now. The goal here is that I'd like to be able to introduce "effect zones" for slow-moving particles to drop into, like the kinds used for smoke trails. This however also means I'll need a way for particles to jump from zone to zone as needed, which is a big ask due to the use of threads; I may simply be forced to make trailing particles share a zone forever and have that zone expand as needed, which may be fine.

I've been thinking about 515 foo and a suggestion from a while back, and some suggestions for either allowing lists returned by procs to be assigned to multiple vars at once, or to allow the use of multiple loop vars (e.g., for((key,value) in list)). I kinda feel like that might be a worthy thing to attempt in 515, but I'm not fully decided on it.

Anyway that's just one of the many ideas I'm juggling right now, but I need to button up 514 first and that's still a process that's getting a lot of interruptions. However the other code work I've been doing has been worth it, because the SendMaps profiling and optimization in particular has shown a big improvement to some games.

Thanks everyone who's been supporting BYOND through Membership and the other donation channels. Your contributions are everything and I'm grateful for your continued support of the platform.

Now we're headed into Father's Day weekend and the "official" start of summer. (Everyone knows summer really begins on Memorial Day weekend, and the solstice is meaningless.) Fire up the grill and light the fire pit, and get your s'more on. And pray the squirrels don't eat my raspberries before I can.