Fall is finally here in earnest. The weather has turned reliably crappy and Big Dip has closed for the season. No more pumpkin ice cream for me—except for the big wheels I bought just under the wire.

This week started with bug fixes, since 514 already had some fixes in the queue and there were more I had to look at. The new maintenance release went out on Tuesday, and this time it wasn't a disaster. Yay! I'll find something to screw up next time; don't worry.

One of the cooler 514 features that went in is that the implied types used for locate() and new() can now be used with other operators besides the = operator only. Now any assignment operator will work this way, allowing the type to be implied. But it does kind of make be wonder if there'd be a use for an implied type var in 515, or a typeof() operator evaluated at compile-time. Probably the SS13 crowd has like 9 different use cases for these ideas I haven't even thought of yet. There are some seriously clever folks in that part of the community.

I took a break from the map editor project for 515 stuff to move forward on some other features, with my eye especially on what the SS13 guys like to call "GetFlatIcon()" based on a proc that used to exist of the same name. Essentially I want to be able to turn appearances into static icons, starting with ones in browser controls; e.g. <img src="\ref[appearance]"> should work. Once that's working I want to add a proc for the server to request that a client grab a combined image, and then I'd like to get rid of code the client uses to handle simple overlays for stuff like statpanels (and menus!) and replace it with this. Then we'll be one step closer to jettisoning the software renderer for good.

So for a little bit I plan to stick with other 515 features just to give myself a little break from the map foo, but all in all I'm thrilled with how it's going. Keep the feature requests coming!

Thanks once more for all the support lately for BYOND. There've been some bigger donations recently as well, and they're much appreciated—especially now that we have another car payment.

After a last-minute day trip, right after last week's news got posted, we're a two-vehicle household again. (Three if you count my car that's waiting for its final goodbyes.) Just in time to have nowhere to go because the weather sucks! Also I'm discovering that with the change of seasons, gouty arthritis is the gift that keeps on giving. Pro tip: If anyone in your life ever says "But I don't wanna take a pill for the rest of my life," be sure to haul off and punch them right in their stupid face. They'll thank you in the future.