Brrr! The temperature shot way down overnight, and thanks to the magic of poor insulation, it's pretty darn cold in my office today too.

This week was more of a mixed bag for development, because although I focused a lot on the map editor I was able to get work done on a number of bugs that had piled up, and finally address them. I had really hoped to get everything dealt with earlier in the week and get a release out, but it became clear early on that just wasn't going to happen, and yesterday I was still finishing up some important bug work. So instead I'm going to shoot for a Monday release and work on buttoning things up, because the way everything has been going ain't no way am I gonna tempt the Friday curse.

Besides the bugs that had been listed on the forums, I also finally got test cases for some longstanding issues with statpanel performance. Statpanels suffered a number of odd bugs that got dealt with, and there was a skin bug that looked like it had to do with statpanels but didn't (it was super weird), but the biggest achievement was dealing with some very old performance issues. Namely, I prevented a great deal of unnecessary calculations by statpanels that were causing hiccups whenever a panel tried to see if it needed to resize itself. Things like measuring text were being done way too frequently.

On the map editor side of things, the docking stuff I was working on is in, and it was working out the kinks in that that was the most annoying part of this week. The layout changes will persist across other map tabs and sessions, which is pretty sweet. I also got rid of the help text bar under the toolbar and modified the statusbar to use rich text (using the maptext engine) so that the toolbar can be more versatile going forward. I have big plans for that. And that statusbar upgrade to use the maptext engine also means I can make some changes to other controls—like labels and probably grids and statpanels.

I'm not done with map editor changes and can expect to handle more of them in future releases, but things are in a better enough state that I feel comfortable about trying to pivot more back to the SendMaps threading and to another project that was high on my list for the 515 beta series: better external library support. So I'll probably be trying to spin up on some of that even while I'm doing button-up work on the rest.

Thanks to everyone who's been supporting BYOND lately through Memberships and our various donation platforms. It doesn't just help a lot, it's crucial, and I'm very grateful for all your support.

Next week, a certain groundhog in Pennsylvania is gonna get whacked, but one in Ontario gets a hearty pat on the back and a donut. The tree is still up. Try to survive the cold snap, and if I do I'll see you next week.