Well, this week has been a mixed bag. My shoulder is still a mess and it's impacting work, so bear with me.

I finally pushed out a new release mid-week, which mostly went pretty well even though a weird bug showed up immediately afterward. Fortunately, said bug won't come up in any real code. Between that and another fix involving icon operations (that bug appeared with the first 515 beta), I have a few fixes on deck for next week.

I've been lining up testers for the SendMaps threading but I'm not quite there yet; fortunately some of them aren't either, and they're scrambling to update their code for 515 compliance. Beyond that I've been looking at miscellany, mainly places where I can make modest improvements in this or that.

One of the improvements I made was to the creation of ref() strings. Apparently, there's some caching code in at least some SS13 branches because the creation of a ref string actually takes a lot longer than looking up a var. That seemed insane to me, so I replaced the method that was being used under the hood with something much faster. Hopefully it's fast enough that they won't need the var lookup anymore. And if they still do... well, at least generating the string is faster. In my tests I got about a 13x speed improvement, which is the kind of win you don't get every day.

As Spevacus mentioned in a recent post, there's a game jam going on this weekend, and it's not too late to jump in. Check out his news post for the details.

Many thanks to those of you whose contributions help support BYOND, whether through Membership or the various donation channels. It all helps, and I'm grateful.

We'll have to see how things shake out on the home front next week and what that means for the development plan, but of course one way or another it keeps moving forward. See you next week.