Boy what a week it's been. I was finally able to install the GPU for the new system on Sunday, which allowed me to complete the spin-down process on the old machine and start spinning up the new one. Spinning up is nowhere near done, partly because I diverted from less important spin-up tasks after the main ones were in place. I'd say that as of about Tuesday I was at a place where the BYOND stuff I need was ready, but there's still a lot of other work left to go. I can happily report that the new CPU is a beast when it comes to compiling BYOND.

My plan last week was to try to get 515.1620 out toward the tail end of this week, once the most pressing work was done. That didn't happen because I got sidetracked, although I think a lot of users will be happy with the reasons why. I thought about doing the release anyway last night, but that's way too close to Friday, and so much has been going on that I don't want to have a weekend issue come up. So I'm gonna plan to put out 515.1620 early next week instead.

So as you all know one of my big reasons for needing a new system was to be prepared for WebView2 development. I decided as of late Tuesday to detour away from continuing the monotony of installing (and configuring) program after program, and instead start looking into WebView2. This began a small flurry of code activity where I slowly started replacing all the old MSHTML code (in a new file, though; the old browser code is still in for now) with the WebView2 equivalents: event handlers, navigation, etc. And despite a fair number of setbacks, and a great deal of cursing about ecosystem programming (whoever invented that is going straight to the wall when I become a supervillain)... I'm in a really good place. A proof of concept is working, which is way more than I expected at this point.

That means that the project I anticipated being the worst part of 516 is so far turning out to be a very big annoyance as expected, but—so far—not nearly as big as I feared. I'm actually feeling really good about the possibility of getting out some alpha builds a few weeks from now just to see if the SS13 guys run into anything.

Of course getting this far wasn't possible without all the donations to the new computer fund, and the ongoing work depends on all the BYOND Members and contributors who keep this project going. So thank you all for making it happen.

This weekend I plan to put the new GPU through its paces properly with some AI runs. But November is here, and that means Thanksgiving is coming, and that means Christmas is coming. Let it snow, baby.