We're a week closer to Christmas, and time is really slipping by. I've been busy this week with bug fixes, getting 515 into a better place so I can close out the beta soonish. A few of those bugs have turned out to be frustratingly difficult to reproduce, but others have worked out a little better than I hoped, so I guess that evens a little bit out.

The work on bugs actually ramped up further later in the week, hitting a heavy pace yesterday when I finally realized I was cutting it too close to the wire to release 515.1621 this week. So instead, I'm gonna push to get that out fairly early next week (last-minute scheduling conflicts notwithstanding), and hopefully then I can pivot toward buttoning up early-516 a little bit to make some alpha builds.

I'm torn on how to proceed with 516 because I'd love to do a big overhaul to movement procs, but WebView2 is so important I kinda feel like it'd be a better move to step back from my usual pattern of going insane with features and cramming a million things into a long beta cycle, and instead go with a shorter window for the major version. That would make 516 a relatively low-feature build, but the benefit of that is a little bit less insanity than we're used to.

As it stands, I know there are some unresolved map editor issues for 515 that I don't have adequate information to reproduce, and at some point I need to do more with feature work on that as well. So maybe I can sneak a little of that into 516, but I know that once 515 hits the stable channel I'm gonna be swamped with a ton of bug reports that will most likely tend to be difficult to reproduce. Which is another reason I'm questioning if I want to close out 515 before the Christmas break, because... yeesh.

Thank you to all those whose BYOND Memberships and regular support through other donation platforms keep it all going. None of this would be possible without you.

Because of Christmas falling on a Monday, I'll be here the whole normal week leading up to it and posting my last news of the year on the 22nd. But since we have a couple of weeks, we need some good old-fashioned wintry games, so why not take a little time and put something fun together? Or heck, just share what you plan to do around the holidays to make the most of the time.