We're flying toward the end of the year now, and I've gotten a new release out for 515. I don't want to say this is the last of the year because I suspect I can squeeze more into next week and get something ready before the break, but at this point I'm pretty firmly decided I won't close out 515's beta cycle until the new year.

Most of my focus lately has been bug fixes, with an eye toward getting things as buttoned up as possible. I'm very much on the fence about whether to try to do 516 test builds next week, which seems a bit rushed. It also would mean if anything catastrophic were to happen (which seems unlikely in an alpha build, but who knows) I wouldn't have much time to deal with it. So by and large I think I want to keep 516 work mainly on getting half-buttoned and aiming for January. I don't think that will be a big deal overall, especially with the goal that 516's beta cycle be much shorter than the extended cycles I've been accustomed to.

Despite wanting to keep 516 feature-light for a quick beta, I'm still thinking about the future of rendering. A rendering concept on my wish list is a var called mirror_planes, and I think for that to be most effective it'd work better with some of the structural changes that are needed for the renderer to work. I'm a lot closer, I think, to visualizing a proper setup for that, and it'd be good to get a start on that code at some point in the very near future. A full rework of the renderer is still further off, but getting the structural parts done is a huge and necessary first step.

Besides that, I've been looking into more minor possibilities for small features that are easy to cram into 516 without bloating the beta cycle. Really the big thing that made 515 nuts was the map editor overhaul, and apart from tweaks that's basically done now. But small-scale stuff is a lot easier, including quality-of-life concepts. There's already a surprise feature I tossed in this week that I haven't mentioned yet.

Thank you to all the BYOND Members and the supporters on various donation platforms who keep all this madness going. I'm grateful to all of you. To those who haven't yet, there's still time to get on the nice list.

Anyway, now we're at the point where I want to make sure the last week of the year counts, so I need to get very focused on that while still managing to find time for the million other things I need to do to get ready for Christmas. I still have some minor but challenging shopping to do, and a whole crapload of wrapping (which as usual will mostly wait till Christmas Eve). It's shocking that I don't have much planned for the week after Christmas, but the way the holiday falls this year—and the near certainty of poorly timed extended family celebrations—is also gonna mess up any potential plans. But I'll figure it out. Mak gam!