This week has been a mixed bag, with a bit of everything going on including nothing. Things started out with finalizing bug fixes for 515, then moved on to pivoting back to 516 work, then yesterday was a lost day due to some obligations. Some weeks be like that.

The SIDE_MAP work is basically all but over with now, thank goodness, pending later changes that will go into BYOND 516. There's an undocumented minor fix in 515.1627 that dealt with the last known layering oddity, and now I think that's in a great position for future refinements.

A few strange items are on my radar though, regarding 515's near ascension to the stable channel. There's an undiagnosed issue with games not accepting connections after a little over 2 days of uptime, and I have no way of figuring out any more details on that at present. There's also an open question about why the installer is not, as it should, detecting whether the appropriate runtime libraries are installed. I'm gonna try to hammer on those as best I can, although the former is a huge head-scratcher.

For 516, I've mainly been shoring up code I was working on for the minor feature stuff and documenting. That's all part of the buttoning-up process before getting out some test builds to power users, whose goal will be to test the WebView2 stuff and mostly to update any UIs that are built for old Internet Explorer. As I've said before I expect they won't run into too many issues, but it'll be good to get early feedback.

I'm extremely grateful to all of you who've supported BYOND recently through your Memberships and donations, whether on the site or through other platforms like Patreon. I'm working hard to be worthy of that vote of confidence.

Next week: less frigid temperatures, fewer surgeries, and the tree stays up. Hopefully there will also be some busted folding tables and tear-stained red jerseys.