Even though I expected the latter part of this week to be rough, I think we ended off in a good place. Despite some scheduling headwinds, a lot of bugs got squashed and quite a few of them were pretty difficult ones. So quite a lot made it into the release yesterday.

The EDGE_PERSPECTIVE bug I keep meaning to get to is still on my to-do pile, along with investigating isometric mode. But I went into this week not planning to get to those anyway, so it's all good. Hopefully next week they can be tackled properly, barring anything weird coming up.

One of the bugs I worked on involved KEEP_TOGETHER groups and the temporary surfaces they need to allocate. I tried an experimental change that would trim those groups down in situations where it ought to be obvious that there was a need to do so, but after struggling to get that working and doing a lot more guesswork than I'm comfortable with, I found out in subsequent tests that it wasn't quite right. This points to a pretty pressing need to make changes to the renderer, which has been on my list a while anyway. I need to reorganize some things on the backend, hopefully doing more calculations up-front so the renderer doesn't have to deal with them. So phase 1 of the renderer overhaul probably has to get started in 517 somehow.

Still, we're on a good track for the 516 beta, and I don't anticipate the beta status lasting a whole lot longer. I hope. I reserve the right to be wrong.

Thank you so much to all of the BYOND Members and to the supporters on Patreon and SubscribeStar for your ongoing contributions to keep this project moving forward. I'm blessed to be able to do this and grateful to all of you.

Now it's time for all of us to pull together and root for the Bills. Some of you will be doing it just because the NFL is bent on rigging games to force a Chiefs Superbowl in the hopes that a bunch of Swifties will tune in, which means we need to screw over Goodell and his flying butt monkeys (the refs) all the harder. This is our year.