Appointments are behind me for a bit, I finally have new glasses, and work continues. It's actually been a really productive week.

The big item on my plate was a regression in 516.1652 that was causing hardware rendering to fail, but it wasn't clear why because I didn't have a test case to go on. That wasn't possible until yesterday, because late Wednesday I finally was given a test case that I could use. It took some sleuthing, but the problem eventually worked its way out and it was in fact a logic error in the surface pruning I added.

While I was waiting on that, I worked on some more fixes and features, but mainly features. A conversation on Tuesday led in a really interesting direction where I started to consider issues of synchronization, and the fact that being able to use animate() to sync things on the client would be pretty great. The result of that was a change to animate() where it can accept a command parameter, and that command executes on the client. That can be a strictly client-side thing like .sound (which I've expanded on as a direct result), or .winset, or even a verb that calls back to the server. The possibilities are wide open. It took a little other prep work to rearrange how commands are handled, but all in all the whole thing got done in just a couple of days.

Of course the release yesterday also introduced a bug that slipped past testing, as a result of a different new feature, so I had to quickly do a Windows-only release to patch that because it was pretty egregious. Oops. These things happen, and it was an easy thing to miss. Naturally it popped right up in SS13. There's a new report also that might warrant me putting out a quick release today, despite the Friday curse, but it's a small change so I think it'd be worth it; and even though Linux doesn't need a new build I might just do one because I hate the two versions being out of sync.

I'm really grateful to all of the support you've shown through BYOND Membership and the other platforms this month. Winter can be slow in that regard, so it means a lot when you step up to contribute to the platform.

My ambitious idea of taking the tree down in January did not happen. Oh yes, I could do it this afternoon, but I'm not going to. I'm going to spend my time more productively this weekend, composing limericks disparaging Roger Goodell's junk. Speaking of rodents, I might watch Groundhog Day. See you next week.