u/LummoxJR

We've finally said goodbye to our temps at the docks, but what really makes it feel like things are settling down is that we had another Syndie infiltration attempt. This one tried to sneak aboard by stowing away in an outer compartment of one of the arriving transfer shuttles. Unfortunately for them, they miscalculated which parts of the shuttle would be pressurized. We had to get a replacement shuttle while forensics locked down that one to examine the aftermath. Once they're done maintenance will have to use their special deep-cleaning magic before the shuttle can go back in service.

• 516.1684 was released this week, with more bug fixes.
• Among the bug fixes was an old bug with nested client.eye, and another old bug with networking.
• 517 is finally in alpha! I'm keeping the alpha group very small for the moment but plan to expand it. I'm hoping it can be quicker than 517's alpha, but I'll definitely need to stress-test the render changes with an SS13 render stack at some point.
• Thank you to the BYOND Members and everyone contributing via Patreon and SubscribeStar!
• Happy Independence Day, Spez. But I hope your weenie falls in the dirt.

There's a little more on the BYOND forums. Today's early-access Patreon post goes into that weird client.eye bug, how exactly it worked, how it was fixed, and how things changed over time to make it appear. Today's gonna be brutally hot, even more so than yesterday, so even with the holiday weekend I'm calling it early so I can get out of this heat. Downstairs is fine with the central A/C, upstairs not so much, and on days like this the fans can only mix the air so much. Hope you all have a great holiday, and those of you who live elsewhere, just have a great weekend. I'll be back Monday, with heatstroke.

We're back to normal activity on the docks, so this will be our last week with the temporary personnel, which naturally means a rowdy send-off in our next-to-finest tradition. Our actual finest tradition is much too rowdy, so Chief Lau wants to remind everyone (not that you need it) that she has multiple fully-charged tasers at all times, and a class of cadets near graduation who are almost as ruthless and trigger-happy. So you know, rowdy but not too rowdy. Most of you have figured out where the line is, and some of you can still adhere to it when drunk. Meanwhile Brian has given the Better-Eats machine a clean bill of health, so the bad news is that's going back in service and it's salads for everyone, but the good news is I put a sharp lid on letting Brian be the "musical director" of the aforementioned party.

• BYOND 516.1683 was released this week, with a number of fixes to some bugs that have been around for a while.
• Since the decks are cleared, I'm steaming ahead for 517 alpha release. I wouldn't rule out this afternoon just yet, but it's looking a smidge dicey so we're probably looking at Monday.
• Don't forget to show some love to BYOND as a Member or on Patreon and SubscribeStar. Your support is hugely appreciated, and unlike AI companies I won't screw you over.
• Speaking of screwed over... hey, Spez. You've made this platform worse and your mommy dresses you funny.

There's a bit more on the BYOND forums, and today's early-access Patreon post is a feature rundown for 517. Fun stuff! Next weekend is the big quarter-millennial, so get your grilling and your amateur fireworks ready and don't blow your thumb off. Catch you next week!

Procedural reviews in the science labs have started, and although a few small problems have been found already, I'm following through on my promise to divert extra funds toward the labs that made this a priority. That will give them more room to fix compliance issues, too. Supply transfers have returned nearly to baseline, so in about two weeks I'll be rotating the temporary dock personnel back out, once our regulars have had plenty of breathing space. But I did want to address the thing everyone's talking about, which is Greg selling off Horace's property. We all understand Horace had no will and everything got legally cleared, Greg, but the man's been dead for a week and it's just tacky. Never mind that nobody liked him; it's just a bad look. Anyway, I call dibs on the '62 Fabian disc.

• A new release didn't happen this week like I planned, mostly because work was on a roll and it got late enough into Thursday to make that impractical.
• Among the upcoming fixes is a bug involving appearance corruption that's been hanging around a long time.
• Russian users rejoice; I've also dealt with a problem with regex with Cyrillic characters that was sitting in the queue a little too long.
• Pager decruftification continues.
• Thank you to everyone who helps BYOND out as a Member or on Patreon or SubscribeStar! Your help keeps this going.
• Screw you, Spez.

There's more in the long-form news on the forums. Today's early-access Patreon post is about that appearance corruption bug, how it was found, and what it reveals about test cases and doing small-scale experiments. Summer is officially here this weekend, so have fun! Talk to your dad, and bond over some clownslaughter. I'll be back next week.

Transfers are slowing down and we've finally had a chance to breathe. Our science labs have been performing a little too well lately, however, and even though corporate has been happy I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. The truth is that we're behind on some procedural reviews, so I've instructed department heads to begin figuring out how to insert those reviews into their schedules. The plan isn't to interrupt research that's on a roll, but to interrupt mad-scientist crap that's on a roll, which tends to be more our speed here. I'm hoping to prevent the next several disasters, or at least delay them a long time. Speaking of unwise experiments, we're getting the refurbished Better-Eats vending machine back as a test run to see if it's properly clear of rogue AI and safe to use again. I'm assigning Brian to be its babysitter, since he's our resident expert on containing dangerous AI.

• The 516.1682 release went out as planned this week, finally!
• Due to some issues that got overlooked (organization has been a bit of a mess) and a couple of unexpected changes, I'm keeping focus on 516 and plan to do another release next week.
• One of the changes involves the venerable as() hack, which stopped working but I want to officially support from now on.
• 517 button-up will resume after the next release.
• I'm very grateful to all of you who are BYOND Members or pitching in on Patreon and SubscribeStar. Thank you so much. For those who aren't on board yet, your help would be deeply appreciated too.
• Screw you, Spez.

There's a bit more in the long-form news on the forums. Today's early-access Patreon post is a bit of a discussion on undefined behavior and what can be learned from it. Next week: less oppressive heat! See you all then.

The higher shipping traffic we've been handling for a few weeks is probably going to taper down starting in a week or two, so the dock staff will finally have some time to breathe. Tensions have been high enough that a few more fights than usual have broken out, especially among the new workers who haven't yet learned how to keep up with the drinking habits of our own veterans. Chief Lau had to crack a few heads, but medical assures me no one was permanently injured and this won't impact productivity on the docks.

• No maintenance release this week, but one is coming very soon.
• Still trying to get glide hints working right ate up too much time, but I've decided to lock down the networking side where it is now and actually deal with the hints at a later time.
• Getting back to 516 bug reports had me working on the pager stuff some more, which was overdue since I last worked on it for any serious amount of time. I don't plan to take it too far but I'm gonna at least take a chunk of Monday to do more there.
• Thank you to the BYOND Members and everyone on Patreon and SubscribeStar who keeps the lights on!
• Screw you, Spez. I hope a seagull eats your hot dog.

There's a bit more on the BYOND forums. Today's early-access Patreon post is about the debugging slog I've dealt with this week and an idea I have to make future debugging in this area less of a nightmare. Don't let your scientists get too many big ideas, don't step on a visiting alien's 5th cousin, and alas there is no deliverance from security. I'll see you next week.

We had to send back the new Better-Eats machine, much to Dr. Tavi's annoyance. I actually found some of its options good, and was enjoying them right up until a dormant bit of AI in the machine went omnicidal and decided to exterminate humanity. Fortunately as a vending machine it couldn't do much, and it didn't even have enough control over the recipes to hurt anyone. But needless to say, corporate is having some harsh words with the company that made the machine. It's not the first rogue AI to have wormed its way into anything and it won't be the last, but there are laws about guarding against this. At least we haven't had a repeat of anything even close to the Puzzle Chase incident.

• 517 button-up work got the lion's share of attention this week.
• Some reference cleanup was also done this week, since IE isn't in the way anymore.
• Glide hints are just about the last thing to finish before alpha, so the next step is doing a lot of exhaustive testing.
• No new maintenance release yet, but I'm hoping to make one high priority for next week since a couple of reports have stacked up.
• Thank you to everyone who supports the platform, as BYOND Members and on Patreon and SubscribeStar. I know times are tough for some people, so those who go the extra mile to throw a little couch money this way are deeply appreciated.
• Screw you, Spez.

The long-form news is on the BYOND forums. Today's early-access Patreon post goes into a new idea I had for tackling inline procs; it's a little underbaked, but everything has to start there. Because of the holiday weekend I'll be back to work properly on Tuesday. Even though a short week is coming I'm hoping it'll be a big one. See you then.

The big expansion of the outer-colony projects is still going strong, so the company tells me that we can expect steady shipping traffic for several more weeks. I know the dock workers pulling overtime are happy about this, but I did ask to bring on a little supplemental staff to ease their load. Overtime is nice but they can't keep working at a dead run without burning out, so a few more hands on deck will alleviate that without hurting that sweet pay voucher. The better news out of this is that it's put a further delay on any talks of bringing more visiting scientists aboard, at least beyond the usual stream of research collaborations.

• No new maintenance release this week, but I did fix a weird compiler crasher that was discovered by a user updating a SS13 codebase.
• mirror_planes is working, but I had some detours when testing that led me to look into a few more things.
• Among those detours was cleaning up some list-handling code, which also revealed that several client.verbs operations were never hooked up properly. Yikes!
• I'm also looking at finally solving the "initial() paradox" where you can't grab the value, even just to test equivalence, of vars set by init procs.
• Thank you so much to the BYOND Members and all of you on Patreon and SubscribeStar who support the engine.
• Spez, I honestly didn't think you could dig past rock bottom but you found a way. Screw you.

The BYOND forums have the long-form news. Today's Patreon post is Patrons-only because it goes deeper under the hood, and it's all about the work I'm doing changing initial() and finally doing something with the mysterious EXPRESSION_REF type. Some cool stuff is coming. I'll be back at it next week.

I've been working on this for a bit and finally pulled the trigger on release.

The Courier Crew Revoiced Redux

I made this because although I really like that The Courier Crew - Revoiced replaces the original XVASynth audio, it's using stock ElevenLabs voices that don't match the voice types of the new couriers.

I redid the lines using a combo of XTTS, a tiny bit of Qwen3, and RVC for cleanup, then spliced the results to get the best quality and tone. Also I changed the one courier's FemaleCoward voice to FemaleYoungEager, via SkyPatcher. Now the Khajiit sounds like a Khajiit, and if you're using other mods like Chatty NPCs the voices won't suddenly change on you.

Courier Delivers to NPCs is also patched by default. Just voice lines, no plugin, so it can be installed or uninstalled at any time.

I'm mostly just venting, but if anyone has any thoughts on a solution or has noticed this themselves, please let me know. (Eudalus, if you see this, please don't take any of this as shade. You made a great mod. I talk it up whenever I can. It's just beating me up at the moment, probably because of some unique factor in my mod list triggering an otherwise rare issue.)

I was testing something entirely unrelated and saw that the books from my mod Little Library weren't being distributed onto bookshelves. That was super weird, so I ran a bunch of exhaustive tests. Leveled List Object Swapper, which the mod relies on for leveled list handling, doesn't seem to be working correctly anymore and I can't tell why. I'd installed quite a lot of new mods since the last time I noticed everything working, but after doing a lot of A/B testing I determined none of that seems to be the problem at all. It's crazy weird.

LLOS doesn't do verbose logging, which is unfortunate, but it is working. I tested a different leveled list I'd done for a different mod, and the LLOS insertion worked perfectly. That file used FormIDs instead of EditorIDs. Interesting. I thought I had seen my mod's books in tests after I updated po3 Tweaks at the beginning of September, but maybe I wasn't paying enough attention and it broke then.

Next I thought maybe I'd try copying just one rule from my own mod's LLOS file; maybe some kind of syntax error was causing it to choke. The only thing that changed was LLOS reporting it was doing 18 more list insertions, but the book still wasn't being added to LItemBook1All. Still, progress. Then I changed my test file to use FormIDs instead of EditorIDs. Suddenly the book was appearing in the leveled list!

But it gets weirder. The book was being inserted a lot of times into the same list. Like possibly 18 times, as an educated guess; I can only tell by the fact that using player.additem was causing the new book to appear way more frequently than anything else. Telling LLOS to explicitly do Count=1 for this rule didn't work. And the log now says instead of the original 3806 insertions, or the 3824 I saw earlier, now it's doing 3044 insertions—WAY less.

So I'm super frustrated. Despite a great deal of testing by disabling lots of SKSE mods, even rolling back SSE Engine Fixes in my test profile, LLOS is still misbehaving in bizarre ways and I have to assume it's actually LLOS's fault, not some other mod breaking it. Until it's fixed, my own mod is badly broken. Which means I probably should push an update this weekend to temporarily include the optional no-LLOS patch and disable the LLOS file, until the bugs are fixed.

Anyway, I'm a dev too so I know bugs get fixed when they get fixed, and bugs that can't be reproduced are insanely harder to fix. Hopefully at least more verbose logging (preferably extreme) can be made available at some point to help narrow down the issue, but that's out of my hands.