They say the road to hell is paved...

 seems like a pretty rocky road to me.

Long time no see, eh? well I'm still alive, still kicking.. and it has been quite a weekend.

The other day, someone posted a comment on a review of the ER Ares Penis, saying they were having some technical issues. The hud, for whatever reason, was disappearing off the top of the screen when they tried to minimize it.

Now, I've never used Firestorm, but the last couple of weeks I've been using it, and when I pulled up the hud and found that just like the commenter, MY hud vanished off my screen.. I knew right then and there that this needed to be fixed. And because the commenter did so on a product review, I had to be FAST or sales were going to suffer, hard.

I've done a lot of tinkering with that hud, and the minimize function hadn't been something I'd really used much in my experiments. I figured the quick and easy fix was to just remove the minimize button, pack it back up, and ship it.

That was the wrong move.. on a lot of levels. I was rushed, I was hurrying, I wasn't taking my time and checking every angle.. and the release failed as soon as someone tried it out. Now the color picker was broken.

I tried hunting through the code to find the issue, and finally just reset the script and it fixed itself? I HATE fixes like that.. but I worked to integrate a script reset into the 'first use by a new user'.. and it was good to go this time.. right?

Nope.

Turns out in my haste to remove the minimize function, I'd forgotten that the title-bar of the hud could be used to minimize the hud too.. but with the maximize button now removed.. once zipped, it couldn't be unzipped.

My offline messages were on fire when I woke up this morning.

SO..

I took the product completely offline, and I tore the whole thing apart. I mean really.. every piece of the HUD re-positioned, every line of code pored over. I found remnants of code that weren't being used anymore, later found places that were using that code, and so on.. back and forth all day long... til finally I had a HUD that was working, reliably, for me.

The minimize function is back by extremely passionate popular demand. It's function completely reworked, the math completely refigured. The hud itself rebuilt.

I tested, I re-tested. I tested with an alt, then another, then another. Different viewers, different regions, some wearing the parts, some rezzing them. I contacted friends, and begged them to test it. We've hammered buttons, filled message buffers, done everything we can do to break it.

In the end, I think it's stable. At this point, version 1.6.0 is the most well-tested version of an item I've ever released.

I appreciate all of your patience as I've bungled this release.. and I hope you'll find that the work, the hiccups, and the annoyances will have been worth it in the end, for a much more stable, reliable, and even a touch faster product than before.

Now, I'm going to bed.