After I added tile animation last year, I made Tilemap Town's web client rerender the screen 10 times per second whether or not there's any map changes, in order to make sure animations get displayed. I did some work a few weeks ago to reduce the amount of redrawing that the game does; it will only redraw sections of the screen that have changed, or that have an animated object in them, whether player or map tile. This makes Tilemap Town's web client actually somewhat usable on a Raspberry Pi Zero W; I doubt it will have much of an actual impact for the devices people that actually use for Tilemap Town (where I don't think people normally had performance problems?), but having the client do significantly less work is still good.

There's a new system to allow the server and client to request the other to acknowledge a message that was sent. If the client gets disconnected before it receives an acknowledgement, it will try again after reconnecting, and if the server ends up receiving the message twice, it will only act on the first one (idempotence) but still acknowledge the others. This should make Tilemap Town handle an unstable connection significantly better than other platforms that don't keep server-side message history (like IRC), and you shouldn't have to ask if someone received your message or not.

There's two new commands for users:

• /tailshift - client-side command that adjusts your horizontal offset when you change directions; this allows you to keep a character's feet on the center of a tile even if they're not in the center of the sprite, so that you can give up some space on one side of the sprite to gain more space on the other side (such as to give a character a large tail)
• /z - allows you to specify if you should appear above or below other players on the same Y coordinate as you. This command takes an integer from -10 to 10, and a player will appear on top of a player with a lower Z index

The map button finally does something! When you're online you can edit/view the map name and description, and edit/view some of the most important map permissions. When you're offline, you can load and save maps! This means you can pull it up on a phone and gradually work on some maps by yourself offline. I've found that it can be kind of relaxing to just doodle in a tiny map on my phone.

The build menu had some small improvements; there's a 2× zoom button which makes it easier to see the individual tiles, and easier to pick the one you want on a phone. There's also a scrolling checkerboard background underneath the tiles, so you can see white tiles and see translucency easier.

There's some new moderation/security features, the primary one being that I created a system to make it easier to roll back map changes; previously I had enough information to roll back changes, but it was a manual process to actually do it. There hasn't really been a problem with vandalism, but sometimes people connect who don't know what they're doing and unintentionally delete or overwrite portions of the map.

When you attempt to log in and it fails, the login failure message is more prominent now (getting displayed in the login window, not just the chat log) and there's a note about how you can contact me for a password reset if you need it. I realized that's probably something that needs to be explicitly stated.