Lewin Kelly Heliodex

Heliodex project update – March 2026

I return with another monthly update. Mostly with information on Mercury, as usual. Hope you're having a great easter if you celebrate that, or otherwise having a more relaxed holiday than I am if you have one at the moment. Here's what I was doing throughout March:

Mercury

Mercury 3 has 105 user accounts. As is tradition for the first day in April, we did a lovely CSS rewrite for the website, including plenty of new fonts, crazy animations, and rainbow colour scheme. I was only able to put in about an hour of work for this, so not as full on as the 2024 April Fools design & rebrand, but still fun nonetheless. It was of course reverted after a day. Some users requested that we bring it back as a website theme, though we already have that feature in Custom CSS (funnily enough that page 500s for some reason, must fix...) I suppose.

Work

Heliodex project update – February 2026

Oh wow, look at the size of this one. Yeah, these posts are most definitely getting longer, to the great detriment of all 0 readers. Grab some of your preferred snack to make this seemingly less boring to read if you so please, and welcome back to the monthly project update!

Mercury

Mercury 3 has 91 user accounts. The number of beta testers is smaller than that but still growing, and other user-generated areas like the Forums and Catalog are of course growing as well.

Recent news includes the migration of the database from SurrealDB v2 to v3 after its recent new release, mainly by following their migration guide, though plenty of manual intervention was required. As such, the Site was [down for about 2 hours](https://github.com/tp-l

Heliodex project update – January 2026

Hope all of your respective 2026s are off to a good start. Here's the rundown of how mine has been going so far, and what I've been up to with various projects.

Mercury

Mercury's estimated user count now totals 73. A few more Mercury News sessions were hosted, mostly we didn't have a whole lot to show off apart from some interesting plans. We are looking into, for the first time in Mercury's history, a client change – from the current December 2013 client to one from some time in 2016. This would give us a huge amount more control over how the client works, and there's quite a bit more support and documentation available for 2016 than there is for 2013, as well as some awesome existing open-source projects (with commit history). We don't know when or if this will begin happening, though the 2013 client will probably still remain

Heliodex project update – December 2025

Welcome, all, to 2026. I ended last year with an ostensibly more relaxed schedule of work, though I had plenty of real-life stuff to deal with over the winter holidays as well. Here's a bit of what I was able to get done over the past month.

Mercury

Mercury's sprint of speedy development seems to have ended. We're back to normal "development pace" of various bug fixes only when enough people clamour for them.

Since last update we've hosted 2 more Mercury News sessions, the 2nd of which I failed to attend. We didn't have particularly much to talk about anyway though. Some more giveaways have been held by taskmanager, presumably in order to generate hype for the project. A video trailer is also being worked on, which I'm not involved with.

Heliodex project update – November 2025

It is the season... of Mercury, of course. I'm recovering from the mental whiplash of Mercury 3 shifting into higher development velocity. Here's some of the things that have been happening with my projects recently.

Mercury

On 9 December 2025, we hosted the first session of Mercury News in a while, alongside a giveaway 400 Robux for everyone who attended. It was intended to last around 45 minutes, and actually did last that long, despite my rambling on about the prospects of the upcoming new Economy service.
Mercury 3 now has over 50 registered beta testers on site, making it the same size as Mercury 2 was in March 2023. We've been irregularly terminating some of the inactive accounts, though this user count number includes those which have been moderated.

On the [ledgertests](https://github.com

Heliodex project update – October 2025

Ah, yeah, this again. Welcome back to my monthly Heliodex project update! This month has still been plenty busy, though it's the first update in a year that I didn't significantly work on Coputer. You'll see where I spent most of my time instead below.

Mercury

The Mercury 3 website is now available at mercs.dev, with documentation at docs.mercs.dev. Its hosting has been moved to my own dedicated server, living alongside the RCCService instance. This is done with PM2, and its configuration file has been added back to the repository. Dedicated gameservers are running on a Windows VM hosted on Azure (burning through my free credits, not paying them anything yet lol).

The implementations of the new RCCService proxy and [gameserver arbiter](https://github.com/tp-link-extender/RCCService/tree/main/Orb

Heliodex project update – September 2025

September doesn't seem to have been eternal this year. However, given how much I'm already seeing about the upcoming Halloween, it almost seems like October will be. Here's another monthly update!

Mercury

Mercury 3 has entered its private beta testing phase, and now has 28 users on site, all creating status & forum posts, places, assets, and spending currency. An RCCService instance is set up on my dedicated server, accessed from the site running on the Windows VPS, so the reverse of the architecture of Mercury 2. This probably won't stay this way for long though, and we're practising site backups in preparation for another server migration.

The RCC is used for avatar and clothing rendering at the moment, with shirt renders recently being fixed to work properly. Since it's running on OpenSUSE it has to run over a compatibility layer. We're using Wine, which did require a lot of configuration especially a

Heliodex project update – August 2025

It's that time of the month again. The summer and its holidays are finally over, so here's a quick update on what I've been up to over August (and the first few days of September).

Mercury

Work on Mercury 3 is getting back up to speed, and the site is now hosted again, albeit unreliably, for a basic alpha test. Taskmanager wants a beta testing phase to begin within the next week or 2. A new system for management of assets has been introduced, separating a few different categories of asset:

Builtins: Assets bundled with the client or studio. These are not requested from the site. (animations, humanoid scripts, studio plugins to an extent)
Privileged assets: Assets loaded directly or indirectly by scripts sent to the client. This includes:

Heliodex project update – July 2025

Another project update! I never know what to write in the first paragraph of these things. Here's what I've worked on over the last month.

Mercury

The documentation site on the docs branch has been updated with articles on installation of certain tools and further integration guides.

I've been experimenting with different ways to start up and manage Mercury's external services, mainly the Database and Economy service. This has usually been done with Docker, which is great when it works though often has issues on machines with poor support for virtualisation. Starting each process independently is difficult to manage. I tried using my own tool for this, which worked surprisingly well, but would shut down if its parent terminal was closed. Recently I tried Nomad, which

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