Unlike uObjectColor2, this is more global state. uObjectColor2 is part of gradient calculation which may later be offloaded to a secondary buffer which already resulted in only conditionally setting it, resulting in broken special colormap application for the software renderer.
With localization for non-Latin languages on the support list the multibyte API doesn't cut it anymore. It neither can handle system text output outside the local code page nor can an ANSI window receive text input outside its own code page.
Similar problems exist for file names. With the multibyte API it is impossible to handle any file containing characters outside the active local code page.
So as of now, everything that may pass along some Unicode text will use the Unicode API with some text conversion functions. The only places where calls to the multibyte API were left are those where known string literals are passed or where the information is not used for anything but comparing it to other return values from the same API.
currentUILevel is now primaryLevel.
For ZScript, currentVMLevel was added. This is also exported as 'level' and will change as needed.
This also means that no breaking deprecations will be needed in the future, because in order to sandbox a level only 4 variables need to be handled: level, players, playeringame and consoleplayer.
The remaining global variables are not relevant for the level state.
The static 'level' has been mostly removed from the code except some places that still need work.