Due to the work we've been doing on our other games, along with the various issues that have shown up in the Hive forums on Steam, there have been a ton of changes since the last big update.
Everything mentioned here is now pushed for Windows, Mac, and Linux (some might have appeared slightly earlier on Windows).
If I've been keeping track of it correctly, here is a fairly complete list:
- A handful of FNA/OpenGL fixes which will make the game work on more of the Intel HD Graphics cards that had problems, but not all of them.
- A smaller log file (again)
- Better display of users with Apostrophes in their names, in the Online Games Menu Screen (OGMS).
- Fixed a rare crash in the OGSM ListView.
- Added visible Menu button to the game screen. This makes the game now fully functional for mouse-only players. This is actually pretty important for accessibility. See the "Accessibility" section of a recent Khet announcement for more info on this.
- Made it so Passes get sent to the server by the last-mover since we know that player is online. This keeps the activePlayerId in sync better.
- Fixed an error when a pillbug-enabled mosquito moved an enemy disabled-mosquito. Thanks to user Quodlibet for reporting this!
- Elo Ratings can't be replayed from Steam Notifications now.
- Fixed some really bad edge-cases that were caused by playing an online async game, then leaving it, then finishing a local game in the same run of the program. This should solve a lot of the more mysterious bugs that were being seen.
- Since the last release of Hive, we rewrote our entire font rendering system to use a more scalable system. On users with huge high-resolution monitors, they should now be able to see the fonts as clearly as someone with a standard monitor. The new system is "Signed Distance Fields". For the curious, here is a youtube video that shows the general way in which they work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGZRHJvJYIg This change also allowed us to completely re-write how string-measurement works. After a ton of obsessing over the details, you'll notice that now, text is centered better in several spots in the app, and the Chat box looks less wonky. This is all due to being able to measure text very accurately. Hive runs at a slightly lower resolution than our other games (so the fonts tend to be larger) and the fonts actually look REALLY nice in the latest version (I may have been staring at fonts too long).
Sorry that I waited so long before releasing that huge batch (we usually do more smaller releases) but I hope the changes make the game a little nicer for everyone! :)
Happy Holidays & Happy New Year!
- BlueLine Games (Sean & Geoff)