Puzzle Together News

* Fixed problems with the new native file requester for uploading custom puzzle images. Image files now appear in the requester, and loading an image no longer crashes the game.
* The initial scattering of puzzle pieces now looks more natural, rather than being piled into exact rectangles.
* Laid the groundwork for future optimizations that will speed up loading and prevent sever problems.

Today's update adds a few features and fixes several bugs.

First, there is a new "Graphics Quality" dropdown on the Settings page, with the following options:

• Best: Highest quality graphics. All options turned on, high target frame rate.
  
• Fastest: All options turned off, high target framerate.
  
• Auto: Starts with high quality and gradually turns off options to achieve high framerate.
  
• Manual: Choose your own target framerate and which graphics features to enable.
  

The Manual setting gives you complete control of the game's graphics. You can set the maximum framerate as high or low as you'd like, turn off motion blur and depth of field blur (some players find these options make them feel queasy), turn on VSync to prevent screen tearing, and so on.

The update also includes these improvements and bug fixes:

• Zooming with the scroll wheel and arrow keys now zooms in and out relative to the position of the mouse pointer, rather than the center of the screen. This can be handy for quickly zooming in to a particular area.
  
• Entries on the My Puzzles page now have an X in the corner, so you can remove puzzles that you no longer want showing up in your lists.
  
• Sort by Color now works correctly in multiplayer. All players should now see the same results of the sort.
  
• Fixed some physics issues with ~2000 piece puzzles. Pieces no longer slide and turn on their own when dropped.
  
• The game now correctly keeps track of the total amount of time that it took to complete a puzzle.
  
• Fixed a problem that would cause some characters to appear as boxes (☐) in player names and chat.
  
• You can now zoom in closer to the table when playing a puzzle with very small pieces.
  
• Lowered the volume of the sound that plays when a puzzle is completed.
  

Many players have been asking for a way to unlock full access to all of the puzzles, or unlimited custom puzzles, rather than having to buy each puzzle individually. These options have now been added. You can now unlock:

- Full access to all of the puzzles in the library
- Full access to only those puzzles belonging to a particular category
- Unlimited custom puzzles

Each of these can be purchased for a period of either one week, one month, or six months.

In addition there have been a few other changes:

- The Z/X keys smoothly rotate the puzzle piece being moved, counter-clockwise and clockwise. The Q/E keys now also rotate the piece being moved, but in 90 degree increments.

- Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause two pieces to snap together even if they weren't at the right angle to each other.

- Some other minor tweaks and fixes.

It's now been 3 weeks since Puzzle Together launched. In that time, over 67,000 puzzles have been completed, and nearly 10,000 different custom puzzles have been created! I'm continuing to make improvements and bug fixes based on everyone's valuable feedback.

Today's update addresses some problems I've seen with puzzles that are open to all (meaning anyone can join them). Even when hundreds of players are online, usually there are just a dozen or so in open puzzles. When I would visit the open puzzles with players in them, I noticed two problems. The first is that trolls would frequently visit open puzzles, to throw around pieces, cover areas where other players are working with the box, yell into their mic, etc. The second problem, likely in response to the first, is that many hosts kick new players right out of their open puzzles, even though the new player hasn't done anything yet. With an open puzzle experience this rough, it's no wonder few players try it out more than once.

To solve these problems I've made several changes:

• You can now mute another player so that you don't hear their voice chat, or see their text chat. To do this, press on their name at the top of the screen and select "Mute" from the menu.
  
• You can now also "ignore" another player, so that you don't see any of their actions (unless they connect pieces or place pieces where they belong in the puzzle). To do this, press on their name at the top of the screen and select "Ignore" from the menu. This is especially useful for preventing players from bothering you by throwing around pieces, hiding the box, etc.
  
• Hosts can no longer remove (block) players from open puzzles that they host. Because of the above changes, there's really no need to remove even troublemaking players from an open puzzle, and abuse of the ability to remove players takes the "open" out of open puzzles. Players can still remove others from private puzzles that they host.
  

In addition, a few more changes have been made in the last few days:

• Improved ability to select pieces to move them as a group
  
• You can now pan the view using the W,A,S,D keys (rotating pieces has been moved to the Z,X keys)
  
• Improved antialiasing
  
• Fixed a bug that would cause the moving of large groups of pieces not to show up for other players of the puzzle
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause the voice chat to stay connected even after a player leaves a puzzle
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause the framerate to drop to 10 FPS, and removed the 40 FPS maximum limit
  

Happy puzzling!

In the week since Puzzle Together was released, over 1000 puzzles have been completed! Players all over the world have been putting the game through its paces, and while it's usually worked fine a few major multiplayer bugs were reported. These have been fixed with today's update.

These bugs have been fixed:

• When some players would move a puzzle piece to any position on the table, anyone else playing with them would instead see the pieces they move pile up in the center of the mat. It turned out that this bug only affected players in countries where decimal numbers are written with a comma, like "3,14" rather than "3.14". The game wasn't prepared to interpret numbers in that format, and so would consider them all to be position zero -- the center of the mat!
  
  
• Sometimes when a large group of pieces was connected together (but not yet placed in their final position on the mat), moving that group would cause a player to be booted from the server. There were actually two separate issues that could cause this problem, and both have now been fixed.
  

While the biggest bugs may now be behind us, no doubt there will be others that show up now and then. If you run into a bug, please post about it in the discussion forum, including as much detail as possible. Thank you, and have fun puzzling!