Puzzle Together News

This year-end update has something for everyone. Here's what you can expect:

• 400+ new puzzle images, covering a wide variety of subjects and styles, and all created by human photographers and artists. For easy access, most of these new puzzles are separated out into their own categories, such as "Animals II", "Buildings II", etc. You can see all of the new additions by selecting New from the Show dropdown on the Start a Puzzle page.
  
• Going forward, two new puzzles will be added each week, and will be completely free to play for a limited time.
  
• On the Friends page, there is now a Prior Puzzle Partners section, where it's easy to invite the people you played your previous puzzle with, to your new puzzle.
  
• Custom puzzles can now be generated tall or wide, as well as square.
  
• An "Ai" icon is now shown on all puzzles that are AI generated.
  
• Under Settings, there is now an option to hide all AI generated puzzles.
  
• The escape key can now be used to close the chat window or the sort window, to turn off selection mode, and to deselect any selected pieces.
  
• AI puzzle generation takes less time than before.
  
• Increased the quality of AI generated puzzles that are available through the Search function.
  
• When an invitation is received to join a puzzle, you can now join directly from the notification.
  
• When dragging out a box to select pieces, the screen will no longer scroll when you get near the edge.
  
• On the My Puzzles and Open Puzzles pages, an icon is now shown for puzzles that have auto-sorting turned on.
  
• When playing a puzzle solo, you're no longer asked to confirm auto-sorting of pieces.
  
• The Chat entry box now has focus when the chat window is opened.
  

(Note that voice chat in this version is incompatible with previous versions. So if you and your friends are not able to hear each other, make sure you've all updated to the new version.)

Many of these improvements started with suggestions from players, so keep those ideas coming.
Happy puzzling!

Today's update was a long time coming, and adds some exciting new features while also fixing a bunch of troublesome bugs.

Here's what's new:

New Features

• When generating a custom puzzle image, there is now a menu that lets you choose from 30 different styles. Choose "General" if you'd rather describe the style yourself, or choose "Classic Style" if you'd like to stick with the style Puzzle Together has been using up until now.
  
• You can now generate multiple custom puzzles simultaneously -- no more need to wait for one to complete before starting another.
  
• Improved quality of custom generated puzzles.
  
• Custom puzzle generation now has better understanding of non-English image descriptions.
  
• Added a bunch of new table color options, under 'Settings'.
  
• A pop up asks you to confirm before sorting pieces, to help prevent accidental sorting.
  
• There is now a 'ping' sound when a chat message is received.
  
• Added the option, under 'Settings', to turn off the ability to change the camera angle by right-click dragging the mouse.
  
• Under 'Settings', in the menus of actions that can be assigned to mouse buttons, you can now rotate pieces left (counter-clockwise) as well as right (clockwise). So, if you'd like, you can assign one mouse button to rotate in one direction and another button to rotate in the other direction.
  
• You can now zoom closer in and further out. Also, the speed of zooming in/out and changing camera angle with the keyboard has been increased.
  
• Any player in an open puzzle can place pieces in their final position, so long as at least 90% of the puzzle's connections have been made.
  
• On the "Join a Friend's Puzzle" page, there is now a copy button next to the join code, to let you easily copy the code to your clipboard so you can paste it in a message.
  

Bug Fixes

• When you change your username or e-mail address under 'Settings', you no longer need to hit enter for the change to take effect.
  
• If a puzzle was completed when there was no connection to the server, it never registered as being completed. This has now been fixed, and any affected puzzles should now show up as completed when you enter them.
  
• When using ctrl+click to add a piece to the set of selected pieces, it will no longer also cause the piece to rotate.
  
• When you "like" (favorite) an AI generated puzzle, it will now appear on the Library page when you select "Favorites" from the Show menu.
  
• When you purchase an AI generated puzzle, it will now appear on the Library page when you select "Purchased" from the Show menu.
  
• Fixed a bug that would cause the game to hang when entering a puzzle, if you had left the previous puzzle while pieces were still selected.
  
• A sort can no longer be started if another sort is in progress.
  
• Fixed a problem that could cause the puzzle box to permanently disappear.
  
• Added logging to help find a problem that prevents some players from being able to make purchases.
  

This month's update improves the search function, and fixes some bugs. Here are the details:

- The search function now shows matching results from Puzzle Together's whole puzzle library, not just the collection of AI generated images. Also, the AI images that it does show are higher quality than before.

- Fixed an issue with the database that would cause problems connecting to the game each day sometime between 4am and 8am EST, for about 20 minutes. It could also cause disconnections and issues keeping track of stats and progress throughout the day.

It's a small update this month, with the following changes:

- Fixed a bug that could cause pieces to disappear or become stuck to the table in multiplayer puzzles. Hopefully this is the only problem that was causing this to happen, but do let me know if you still encounter these issues after this update.

- Fixed a problem that could cause the "Loading..." screen to get stuck for a long time when the game starts up, for accounts that have played many puzzles.

- Improved the quality of the AI puzzle image generator. If you tried generating images in the past but were disappointed with the results, give it another go! There's till a lot of room for future improvement, but the quality is now significantly better than it was.