Sunday, January 5, 2014

Beta 4: Montana and Addiction, and "No game window"

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 4 is now available for download from our Beta Program page.

This release fixes the following bugs:

Bug ID 3: No game window opens at launch.
We now believe that this is due to a corrupted auto-saved game file in Solitaire Till Dawn's preferences folder. We also believe that the corruption was caused by the b1 release, which had incompatibilities with OS X 10.7 (Lion). If we are correct, it won't happen again because we fixed the incompatibility in the b2 release. However, the corrupted files remained behind, and still caused problems in b2 and b3. Some of you followed our advice and removed your Solitaire Till Dawn prefs folder to get rid of the corrupted file. For the rest of you, the b4 release now checks the validity of the auto-saved game file, and if it is not successfully read in, it is ignored and a new game is started instead.

Bug ID 12: Selecting a larger card size sometimes doesn't work.
Actually we can't really fix this one. Larger card sizes mean that the layout for the whole game takes up more space; but the whole game still has to fit in the window, and the window has to fit on your screen. If you request too large a card size, Solitaire Till Dawn won't honor your request because it would mean that the game wouldn't fit on your screen. But now, when this happens, Solitaire Till Dawn will at least put up a notice to explain why it couldn't comply with your request.

Bug ID 13: In Montana and Addiction, redeal can cause a crash.
This one surprised me, because I enjoy these games and played them a lot during development. I tracked the problem down to a recent code change that looked innocuous, but that turned out to be breaking those games. It's fixed now, and you should be able to play Montana and Addiction safely.

Let me take a moment to thank you all for your energy in testing Solitaire Till Dawn and in sending me your wonderful bug reports. You are all being hugely helpful, and I appreciate it! I'd like to ask you one more favor: if a bug bothered you in the past and a new beta fixes it, let me know. It helps me be sure that I have really fixed that bug.

5 comments:

  1. Glad to see the beta. Tried to use the bug report form, but it is just hanging for me. (Tried in both Chrome and Safari, and after turning off Little Snitch). I know you asked for the reports using that form, but guess I'll have to try this way.

    I guess this counts as a feature request rather than a bug. It is one I sent in long ago about the old STD, and I was sure hoping it would be fixed in the new one.

    The text in the line at the bottom of the windows is so small as to be unreadable for some of us older folk and I see now way to increase its size. You nicely allow for large card sizes, but have no adjustment for that text. Actually, this applies to pretty much all of the text in the game, including things like the list of games to select from.

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  2. Yay, my wait is (at least temporarily) over ! I have played a dozen games (of spider and free cell), and things seem to be working well.
    A minor bug: The "you won" window appears at the win, even if the check box it includes to show it is unchecked.
    A missing feature: if, like me, you play as a puzzle, there is a lot of undo/redo action. Undo is still cmd-z, but now Redo requires an awkward 3 key combination (used to be easier, maybe way back, with cmd-r) Since these appear as left and right arrow icons on the game window, it would be sweet if the left and right arrow keys had the undo and redo functions, respectively. Maybe it is not even hard to program that.
    I am looking forward to paying you in the apps store (along with, I hope, a million others), and getting a real, permanent Solitaire till Dawn again.
    Thanks.

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  3. Thank you so much for all the work you've put in. So far, it looks great and I love the pack design.

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  4. Just press the space bar for Redo. This (and many other cool keyboard shortcuts) are listed under Keyboard Shortcuts in the built-in Help. To see them, open Help and scroll down to the bottom of the Table of Contents to find the link to the Keyboard Shortcuts page.

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