If you see any remaining issues, please report them to me.

Thanks for playing!! :D

Upgrading some stuff & ran into some issues... fixing it now!!

Online play will probably be down for half an hour or so. Sorry! ^_^;

In the most fantabulous coincidence ever, we have just finished releasing the Russian translation of Simply Chess... the translation was finished up by Steam user " ⇜ǤȐƠƲƝƉHƠƓ⇝" and it is February 2nd in Russia right now!! :D

(pro-wiki-tips for the unacquainted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day)

OH, THIS IS BEST!

Ok, I'm better now. So it's a pretty straightforward update:

• Russian translation by Steam user ⇜ǤȐƠƲƝƉHƠƓ⇝ and Steam user Novoleg
  
• GamePad fixes (especially relating to Online Play & associated menus) with huge kudos to Steam user Comp9 for helping us debug this, and to user Junkyard for reporting that we had issues. GamePad support is really important for both Steam OS and for people with alternative input devices (that usually communicate as game pads).

Get some Chess!!!

Pushed an update to Windows yesterday (same fixes will go out to Mac & Linux on the next rebuild).

The main newness is that there is now a Finnish (Suomi) translation!! Big thanks to vsi65 for the translation!!

Updates since the last announcement:

• Fixed the directions of the gamePad and keyboard when playing with white not on the bottom in Chess.
  
• Fixed a bug where clicking "Rejoin" very quickly after entering the Online Game Menu Screen could cause it to crash.
  
• Removed the King from the Piece Counter part of the HUD. This was always 0, but it bugged some people that it was there.
  
• Fixed the "Ready" button in the Online Multiplayer some more... potentially fixed other button clickability issues. Basically, MouseUp was refreshing the Input events even if the events weren't being handled. So if it refreshed and the button was already up... maybe that was the issue? Regardless, this fixes our test case for the Ready button but might not affect the other button issues.
  
• Quieted the Log File a little bit by removing the "Loading item" lines since we haven't had a problem with asset-loading in a LONG time.
  
• Finnish translation thanks to vsi65!

Also, Premium is 35% off for a couple of days... please get it and support our continued development of Simply Chess... thank you!! :D
http://store.steampowered.com/app/451690/

Some people have been rep-ing chess for (thousands of) years! ...Let's show the world that we've known Chess was cool, long before any of this newfangled stuff!

This is a big announcement with a lot to cover!

Since the last announcement, here are updates we've made to Simply Chess:

• Mac: fixed crashing that would happen in various versions of OS X on various machines. It was due to several versions of Mono crashing in different ways on different versions. We found an old version that works consistently.
  
• The "Online Multiplayer" lobby said "Local Multiplayer" at the top, previously.
  
• Old "Steam Notifications" have been deleted and any games that end will now get their notification deleted once both players have seen the end of the game.
  
• GamePad support for BlueLineCloudSignupDialog is no longer broken... can fill it out correctly, or skip it and play without an account just like with keyboard/mouse.
  
• Made resizing the window conform to the ratio instead of using leterboxing.
  
• The Online Game Menu Screen doesn't flicker when the list reloads now.
  
• Fixed the ugly layout of the Pawn Promotion dialog (the icons had shifted to be overlapping the "Ok" button).
  
• Made Alert dialogs center in the screen correctly (they were slightly off-center before).
  
• Added "Limitless" AI for Premium players (Limitless will also unlock for free if players can beat all 100 levels of AI!) This lets the AI play without mercy or concern for your pathetic human brain.
  
• Fixed the layout of the BLC Signup dialog to fit better.
  
• Fixed the "Chat" button to use the internationalized string and not display off-screen when the opponent is on the bottom (which is rare, but some people choose to put themselves on top).
  
• Made it so that asynchronously created games also have the opponent's name added to the serverName when the 2nd player joins.

If you'd like to help us with translations, please head over to Roksten[www.roksten.com] and offer to translate our projects into your native language! Our volunteer translators have helped bring these new translations to Simply Chess with this update:

• Added Spanish translation (thanks dani_as0!)
  
• Added Polish translation (thanks Ti_Ichigo from LiveCoding!)

All of our games happen to be on sale right now (only the two-pack of Othello, not the single... for technical reasons). Check them out to make sure you have at least 3 and you can get Premium for free (see below):
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=BlueLine%20Games

This includes 25% off of Simply Chess Premium... you can support our continued development of this game for ~$3.74
http://store.steampowered.com/app/451690/

Do you own some of our other games already? If you buy 3 or more of our games and you don't have Premium yet, when you play Simply Chess, you will be presented with a Steam Code for Simply Chess Premium as a way for us to say Thank You for being our loyal customer!

UPDATE: The Steam Key appears when the game would otherwise show you a Cross Promotion, so it's not immedaite. Basically: finish 4 matches, then from the Main Menu, go to start another game and it should show up.

So check out which games you already own, and maybe grab a couple more at STEEP discounts and maybe even get Premium for free!
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=BlueLine%20Games

Howdy! I haven't announced the updates in a while, I've just been pushing them quietly. Time to fix that so that you have a better idea of what to expect :)

• Bugfix: The buttons for the second-player in a Lobby had regressed to not be mouse-clickable anymore (hotkeys still worked). Thanks dani_as0 and bentley_maniac for the reports.
  
• Fixed regression that was causing log-spam of loading SDF fonts.
  
• Fixed it so the local player is always on bottom if there is only 1 local player (this was messed up in online games, previously... because we had assumed the local player was always Player 1).
  
• Pressing "F" in Pass-n-play mode now works. This allows (for example) to play against yourself and swap the board each move so you always play from the bottom perspective, etc..
  
• Fixed the occasional crash on Mac/Linux that occurred especially when entering the Online Game Menu screen very quickly after starting the program.
  
• Fixed a recently-developed crash when opening the Steam Overlay (eg: for Leaderboard or Achievements) in OSX.
  
• Fixed the case where you Leave a game during LoadingFromServer, then started another game (eg: local, or just a NEW online game) and the game thought it was still loading from server... forever.
  
• Fixed game-reconnections (if it says "Loading from game server..." at any point during a game, now it should succeed again. That was broken for a while... we just didn't notice because that only happens in weird cases anyway).
  
• Fixed the use-case where a host starts a game asynchronously with the opponent moving first, then a guest joins and makes a play, then the host would previously freeze in "Loading game from server...". Creating async games and having the opponent move should be fine now.
  
• Rewrote IAP to use DLC instead, which will eventually let people get card-drops, allows the game to show up in Steam Libraries, etc. This is a really complicated issue, but we think we're very close & we just need Valve to change one config setting for our app and we'll be all set.
  
• Added Condal Chess Set 2D skin to Premium version.
  
• Game warned "this game is rated" when forfeiting, even if it was not rated.
  
• Fixed a collection of crashes on OS X. Found the magical version of Mono that we needed (it turns out that a rather old version of Mono seems to work the most consistently across all common versions of OS X). This was fairly urgent for Mac users so we just pushed it out the moment we found out it was working for all testers. That's one of the reasons that I didn't make a single clean "release" with an announcement. Sorry for the delayed announcement! ^_^;

We have several other things in the works including translation, one unreleased fix (it says "Local Multiplayer" on the top of the "Online Multiplayer" lobby), etc.. Stay tuned :)

Oh yeah, here's where you can get the Premium version (which isn't as useful until we get those card-drops working, but we appreciate the support if you want to grab it now, anyway!):
http://store.steampowered.com/app/451690/

We've given a round of polish to the game, and pushed that update to Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Some fixes:

• 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. Yikes. This affected level-unlocking in Simply Chess and in all games had the potential to result in some games being ended prematurely.
  
• Removed old HUD images. This just makes the size of the game on your computer smaller.
  
• Fixed the game's icon to show up on the window (was already fixed in Windows, but I'm not sure when). This release fixes it on Mac & Linux also.

Since the last release of Simply Chess, we finished our re-write of 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 much more accurately.

It's been a month since our last big release, so we've done a batch of bug-fixes and other improvements! We're also knocking down the cost of Premium to $3.99 for a short time (I haven't decided how long). Grab it now! :)

UPDATE 20151027: These changes are now on Windows, Mac, and Linux instead of just Windows like they were last night.

Here are a bunch of fixes we've done!

• New HUD! We noticed that the old HUD would occasionally cause people to think that they were the opposite color than what they really were. This was partially because the OPPONENT's captured pieces were on your own HUD. The new HUD makes that much less ambiguous and it also encapsulates the turn-timer which was previously just kind of thrown onto the screen.
  
• Elo Ratings changes can't be "re-played" by clicking on a Steam Notification from a finished game and re-loading the endgame anymore.
  
• Fixed the layout of the belated BLC-signup dialog.
  
• Cross-promotion tool that shows other BlueLine games can now detect Steam sales and show the discount percentage.
  
• Additional fixes for Intel HD Graphics cards.
  
• Smaller log-file
  
• Better displaying of names with apostrophes in them, in the Online Game Menu String.
  
• Fixed a rare potential crash from leaving the Online Game Menu Screen running.
  
• Added a visible menu button to the game. This improves mouse-only accessibility. See below...

To make it so that a game can be played by as many people as possible, it's important to make games accept a wide variety of input. You can currently play Simply Chess with Keyboard, Mouse, or GamePad... and any mixture of those.

Prior to this release, we had a shortcoming that there was no way to pull up the in-game menu using just the mouse. This meant that mouse-only users (such as those that you Speech Recognition) would have to close the entire app each time they finished a game. That's got to be really annoying, so we fixed it.

Since accessibility is a fairly easy thing, that BlueLine is trying to get more game developers to put some time into... we Streamed the processes of adding this menu button (and talked about accessibility while doing it). The stream was on http://twitch.tv/bluelinegames and now that it's over, the video is up on youtube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjYFJkvg9-s&t=28s

Here is a bonus-pretzel since you're a BlueLine player... inside info is that Hive is 75%-77% off of various packages for a few more days!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/251210/