I really did not expect to be making releases of my programs anytime soon, but things come up. First somebody reported a crash in Tetzle when attaching multiple pieces, then somebody else reported that player names were messed up in the high scores dialogs of my games under Windows, and finally the tool I used to update the Linux desktop integration files is unmaintained and broken so I needed to replace my use of that. Oh, and Whisker Menu did not show up in the right location when using multiple monitors under Wayland. Whew. I think that covers everything! I doubt most users will notice a difference—although packagers will need to add gettext as build dependency—but enjoy the new updates! And now I am going to take a break for a while… I hope. 😉

As has become my habit for January, I made a maintenance release of my programs. For the most part there aren’t any user-visible changes, but I did fix a bug in Simsu (the game was really wide when first launched) and I updated the translations. A few days ago I also made a Whisker Menu release, and that had some bug fixes in it. Enjoy!

A user recently informed me of an issue with the Windows release of Tetzle: there were missing DLLs that prevented Tetzle from running! Interestingly, the builds ran on my computers without a hitch so when I had tested them before making the release I didn’t notice the issue. I have uploaded new builds of Tetzle 3.0 for Windows, so the issue has been solved.

What happened, as far as I can tell, is that the windeployqt.exe executable from the binary release of Qt 6.7.2 apparently thinks everything is compiled with MSVC instead of MinGW. 🤦 Which means that when it went looking for the compiler runtime libraries—libstdc++-6.dll, etc—it couldn’t find the correct ones.

I solved this by grabbing the windeployqt.exe executable from an earlier Qt binary release and used the qtpaths.exe executable from Qt 6.7.2 so that it would find the correct libraries and plugins, and everything was fine. I suppose I could have just copied the few missing DLLs by hand this time, but now I have everything set up so that I can avoid this issue in the future.

This shows how important it is to inform me of issues: if I don’t know about them, I can’t fix them! Don’t assume somebody has already reported it. 🙂

I am pleased to announce the release of Tetzle 3.0! 🎉

The biggest change is also one that should be completely invisible to most players: I replaced OpenGL with QPainter, which should solve some bugs that players have reported. And make packaging Tetzle easier. (And make Tetzle work with newer version of Qt 6.) It is also why I decided this release should be 3.0 instead of 2.3, to signify the large change in behavior.

I added edge scrolling to the board to make it easier to move the play area without having to drag it with the middle mouse button. There are now nice little arrows on each side to show when you can hover your mouse on a side to move the board, or you can click on the side to speed up the scrolling.

I redesigned the statusbar to make it less confusing. The progress through the game is now labeled clearly, and the zoom slider now has buttons next to it for zooming in and out and to the best fit.

I also redesigned the new game tab of the choose game dialog. It now shows labels next to the buttons to add an image, remove an image, and to set the image properties. I moved the buttons above the image selection area to make them more visible. And I made the tags into a combobox next to them, instead of a sidebar.

And finally, I made it center on the mouse cursor when zooming. That is the way the game was always supposed to work, and was the way it did before the 2.0 release a long time ago. Since it hasn’t worked that way in over a decade, I felt it was best to list that as a new feature. 😉

Along with the new features, I also spent time cleaning up the code to make it easier to maintain. None of those changes should be visible to players. If they are, I did something wrong!

Go and enjoy! And, of course, please report any bugs you find.

I just recently made Tetzle zoom in and out on the mouse cursor. I felt that was much more natural than always zooming in and out on the center of the play area.

While I was doing so, I noticed that the code implied that was how it was already supposed to work. But it didn’t. And yet… when I looked far enough back… it did! Back with Tetzle 2.0 I rewrote the graphics handling and broke the zooming in on the cursor. Unintentionally. Ever since then, it has zoomed in on the center of the play area.

So… does that make this a bugfix for a bug that was 13 years old? Or a reintroduction of a past feature? 😛