Hey there, Hive Fans! We at BlueLine Game Studios are happy to announce that we have just launched a Kickstarter for our newest game Lost Cities! It uses the same great engine that we started with Hive and have been growing over the years for our other games. The game will be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as usual and we hope to use the Kickstarter to fund a bunch of translations and a few other new bells and whistles. We hope you'll take a few minutes to check out the Kickstarter: http://bluelinegamestudios.com/kickstarter/lost-cities We also have already put out a demo for the game that you can check out on the Lost Cities Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/520680/Lost_Cities/ Thanks for your continued support of BlueLine Games! Enjoy!

Hey there, Hive Fans! We at BlueLine Game Studios are happy to announce that we have just launched a Kickstarter for our newest game Lost Cities! It uses the same great engine that we started with Hive and have been growing over the years for our other games. The game will be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as usual and we hope to use the Kickstarter to fund a bunch of translations and a few other new bells and whistles. We hope you'll take a few minutes to check out the Kickstarter: http://bluelinegamestudios.com/kickstarter/lost-cities We also have already put out a demo for the game that you can check out on the Lost Cities Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/520680/Lost_Cities/ Thanks for your continued support of BlueLine Games! Enjoy!

Sorry about that. It turns out the issue is that some database upgrades - that we made in the last few days - had decided that "" was not a safe character. So any time we were trying to place a piece to the top-left of another piece (in Hive notation this is like "wG1") we would place the piece ON TOP of the other piece instead. This is fixed! Now you can move to the top-left of another piece successfully again ;) The fix was on the game-server so there is no Steam update required. Please let us know if you run into any other issues! Thanks for playing! PS: We're still on super sale, so please tell a friend! :) http://store.steampowered.com/app/251210/

Sorry about that. It turns out the issue is that some database upgrades - that we made in the last few days - had decided that "\" was not a safe character. So any time we were trying to place a piece to the top-left of another piece (in Hive notation this is like "\wG1") we would place the piece ON TOP of the other piece instead. This is fixed! Now you can move to the top-left of another piece successfully again ;) The fix was on the game-server so there is no Steam update required. Please let us know if you run into any other issues! Thanks for playing! PS: We're still on super sale, so please tell a friend! :) http://store.steampowered.com/app/251210/

So, Hive is on sale which is good because more players (yay!) but it seems like we created a bug somehow, in the last few days. Really not sure what we could have changed that's related to this... but somehow, when piece placements are coming in, we're seeing stuff like new pieces being placed onto the Hive (even Spiders, etc... which aren't allowed to be on the Hive ever, much-less during placement). Really sorry for the inconvenience, but wanted to let you all know that we're aware of it & actively trying to fix it!

UPDATE: Fixed! So, Hive is on sale which is good because more players (yay!) but it seems like we created a bug somehow, in the last few days. Really not sure what we could have changed that's related to this... but somehow, when piece placements are coming in, we're seeing stuff like new pieces being placed onto the Hive (even Spiders, etc... which aren't allowed to be on the Hive ever, much-less during placement). Really sorry for the inconvenience, but wanted to let you all know that we're aware of it & actively trying to fix it!

First, the updates & translations!!

• 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.
• 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.
• Made Alert dialogs center in the screen correctly (they were slightly off-center before).
• Made it so the buttons on the main menu are not partially covered by the tiles on the left.
• Added Spanish translation (thanks dani_as0!)
• Added Polish translation (thanks Ti_Ichigo from our LiveCoding.tv channel!)
• Made it so that asynchronously created games also have the opponent's name added to the serverName when the 2nd player joins.

Sales!

Want "Simply Chess: Premium" for free?

First, the updates & translations!!

• 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.
• 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.
• Made Alert dialogs center in the screen correctly (they were slightly off-center before).
• Made it so the buttons on the main menu are not partially covered by the tiles on the left.
• Added Spanish translation (thanks dani_as0!)
• Added Polish translation (thanks Ti_Ichigo from our LiveCoding.tv channel!)
• Made it so that asynchronously created games also have the opponent's name added to the serverName when the 2nd player joins.

Sales!

Want "Simply Chess: Premium" for free?

After a few months of Early Access, all the kinks are worked out and Tatsu by John Yianni, is fully launched on Steam!! The tabletop version is available in Europe and is working its way out around the United States. http://store.steampowered.com/app/445070/ At launch, Tatsu is available in English, Spanish, and Polish on Steam! As time goes on we're planning to add more translations (and we also have plans to release translations for Hive as well!). Thanks for your long-term support!! For anyone who doesn't know the history, Hive was our first game on Steam.. and now we're still here in 2016, releasing our 5th game in 5 years! :D

After a few months of Early Access, all the kinks are worked out and Tatsu by John Yianni, is fully launched on Steam!! The tabletop version is available in Europe and is working its way out around the United States. http://store.steampowered.com/app/445070/ At launch, Tatsu is available in English, Spanish, and Polish on Steam! As time goes on we're planning to add more translations (and we also have plans to release translations for Hive as well!). Thanks for your long-term support!! For anyone who doesn't know the history, Hive was our first game on Steam.. and now we're still here in 2016, releasing our 5th game in 5 years! :D

There is no special occasion for this update, other than that we've had a ton of fixes piling up and I really wanted to get them out there... so we did it! Windows, Mac, and Linux all have these fixes & should be as identical as they can be.

• Rules bug!! Pillbug was able to use its special ability right after being moved. (thanks for reporting this, andypie!)
• The build is about 100megs smaller on your hard-drive. This is mostly due to changes in the compression by cutting out the Monogame content pipeline.
• 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 the occasional crash on Mac/Linux that occurred especially when entering the Online Game Menu screen very quickly after starting the program.
• 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.
• Game warned "this game is rated" when forfeiting, even if it was not rated.

There is no special occasion for this update, other than that we've had a ton of fixes piling up and I really wanted to get them out there... so we did it! Windows, Mac, and Linux all have these fixes & should be as identical as they can be.

• Rules bug!! Pillbug was able to use its special ability right after being moved. (thanks for reporting this, andypie!)
• The build is about 100megs smaller on your hard-drive. This is mostly due to changes in the compression by cutting out the Monogame content pipeline.
• 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 the occasional crash on Mac/Linux that occurred especially when entering the Online Game Menu screen very quickly after starting the program.
• 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.
• Game warned "this game is rated" when forfeiting, even if it was not rated.

John Yianni, the designer of the Hive board game, has released a new board game: Tatsu... and we have made a Steam version that's available in Early Access now! http://store.steampowered.com/app/445070/ If you like Hive, you'll provably love Tatsu too!

John Yianni, the designer of the Hive board game, has released a new board game: Tatsu... and we have made a Steam version that's available in Early Access now! http://store.steampowered.com/app/445070/ If you like Hive, you'll provably love Tatsu too!

Due to the work we've been doing on our other games, along with the various issues that have shown up in the Hive forums on Steam, there have been a ton of changes since the last big update. Everything mentioned here is now pushed for Windows, Mac, and Linux (some might have appeared slightly earlier on Windows). If I've been keeping track of it correctly, here is a fairly complete list:

• A handful of FNA/OpenGL fixes which will make the game work on more of the Intel HD Graphics cards that had problems, but not all of them.
• A smaller log file (again)
• Better display of users with Apostrophes in their names, in the Online Games Menu Screen (OGMS).
• Fixed a rare crash in the OGSM ListView.
• Added visible Menu button to the game screen. This makes the game now fully functional for mouse-only players. This is actually pretty important for accessibility. See the "Accessibility" section of a recent Khet announcement for more info on this.
• Made it so Passes get sent to the server by the last-mover since we know that player is online. This keeps the activePlayerId in sync better.
• Fixed an error when a pillbug-enabled mosquito moved an enemy disabled-mosquito. Thanks to user Quodlibet for reporting this!
• Elo Ratings can't be replayed from Steam Notifications now.
• 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. This should solve a lot of the more mysterious bugs that were being seen.
• Since the last release of Hive, we rewrote 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 very accurately. Hive runs at a slightly lower resolution than our other games (so the fonts tend to be larger) and the fonts actually look REALLY nice in the latest version (I may have been staring at fonts too long).

Due to the work we've been doing on our other games, along with the various issues that have shown up in the Hive forums on Steam, there have been a ton of changes since the last big update. Everything mentioned here is now pushed for Windows, Mac, and Linux (some might have appeared slightly earlier on Windows). If I've been keeping track of it correctly, here is a fairly complete list:

• A handful of FNA/OpenGL fixes which will make the game work on more of the Intel HD Graphics cards that had problems, but not all of them.
• A smaller log file (again)
• Better display of users with Apostrophes in their names, in the Online Games Menu Screen (OGMS).
• Fixed a rare crash in the OGSM ListView.
• Added visible Menu button to the game screen. This makes the game now fully functional for mouse-only players. This is actually pretty important for accessibility. See the "Accessibility" section of a recent Khet announcement for more info on this.
• Made it so Passes get sent to the server by the last-mover since we know that player is online. This keeps the activePlayerId in sync better.
• Fixed an error when a pillbug-enabled mosquito moved an enemy disabled-mosquito. Thanks to user Quodlibet for reporting this!
• Elo Ratings can't be replayed from Steam Notifications now.
• 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. This should solve a lot of the more mysterious bugs that were being seen.
• Since the last release of Hive, we rewrote 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 very accurately. Hive runs at a slightly lower resolution than our other games (so the fonts tend to be larger) and the fonts actually look REALLY nice in the latest version (I may have been staring at fonts too long).

Improvements!

• Fixed a weird edge-case bug for some async games which had passes in them, and then would not let users re-connect to the game.
• Fixed the Online Game Menu Screen crash that was happening on Mac OSX.
• Redid our release-process to remove a bunch of un-needed assets that were left around but weren't being cleaned up. This leads to less hard-drive space being used for the game, and significantly less bandwidth used for the initial install. This was a pretty big change. If you were to install Hive game 3 times (once on Windows, Mac, and Linux) the total download required would have been 909.4mb and now it is 583.5mb... for installing on all three OSes, the total hard-drive space required would have been 321.4mb, now it's 247.9mb. :)
• The logFile now has a .txt extension instead of .log. This makes it easier for users to open it, and makes it easier for us to open on our mobile-phones so we can provide support to people even when we're afk.
• Reduced some of the log-spam so logFile.txt will be smaller.
• Added "Join Steam Group" button.

Free game!

Improvements!

• Fixed a weird edge-case bug for some async games which had passes in them, and then would not let users re-connect to the game.
• Fixed the Online Game Menu Screen crash that was happening on Mac OSX.
• Redid our release-process to remove a bunch of un-needed assets that were left around but weren't being cleaned up. This leads to less hard-drive space being used for the game, and significantly less bandwidth used for the initial install. This was a pretty big change. If you were to install Hive game 3 times (once on Windows, Mac, and Linux) the total download required would have been 909.4mb and now it is 583.5mb... for installing on all three OSes, the total hard-drive space required would have been 321.4mb, now it's 247.9mb. :)
• The logFile now has a .txt extension instead of .log. This makes it easier for users to open it, and makes it easier for us to open on our mobile-phones so we can provide support to people even when we're afk.
• Reduced some of the log-spam so logFile.txt will be smaller.
• Added "Join Steam Group" button.

Free game!

As usual, we've been improving our Board Game Engine in the weeks since the previous update. We ended up with a large number of improvements. Hive was doing pretty well, so there was only one significant bugfix, but there are a lot of little improvements to polish more of the edges. This release is for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

• Fixed the occasional 1-second stutter in the UI. It would happen about once every 40 seconds & it appeared at the previous release. Really uncool... but totally fixed now.
• The occasional disappearing buttons in the OGMS are fixed. In some rare cases, all of the buttons would be missing from that menu & you'd have to restart the game. That wasn't fun!
• LogFile.log is no longer part of the build, so if you "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" in Steam, it won't make you download the logfile over again.
• The BuildID is now in the log-file. This is useful for detecting if someone's Steam client is being stubborn and not upgrading their version of the game.
• Upgraded to Steam SDK 1.34 (newest version).
• 2D rendering improvements (mainly visible on the Rules and Online Game Menu Screen (OGMS) on slower computers, especially as we get more games in the OGMS at once.

• Fixed the "Rematch" functionality which hadn't worked correctly for online play since the move to BlueLine Cloud. Now it's good again.
• Sliders were very finicky for clicking/dragging before. They work as expected again.

We might have picked up some other improvements to the engine, but there were at least two changes:

• Games that are already started, now show their Game Settings in the list of games on the Online Game Menu Screen.
• When reloading a game from the server and all of the moves get played in rapid succession, it no longer plays all of the move-sounds on top of each other (which could be rather jarring if your speakers were turned up). Now the replay of those moves is silent.

It's finally here!! :D Today, we've released Asynchronous Play! This means that you can play a game even when your opponent is not online (and vice-versa). So it'll be a lot easier to find players and to finish games. Here's some things you need to know!

• All online games now support Async... instead of Quitting, you can now "Leave" the game. This is perfectly safe, you will be able to come back at any time.
• All online games now have a "turn timeout" setting which controls how long you have to make a move. The default is 7 days, so this is typically just to prevent users from abandoning a game when they're losing. If a turn-timeout passes without the active player moving, then that player forfeits the game.
• To avoid the problem of two people having to be online at exactly the same time to start a game, you can now "Start Alone". Basically: if you "Create Game" online, then you hit "Ready" in the lobby, but nobody else is in the lobby yet, you'll have the option to "Start Alone". At that point, you'll go into the game (and you can even move, if it's your turn) even though there is no opponent. You can safely leave the game and it will still sit around waiting for someone to join it. NOTE: You can not start a Private Game alone... because you can't invite Steam players who aren't online (we're working on another way to do this eventually).
• The first time you play, you will get prompted to connect to "BlueLine Cloud". This is not a 3rd party service (we're BlueLine.. it's just the name of our game-servers). If you connect, then your data will be available to you outside of Steam (sort of anti-DRM). If you choose "No Thanks" you can connect later, but it's recommended that you do connect.

• Our entire graphics library has been updated to use the latest version of FNA. This increases performance (better frame-rate on really old computers) and should make the game more compatible to graphics cards that have often had problems.
• GamePad support on Linux is back (it had broken).
• The list of games scrolls better
• ?? Probably a lot! We've been holding back releases since January to make sure that Async was super-stable before releasing it on Hive. We released it first on Reversi, then improved it, then released it on Khet 2.0 and improved it more.... then tested more, polished a few things, and only NOW is Hive getting it! Much has happened in the meantime. Keep an eye out for any bugs!

A while back, we mentioned that we were making Async play for all of our games. We released it along with Reversi. Made a bunch of fixes & new features (such as allowing starting of games asynchronously) and then released it on Khet 2.0... more fixes & features (including re-doing the connect-to-cloud process), and now it's coming to Hive. It's done, it's tested, and we're just waiting due to timing-reasons. In the meantime, we're doing small housecleaning-type stuff to make it shine around the edges. We've made a bunch of fixes to async since it first launched with Reversi, so hopefully the Hive version will be pretty stable even at launch. It's been months since we've pushed a release of Hive, so much has changed in our engine. We've update the rendering engine, made performance improvements (so it can run fast even on slow computers), and more. Async play seems to have finally stirred up a bigger online community for Khet 2.0, and I'm hoping it does even better for Hive. I'm really sorry that it's taken so long for async to come to Hive (I really thought it would be a couple of weeks, not a couple of months). Hive is our "crown-jewel" so to speak (our largest community), so we wanted to make sure the async was really good by the time we released it. We might only get one chance at this. Multiplayer communities are tricky because you always have to stay above a certain threshold of users... if you drop below, then users stop checking for games (ever!) and it just gets desolate quickly. With this update, we plan to FINALLY turn the tide and get the online Hive community to critical mass. After the release, please contact us with any bugs you find... and please have fun finding other people online to play with! :-) We will try to drive a bunch of people to the online play, right around the time of the release... and if we get enough games going, hopefully there will always be some action in the online community.
Talk to you in about a week!

A while back, we mentioned that we were making Async play for all of our games. We released it along with Reversi. Made a bunch of fixes & new features (such as allowing starting of games asynchronously) and then released it on Khet 2.0... more fixes & features (including re-doing the connect-to-cloud process), and now it's coming to Hive. It's done, it's tested, and we're just waiting due to timing-reasons. In the meantime, we're doing small housecleaning-type stuff to make it shine around the edges. We've made a bunch of fixes to async since it first launched with Reversi, so hopefully the Hive version will be pretty stable even at launch. It's been months since we've pushed a release of Hive, so much has changed in our engine. We've update the rendering engine, made performance improvements (so it can run fast even on slow computers), and more. Async play seems to have finally stirred up a bigger online community for Khet 2.0, and I'm hoping it does even better for Hive. I'm really sorry that it's taken so long for async to come to Hive (I really thought it would be a couple of weeks, not a couple of months). Hive is our "crown-jewel" so to speak (our largest community), so we wanted to make sure the async was really good by the time we released it. We might only get one chance at this. Multiplayer communities are tricky because you always have to stay above a certain threshold of users... if you drop below, then users stop checking for games (ever!) and it just gets desolate quickly. With this update, we plan to FINALLY turn the tide and get the online Hive community to critical mass. After the release, please contact us with any bugs you find... and please have fun finding other people online to play with! :-) We will try to drive a bunch of people to the online play, right around the time of the release... and if we get enough games going, hopefully there will always be some action in the online community.
Talk to you in about a week!

Just wanted to give a head's up on some significant changes before they go live in a few weeks. One very common request we've had from users is for the option to do "Asynchronous Play" which means the ability to play someone even if they don't stay online. So you can just login when you have time, play one turn, then log-off and the game keeps going. We've always planned to have this, and now we're finally on the way to having it done! This is not something Steam supports, unfortunately, so we have to create our own game-servers and replace a bunch of the built in Steam networking stuff.

== What changes will I see? ==

• You will now be able to play with people even when you are not both online the whole time. This is sort of like "play-by-mail" versions of Chess. This should lead to more online play, as well as some MUCH more challenging matches for those who want them.
• When you go to play an online game for the first time after the change, you will be prompted to set up a BlueLine Cloud account. This is a free account, and all it does is tell our game servers who you are on Steam. This is just a technical limitation. This is very similar to the PlayFab signup when playing Planetary Annihilation.
• If everything works as planned, you'll never have to log into BlueLine Cloud manually.
• Email: When you provide an email address during BlueLine Cloud account, we'll NEVER sell that address to 3rd parties. We WILL use it for sending you notifications such as "It's your turn" or "You have 1 more hour to play a turn or you forfeit!". You'll be able to turn off/on each notification at any time. We'll also put the email addr on our BlueLine announcement list which is super sparse (I think we've sent 2 messages in 4 years) and you can, of course, unsubscribe at any time.
• When you set up an online game, there will now be a Game Setting for Turn Timeout. If a player takes longer than this amount of time, they forfeit the game. We currently plan to allow this to go as high as 30 days per turn and as low as 1 minute per turn. This is not meant to be an implementation of "speed" games or "timed" games (that is likely to come later), this is just a way to prevent people from having games go on literally forever if they're losing.
• The timeout settings will show up in the list of online games. It'll say something like "7D/turn" which means you can take no more than 7 days per turn.
• Some fixes: Steam was always really bad at actually reporting which games were in progress. Now, we're in control of that code so it's likely to be way more accurate.
• Some potential bugs: Please keep in mind, we're running our own game-servers now, and there are likely to be hiccups and potentially even some server down-time. We'll be doing our best to keep them up as much as humanly possible, but our game-servers are about 10 years younger than Valve's so realistically, we'll probably mess up occasionally before everything is perfectly stable. Please be patient with us & report any problems as soon as you see them!

== Future Coolness that this enables ==

== Questions? ==

Linux was one bugfix behind Mac & PC. Just rebuilt & pushed, so they should all be in line with eachother. Thanks to Clint B for pointing this out!

A bug was reported, that the AI was able to move a piece which had just been moved by the human's Pillbug on the prior turn. This is fixed now. We fixed our Mac test environment, so Mac now has all of the fixes from our previous release. All three environments (PC/Mac/Linux) are in sync once again. HARMONIOUS! :D

Hey there! As "unforseen4ce" pointed out, we had some regressions in our AI on the last release... especially on the Drone level. That's been sorted, and all the AI now will actually be better than it's ever been (by a little... most noticeable on Hive Mind). The release today is only Windows & Linux so far (I've b0rked our Mac dev environment when I upgraded to Yosemite... will get that solved soonish though). Here's everything that got pushed today:

• AI (especially Drone level) made some dumb errors. Fixed that. This was a regression that we introduced in our last push. The fixed version is better than the AI was before the push that added the brokenness.
• When someone joins the Online game global lobby, now there is an audible sound effect (the volume is controlled by the SFX slider in Settings) this will help you notice when someone else shows up. That was a huge problem when waiting around before... if you just had Hive open in the background, you wouldn't even notice when someone else showed up.
• Now when people join/leave the global lobby, there will be System Messages in the chat box which will announce the person so you can keep track of who is coming & going.
• Made it easier to see how to join a game in the new Online game global lobby.
• Fixed display of Game Modifiers on Game Settings screen (that was another regression in the last push).

While we were making Khet 2.0 (also on Steam), we built a Group Chat into the Online Game Screen so that players can see who else is currently online, hanging around. Since we wrote one engine that powers both Hive and Khet, it was easy to pull that back into Hive! We also made a bunch of other fixes, so here's an overview of the fixes to Hive that we made over the last several weeks and released tonight (and remembered to write down ;)):

• Redesign Online Game Menu with a new Group Chat and member-list
• Made the progress bar update in real-time (it was too jumpy before)
• Fix the initial Loading progress bar (it went to 50% then back to 25%).
• Made the loading time slightly faster
• If you press "Home" key to set the camera back to the default position, it won't spin around in a bunch of circles to get there (even if you've spun the camera to get to where you were).
• Disabling sound in windows was causing the game not to boot for some users.
• Made the "Play Hive Like a Champion" links in the credits actually open a link (instead of just being text).
• Turned all links in Credits into clickable links.

Long time, no release! :) Things have been fairly stable, so we haven't had to do any emergency releases. If you've been following @bluelinegames on twitter, you might have noticed that we've even been able to start on our next project, Khet 2.0 - the Laser Game! In the meantime, we've been making regular tweaks to Hive & then this morning we finally routed out a couple of Online errors that were causing certain users to have a whole barrel of trouble when trying to make online games. Tonight, that build went live & should automatically update for you the next time you run Steam. Here's what's in the release we just pushed to PC, Mac, and Linux:

• Dropped the number of games needed to get a full Elo Rating down to 15 games (too many people were getting discouraged in the 20's... that's sad!).
• BUGFIX: Under certain cases, some players would start online games which would be confused about whose turn it was, so the game would basically be locked.
• BUGFIX: Under other conditions, players could start a game where one player would have a different set of pieces enabled, which lead to crashing.
• Performance improvement to rendering... on low-end systems that had framerates that were low, this should increase the frame-rate by about 50%! (Geoff is such a baller at this stuff)
• Made the "Esc" button clickable on the screen to exit the game.
• Automatically remember the FullScreen setting (made it "sticky") so player doesn't have to go fullscreen manually, every time they play the game (if that's how they prefer it).
• Capture STDOUT and send it to our logfile... this will make debugging customer issues even easier in the future.
• At user-request, updated the coupon-code in the Credits to be the 2nd Edition of the "Play Hive Like A Champion" book. Thanks to Randy for creating a discount for the new version also! :)

We just pushed a small maintenance update. This build includes the following:

• Upgraded our MonoGame-SDL2 branch to the latest code (FNA). This should fix a rendering issue that one user was having.
• Upgraded to the latest version of the Steam SDK. This just fixes an occasional bug that made the Steam avatars too big on Linux sometimes.
• Fixed the granting of Ladybug achievements. They were sometimes granting even if the Ladybug wasn't the piece that moved.
• Made the Online Games menu screen not flicker when it updates the list of games.

Tonight we released an update (on Windows, Mac, and Linux simultaneously) which add a handful of new, fun features. == Elo Ratings & Steam Leaderboards == First off are "Elo Ratings" - the same rating system used to rate professional Chess players. These Ratings will be used for the Steam Leaderboards. The very simple overview is that you'll be rated starting at 1200. If you beat someone at a game of Hive online, their rating will go down and yours will go up. If they're rated much higher than you, the amount you gain is higher. So if you beat someone rated 1400, your score goes up more than if you'd only beaten someone rated 1250. Similarly, if you lose to someone with a very low score, your score would drop more than if you lost to someone with a very high score. One thing to be aware of is that for this system to work, everyone starts out with a "Provisional" rating until they've played 30 games. If you see someone with a rating with "P" at the end (eg: "1200P") that means that they're still starting out. If you're fully rated, playing against a newbie will NOT affect your score. This makes it easy for you to play new people without worrying that they are really good & their artificially-low score could affect you. Until you have played 30 rated games, your Elo Rating will NOT be submitted to the Steam Leaderboard since it's not considered to be a highly scientific rating until you've played a decent number of games. == Private Lobbies == If you want to play an online game with a specific friend, now you can create a Private Lobby. If you create a game with a Private Lobby, then your game won't be listed in the list of games in the Online Main Menu. This way, you don't have to worry about strangers joining the game and having to explain to them that you're waiting for someone else. Since Private Lobbies aren't listed, to get your friend into the game you must use the "Invite Friend" button to invite them in. == Bugfix == We were also made aware of a bug that placing certain pieces after a certain string of events could cause the game to crash. We believe we have this fixed, and this fix is why we rushed this build out without better documentation about the new Elo Ratings ^_^ ...don't tell anyone. But if you saw that bug before, we're sorry: you shouldn't be seeing it again. If you ever see this or any other bugs, please let us know! :) Alrighty... so get out there and play some online games! Since all players have to play 30 rated games to make it on the Leaderboard, it's going to be a race for the top spots! :D

Today, both the Mac and Linux versions of Hive are released! This means that you can play from any major OS against your friends on any major OS! If you're not familiar w/the process: you buy the game once and it works on all of the platforms... they're not really different "products". Please spread the word to any of your friends who run OSX or Linux, and we can continue to build up the online community! PS: To celebrate the release, the game will be 20% off for the next week! For technical reasons the two-pack can't start its discount until tomorrow, but it looks like all of the other discounts are live right now!

Today is awesome. First off... the Mosquito DLC is now released, so now you can get every expansion for Hive on Steam that exists for the table top version! There are also packages that allow players to buy the entire set at once for a discount from the full price. [img=http://bluelinegamestudios.com/hive/press/mosquito_header.png] Mosquito expansion on Steam[/img][/img] Secondly... we know it was a long wait for more than a month to get the expansions out, and we really appreciate everyone sticking with us during that time. To show our appreciation, we gave a "gift copy" of Hive to everyone who bought a copy of Hive before yesterday! [img=http://bluelinegamestudios.com/hive/press/oprahbees.gif][/img] Please note that this apparently takes a while for the gift-copies to roll out. They should automatically show up in your Inventory at some point. We've had many reports of people who have the gift-copies already, as well as many reports of users who haven't gotten them yet. Hang in there! If you still don't have it in a few days, please let us know so we can investigate. Third and finally... there are now Steam Cards and emoticons! Start collecting, crafting, and emoting! I can't wait to get my hands on the :meeple: emoticon! [img=http://bluelinegamestudios.com/hive/press/steamcards_promoimage.png][/img]

• Play locally or online.
  
• Play against the Computer - AI with five difficulty levels.
  
• Includes "hot-seat"/"pass-n-play" mode for players with who want to share one mouse/keyboard or gamepad.
  
• Full 3D with camera-control
  
• Switch seamlessly between playing with mouse/keyboard and gamepad.
  
• Dozens of Steam Stats & Achievements.
  
• Same expansions as table-top version: the Pillbug, the Ladybug, and the Mosquito expansions are available as DLC.
  
• Each expansion can be turned on/off for any individual game. Play with these pieces online even if your opponent does not own the expansions! (they will also get to use the expansions during the game)
  
• Asynchronous play - you can play even when your opponent is offline.
  
• The Hive board game is a winner of many awards including "Mensa Select", "Dr. Toy: Product of Excellence", "Spiele Hits", "International Gamers Awards", and "Juego del año".

• OS: glibc 2.15+. 32/64-bit
• Processor: 1 gHzMemory: 512 MB RAM
• Memory: 512 MB RAM
• Graphics: OpenGL 2.1+ w/ GL_ARB_framebuffer_object
• Storage: 300 MB available space

• OS: glibc 2.15+. 32/64-bit. S3TC texture support
• Processor: 2 gHzMemory: 1 GB RAM
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
• Graphics: OpenGL 3+Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 300 MB available space