Hello all,

A particularely important update is going to happen today. The playroom is going to be unavailable or at least quite a lot disrupted on the following days, but your patience will be rewareded! Here are what is to be expected!

• Our current server is getting old. It's time to move to a new overpowered server! After 9 years of good and loyal service, no doubt that no one will regret capricious network and slow harddisks. We are upgrading to the next level! Your game will be faster and crazier!
• Maybe it doesn't mean anything to you, because you don't see the part of the iceberg under the sea, but it's still that one which allow the rest to float well: The code related to network has been modernized. We are catching up 10 years of lateness! Don't you understand the previous sentence? It doesn't matter, sure you will have the honnour to find better, slightly faster and a lot more stable connections from now on.
• The battle royal mode of the game MagicBlocks is going to appear now. Prepare to fight your friends! WE already told you that the playroom is going to be faster, so you also need to be in condition!
• A new arcade game is coming, and it is summarized with a single number: 2048. If this game is a little special, it isn't necessarily because of its concept, it's more especially because that's the first game signed by third partie developers. Let's hope that it's only the beginning of a long line! Congratulations and a great thank you to the new developer staff.
• You don't like arcade games? Or you don't understand anything to them? It doesn't matter. WE neither have understood how to play that another strange new game that has appeared today, too! Even though we have been told that it would be totally impossible to imagine a simpler game. IF you try it, maybe you will find out how it works? You will tell us back, will you?
• You don't like mystery? So come in and play in known terrain with duck's race! The game gets enriched with new speed challenges, and the possibility to choose with which challenges to play with. Whether you like music, mathematics or great questionnings, you should find them interesting!
• Microsoft is going to automatically uninstall Internet Explorer next 15th of June and replace it with Edge. Following the same logic, we are going to stop supporting this old browser, too. Don't cry, it's good for you! We will finally be able to bring substancial improvements to the web client! More speed, more security and more stability... keep your eyes open!
• AS all that wasn't sufficient, a new version of the windows client is also available today. It is, of course, required to play with all these new features. By the way, we are going to secretely start to use retortion measures against those wo didn't abandonned version 2.2.8 yet. Those who are still version 2.2.0 will even be whiped on the public place, because yes, there are still some! You are now warned!
• And, finally, above all that, you are cordially invited to join our new live chat server. IF you don't speak neither french nor english, it doesn't matter, the vocal server contains an integrated simultaneous translation system. We will be happy to discuss all together and to have a good evening, whatever your language and your location is! As a first time world-wide, an instantaneous audiodescription system should normally also be installed, so you may even turn on your webcam, if you aren't too shy...

Long live the playroom and have fun!

Nice one ;)

Hello,
finally after hours of crying, I managed to get some strenghth back and write this post.
My dear Internet explorer, it is such a shame that the Playroom will no longer support you. You have been such a trusty browser, going from page to page, making a unique click sound while a page is loading, and in fact the only browser having the coolest nickname ever, Internet exploder! Can you give any nickname like that to any modern browser? I challenge you to try. I mean come on, it's being replaced by Edge, what kind of a name is that? An edge of what? Maybe it drove you to the edge of insanity until it finally became accessible.

Just like Windows XP and my dear 2.2.8 version of the Playroom client, I absolutely refuse to stop using Internet explorer.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and thus an era is over. I will never forget minutes and minutes of fun while waiting for Internet explorer 8 to load a page, or the times it was crashing for no apparent reason.

Fortunately, there is a positive here. I tried out the new voice chat server, and I am really, really impressed. Of course, it makes me sad that it doesn't work with Internet explorer, but if I somehow tolerate that, the server is extremely innovative and I never thought something like this would be possible. Honestly you deserve an award for creating something like this and I am extremely surprised you made it free. The server costs for maintaining something like this must be huge.

Finally, I haven't been offered any Windows client updates, but that might be because the client realized I am an Internet explorer fanboy and now hates me. Can this somehow be fixed, maybe by using something even older like Netscape navigator so that the client can finally realize Internet explorer isn't so bad after all? Or maybe it takes 2048 minutes for the update to finally show up? If so I'll patiently wait, meanwhile trying to remember my famous Magic blocks combo giving hundreds of thousands of points, as well as improving my Duck racing speed challenges skills.

Getting serious for only a slight moment, this post was written very well. Congratulations. No idea if there is a certain truth to it, seeing as to how many of these features were announced beforehand and we have been expecting them, but whatever happens, at least one part of the post is completely serious without a doubt and I fully agree with it, Long live the playroom!

realy that is good

all that I have to say is, h.

I did not receive the new update for windows client

The joke here was that we got pranked by ourselves thinking we got pranked at the first place. Well we sort of did but... Awesome! Welcome to the new update.

Hello,
first of all, thank you very much for this update, looking forward to seeing everything new.
Unfortunately at the moment lots of things are quite broken. I assume you already know about many of them, but in case not...

• First, arcade games seem completely broken now. When starting either Magic blocks or 2048, there is the arcade mode on sound, and immediately the arcade mode off sound and the game terminates.
The debug says:
"Found game archive for magicblocks-10 found in C:\Users\wweni\AppData\Roaming\QCGCWX30\games\magicblocks-10.game
Starting arcade mode
Loading sample arcade-mode-on...
Sample arcade-mode-on found in datafile
Running game magicblocks-10
Loading script main [version 2.36.0]...
Script main was not found
Stopping arcade mode
Loading sample arcade-mode-off...
Sample arcade-mode-off found in datafile
Closing game magicblocks-10
Destroying game engine...
Destroying AngelScript engine...
AngelScript engine destroyed
Destroying game engine...
Destroying AngelScript engine...
AngelScript engine destroyed"

• There is also instability with connections. In particular, reconnecting to any game doesn't work at all. It can easily be reproduced. Create any game, add a bot and start it. Now, hold any key like T or W so that the anti flood feature kicks you out. However, instead of reconnecting back to your current game, you are back in the main room. If your game in the previous example was public, you will even see a table still existing with a ghost version of yourself. You can't do anything with this table because you are no longer the table master, the ghost version of yourself is. This is in particular bad if someone has a bad connection since they can't reconnect to any game in progress.
• It is also impossible to play Chess or Go with bots. The Stockfish engine doesn't want to download and gives a 404 download error.
• Tables saved on the previous server can't be restored. Instead they give an error and automatically get deleted.
• In duck racing, when being asked to choose the types of duels you want to use, there is some weirdness with menu options. At the bottom, there is a cancel option. This cancel option however is the real one because it actually starts the game. One option above it is validate, that one has a bug, and instead of validating, it unchecks the duel above it and causes the menu to act weird in general. Other people also said that Duck racing is generally unstable and seems to kick people out randomly and displaying a ghost version of their connection.
• Finally, something quite weird happened at a Uno game I had today. History below, it was a game with 3 people:

It's saad.almasry's turn.
saad.almasry plays a red draw two.
mohammed_albasha draws 2 cards.
mohammed_albasha gets 59 points.
Nikola gets 42 points.
saad.almasry gets 0 points.
Scores:
Nikola: 278.
saad.almasry: 593.
mohammed_albasha: 713.

mohammed_albasha has reached the score limit of 666 points and is now out of the game.
You are the winner!

As you can see, the third person here reached the limit and got eliminated, which is fine. However, I don't understand why I won the game, instead of it continuing with the 2 of us.

Either way, thanks for all your work and I'm sure over time the stability we knew will return.

In addition, when you switch your internet connection to another one while on the main room, your Playroom will reconnect, however, that's not the problem. You will be online but you will be shown as offline. You can, thus, message people but they won't be able to reply to you. Eventually, playroom fixes it by reconnecting us and then we are again seen.

I knew I was going to get rickrolled, and still I clicked the link. Damn it.

Hello,

I hope that you appreciate the update, in spite of the various bugs and stability issues. They will progressively go away, but be patient. It might still take a while until everything is solved.
As you can see, we have indeed moved to a new server and upgraded networking-related code. Given that this is quite an huge change, it's normal that everything isn't perfect directly from the beginning.

@Nikola:

• Arcade games should now be playable
• Chess and Go 404 errors are solved
• Saving and restoring table is working now

Ghost related issues will take considerably longer until we solve them all, perhaps more than a week or two.

Yoooo,
thank you for the update indeed. April 1st is that day at which even your kitchen sink or apple airpods would attempt to fool you, and after spending some time in the live chat I was wondering where this is actually going. I'm very excited to see the new features and hope that all the issues mentioned above are going to be fixed eventually. Interestingly enough, the weird menu behavior in duckracing occurs only when two players are at a table, with 3 or more it behaves as it should. Also a small suggestion regarding the new menu sounds. They're a fun idea, but could there be an option in the future to turn them off if one desires? Thank you and keep up the great work. :)

Hello,

I hope that you appreciate the update, in spite of the various bugs and stability issues. They will progressively go away, but be patient. It might still take a while until everything is solved.

Of course, take your time. I understand how major such a change can be. I appreciate everything that was done, even the press enter game, which can be silly on surface, but actually still has something to it and is quite hilarious.
Thanks for the quick fixes as well, the arcade mode works now. Are there any instructions for 2048? I guess to ask better, can you access the instructions file in any way? There is a readme-en.md file in the archive but obviously the archive is inaccessible for us.

How can I use chat server? where is it?

Hello,
so the main problem with Magic blocks multiplayer seems to be that you can't check the current amount of players in the game or you don't get notified when someone joins. I specify that I don't mean the players on your table.
So as far as I understand, the way this works is that the table master creates a game, opens Magic blocks, chooses battle royal, sets the difficulty and the mode and then waits for others before pressing enter to start the game.
On the other hand, other players must join the table and press enter, and then wait for the master to start.
On this last step, the master is never notified if other players are ready or not, because even though they have joined the table, if they didn't press enter they won't be in the game.
It also seems that this is quite independent of the master too, not sure if this is a bug or not. I can start the game, and someone else can join the table and press enter 2 minutes later, and they will still be in the game. Similarly, I can press escape as the master to stop the game, but other players will still continue playing normally. This last one isn't bad, I wouldn't want the game to stop if I get disconnected or something, but there should be more notifications of other people leaving and joining generally.

Thanks.

hello, where are the rules of press enter? thanks!

How can I access the live chat?

@nunoportugal you just have to press enter when you hear the sound. I guess. I didn't investigate much

I do not know where it is iether. All I got was a darn rickroll!!!

There's no live chat, that was an obvious April joke.
Or maybe it wasn't...

Anyway, for press enter, I'll quickly outline how I understood it and why it's an interesting game despite the silly concept. Of course, it has only been a day so it's possible I got it wrong as well.
The basic principle is to press the enter key when you hear a sound. However, it's not all about doing it as fast as possible.
The longer you wait, more points you will get, but of course you are risking that your opponent will press it before you and take the points.
This is much more interesting with more than 2 people. In 1 V 1 it is quite boring and is really all about speed, the 444 default score is even way too much.
However, with, say, 5 people, the only person who will get no points at all is the last one who pressed enter.
So, if 4 people press enter, the 5th one will get nothing. Thus, you are trying to be, if possible, the second last person to press enter, and thus get more points than everyone else, but still not to be the last one to do it and get nothing.

Of course, you can hear when other people pressed enter based on the buzzer sound. Finally, I'm not entirely sure yet what causes you to lose points. It's probably pressing enter before any sound at all happens, but I think there is something else as well.

Guess I will try it again I suppose. Also, why would they rickroll us with that? that is so disapointing.

Was April 1st.

Hello,
after the latest reboot reconnecting is fixed in games, but now disconnecting is broken :)

What I mean by this is that when you press enter on leave the Playroom, you don't actually leave. You are online for about 10 more minutes, and your friends see something like, Nikola, available, friend, en,
without main room, free table or anything else. Furthermore, each time you reconnect your friends hear as if you have just entered the Playroom. I guess that's why there are so many reconnection messages in the main room, because if someone leaves, and then enters again in this period of about 10 minutes, they will only reconnect and not actually leave and enter as before.

Finally, the Uno bug I mentioned above happens only with 3 or more people, and it happens whenever one person is eliminated, but there are only 2 more remaining in the game. This short example with bots and a score limit of 33 points:
You play a blue 1.
Nikola gets 0 points.
James bond gets 40 points.
Albatros gets 20 points.
Scores:
Nikola: 0.
Albatros: 29.
James bond: 43.

James bond has reached the score limit of 33 points and is now out of the game.
You are the winner!
The table is now open for new players.
So James Bond got eliminated, but me and Albatros didn't continue the game as expected, rather instead I won the entire game.

Thanks.

What makes you lose points in the enter key game also besides what Nicola said is when you keep pressing enter, enter, enter, more enters.

How are you supposed to play this new 2048 game anyway? I mean whatever I perss after I start a game, nothing works.

@delmar-barry It is with shift and the arrow keys.
And @aminiel there seems to be another bug, now as Playroom restarted, I was playing 2048, at first, I saw how everyone was reconnecting on the main room, as if I would be there. Then I finished my game, it didn't even tell me how many points I made, I have no option to leave it and the menu just says create a new table. I'm stuck there and I can't create anything nor even leave the playroom, only if I pressed alt f4, but not from the menu.

I take it that the braille challenge is in French braille as it does not make it clear when selecting the braille option what language it is in.

In English braille the basic letters and numbers are the same but contracted braille varies from British English, to US English, Australian English etc. They are lessening some of the contractions (much to my annoyance) to have a more universal English language braille system for all braille English Countries.

The letters don't differ in English and French braille systems but the numbers definitely do, so it'd be better to not have the number challenges if possible.

Hello,

Braille challenge in duck's race only asks for simple letters from A to Z and digits from 0 to 9.
As far as I know, letters are universal, but I'm wondering if I should remove digits, as they don't seem to be universal, as some players already reported. Thoughts ?

I didn't know digits are not universal.
in Arabic it is same as English, the computer braille probably the only place I've seen numbers differently.