If you're stressed out by the timer, click it to deactivate.
Returned with a vengeance:
Right-Click opening behavior
Crash on quit bug after saving a game (don't worry, your save-games are, well, save)
Changed:
Layout on language selection screen to accommodate future additional languages
Fixed:
"Empty" languages in selection screen (such as French and Romanian)
Hitting Esc on game over would pop-up the "back to main?" dialog which is redundant.
Optimizations to tile neighbor calculations
Save-file fragments would remain in user directory.
Crash when quitting game on language selection screen on first run
Introducing Save-Your-Progress™!
Patch Notes 1.1.3.57
Features added:
Automatic saving in campaign mode (different saves for offline and online, currently not synched via Steam)
It's possible to review a board on Game Over by pressing Tab to hide the overlay banner.
Hit F2 to instantly restart a level. Attention: This is instant, no warning will be given.
Groundwork for upcoming Romanian translation
Fresh New Bug:
Game crashes on exit
Changed:
Tiles with craters will still display a clue
Right-clicking on clues will not open its neighbors anymore. Let me know whether you miss this feature.
Layout in Credits box to accommodate future translators
Increased Steam Cloud save space from 1kb to 1Mb
Performance improvements for tile drawing (see below)
Fixed:
Game exceeded vertex buffer memory on lower-end graphics cards when displaying hundreds of bombs (please confirm)
Unnecessary line break in custom mode settings dialog box
Rare bug that would auto-solve every consecutive board in Custom Mode
When hitting Esc on the Classic Mode leaderboards, the "Back" button would remain and crash the game on press
Typo in German translation
New Leaderboard and Tile Scaling
Patch Notes 1.1.3.53
Added:
- Separate leaderboard for "Classic Mode"
- Automatic scaling of tiles to fit inside playing field’s dimensions
- Missing translations to Russian community translation thanks to Google Translate.
Removed
- "Expert Mode" option from settings because Expert Mode dimensions are available automatically after reaching level 30
Changed:
- Minor string organization within language files
- Typo in key of Russian language file
Fixed:
- This time at last (hopefully!): Level reset bug (please confirm!) - Menu buttons would remain visible when starting a game on very rare occasions
- Russian glyphs И and Й in 2 fonts
Stride clicking implemented
Patch Notes 1.1.3.51
Added:
- Stride clicking: You can now open neighbors also by holding the right mouse button down and left-clicking on a clue-numeral with matching flags surrounding it, just like in the old Minesweeper.
- A fudge-load of more events in the log. Please hit Ctrl+S right away after the level reset on you. Please see the previous announcement for details.
Tackling the Level Reset Bug in Beta
I've added the feature to save a log file of the game tracking all variables and functions involved (hopefully!) because I need I your help in tracking down the level-reset bug.
It works like this:
1. Encounter annoying level reset bug
2. Swiftly hit Ctrl+S
3. Select save location
4. Send log to the email address displayed
Since the log file is only 5000 lines long and new events overwrite old ones, please hit Ctrl+S right away and don't wait too long, since there are a couple of lines written with every step, one second equals ~500 lines in the log. otherwise the info is overwritten and the log useless.
Patch Notes 1.1.3.50b
Added (Beta Only):
- Ability to save log file. Just hit Ctrl+S in-game after the dreaded level reset happened. Just don't wait too long, the log file is limited in size.
Added:
- Russian community translation
Fixed:
- A couple of strings in Italian version
- Timer displayed "Error" after 99 minutes, not after 999 minutes
Changed
- Layout of Credits dialog to allow community translators
Cruel levels fixed!
Finally, the patch for less punishing higher levels is here! Currently, it’s in beta but I will roll it out to the public build as well soon, depending on the feedback.
After the patch notes follows an overview including pretty line diagrams of what was wrong with the release version and what I did to make the new and improved level progression work better.
Patch Notes 1.1.3.49
Changed:
- Completely new level progression algorithm (see announcement below)
- Slightly increased chance of Full Health Container pickup to spawn
Fixed:
- UTF-8 format of Turkish translation (please confirm)
- Incorrect Cyrillic glyphs in font (please confirm)
- "Out of Memory" error (please confirm)
- Mirrored glyph in Spanish font set
- Typo in language key
- eng.json now works properly
Added:
- Expert mode option to custom mode once expert mode has been unlocked by reaching level 30
The “old” Level Progression
(for a bigger view of the images, right-click on it and select "View Image" in Firefox)
The diagram on the top shows the relationship between tiles on and hidden bombs. As it is obvious, around level 40, more than half of tiles would be bombs. At level 83, pretty much every tile is hiding a bomb (minus two because the game reserves one tile for the player’s first click and another for the first guess).
Not good.
More telling, however, is the lower diagram that also depicts the very important tile-to-bomb-ratio of a given level (green line). The algorithm of the release version was pretty simple, just increase the number of bombs by two with each new level. Since after level 10 the board couldn’t grow any further in size (red and yellow lines), the ratio of bombs increased linearly. I thought that Fine Sweeper would be played like an arcade game where at one point the levels got so hard that you would give up. Nothing wrong here, but the fatal flaw was that this happened way too early as you gals and guys pointed out. A big part of Minesweeper games is staying in the flow, and Fine Sweeper wouldn’t quite let you. It got pretty cruel around level 30 and deteriorated to a guessing game.
Considerations for the improved algorithm
To get an idea of how to fix it, I took a closer look at Minesweeper and how they approached difficulty there. The answer lies in the tile-to-bomb-ratio, of course.
Minesweeper’s “Beginner” and “Intermediate” boards both have a tile-to-bomb-ratio of 15.7%, the “Hard” game’s ratio is 20.6%. Applied to the original Fine Sweeper leveling system, it means you had an “intermediate” difficulty on level 6 and level 12 (the difficulty dips after level 1 and level 9). Level 17 would already be “hard” and everything got only worse from there.
People told me that the game lost its fun somewhere between level 25 and level 30, so once the tile-to-bomb-ratio went over 35%, the fun was out. So that was a threshold I wanted to reserve for much higher levels.
The “new” algorithm
One glance already tells you pretty much everything, but still I want to point out a few little tweaks. Most noticeable is that with level 30 the playfield keeps suddenly getting bigger again. “But how?!” I hear you asking. The trick is that with level 30 the “expert mode” gets unlocked which halves the size of tiles. That also makes it possible to create boards that are even a little bigger than the maximum board size of the original Minesweeper.
Most importantly, the tile-to-bomb-ratio stays below 35% until level 66 and should give players a nice challenge as it increases steadily but not steeply with a little fluctuation. Only after level 60 and beyond it picks up linearly again, but the difficulty ramps up not as hard as before.
Since with every ten levels, players start out with an additional heart (plus full health on every 10th level), getting and staying in the flow should be much easier.
You also might notice that I dialed back a little of the maximum item drops per level because you don’t really need them. Still, I slightly increased the chances of a Full Heart Container drop for you achievement hunters. I did not touch anything between level 1 and level 6 because that would spoil the “Need 4 Sweep” achievement, but the following levels are a bit easier before picking up with level 13 again.
In short, Fine Sweeper should feel more rewarding and less cruel. I tested and tweaked it quite a bit to hopefully hit the sweet spot.
What it will change
First and foremost: Hi-scores. I didn’t touch the scoring system, so a hi-score beyond a million points is now possible. With the “old” version, there’s one masochist who bit the bullet and somehow managed to get past level 50, where the tile-to-bomb-ratio is at unforgiving 60%. In the new version, you have this density of bombs on level 91. I don’t expect anybody to make it to level 100, so you will be able to get all the game’s achievements without the impression of playing the lottery.
Please comment on the discussion board at the game hub. Thanks!
Four New Languages!
I'm happy to announce four new languages for Fine Sweeper: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish!
You can change the language via "Settings" > "Language".
Patch Notes 1.1.2.48
Fixed:
- Setting "Show Neighbors" is now stored in the current .ini section and should keep the value you set it to.
Added:
- Portuguese language
- Spanish language
- Italian language
- Turkish language
- Nordic characters to all fonts
- Cyrillic characters to all fonts
- Roman characters to all fonts
- Slavic characters to all fonts
Exploit Fix & Achievement Change
Patch Notes 1.1.2.47 (in Beta for a day, please report bugs to the discussion on the community hub)
Added:
- Option to preview a clue's neighbors on right/middle click (disable in "Settings"). Not available in Classic Mode.
- Balitc, Cyrillic, Scandinavian, Roman, and Slavic characters to all fonts
Fixed:
- Exploit where Alt+Tabbing on level start could reset the timer
- fullscreen distortion over taskbar on AMD graphics cards (please verify) still persists
Changed:
- "1-Upped" achievement requires now beating a hi-score of 100,001 points instead of beating another player's by 1.
- Lessened opacity of crater so that neighboring clues remain more legible
Minor Bugfixes
Patch Notes 1.1.2.46
Fixes:
- Crash when closing the game while on the achievements screen
UI:
- Opened dialog windows can now be cancelled by hitting Esc or Backspace; confirmed by hitting Enter or Space
- Close the game immediately with Alt+F4
- F for full screen
- P to pause
Patch Notes 1.1.2.45
Fixes:
- Achievement "1 Click Sweeper" is attainable again
Added:
- Flag counter in each mode. You can place more flags than bombs, if you want.
- Clue-numbers can be colored like in the original Minesweeper (enable in "Settings")
- Option to toggle only between flag->no flag and not flag->question mark->no flag (enable in "Settings")
- Option to start over from Level 1 on Game Over without the need to return to the title screen.
Changed:
- First clicks almost always open an empty tile ("island"), unless the playing field is very small and/or the number of bombs is too high to clear an opening (only applies to custom mode)
- Flagged tiles are now protected and never open automatically (unless with the very first click on a new field)
- The amount of lives you have when starting depends on the highest level you reached to lessen the need for hearts-farming on lower levels
UI:
- Click on the flag counter element to clear all flags.
- Tickboxes added to UI
Fixes:
- Achievement "Need 4 Sweep" is now attainable
- Achievement "Class of '92" is now attainable
- Achievement "Fine Keeper" is now attainable
- Bug where flagging an empty field led to bombless levels
- Crash for some users when closing the achievements screen (hopefully!)
- Typo in German version.
