• If someone owns all 3 of our other games, they will get a Thank You message and they will be upgraded to Premium for free and won't see the cross-promotions.
  
• Made a limit so that you can never see more than 1 cross-promo in 10 minutes. This way, if someone likes to play against the AI and test out openings, quit, and try them again... they won't be hammered with cross-promos before each time they go back.
  
• Bugfix: There were some board-flipping issues if users pressed "F" in one game, then in subsequent games during the same session, some things could be messed up (they could not click correctly sometimes).
  
• Quieted down a BlueLine Cloud error message that would show up on flaky connections but which didn't really matter (only some requests were getting dropped). Now that error (dropped connection) has to happen 4 times in a row, without a successful request, before the error starts being shown.
  
• Bugfix: Audio track was glitching out. Fixxxed.
  

• Accessibility: ran through the whole game and made sure Controller Support would work everywhere (we streamed a lot of this, then put it on youtube).
  
• Accessibility: ran through the whole game and made sure Keyboard-only Support would work everywhere (we streamed a lot of this, then put it on youtube).
  
• The Pawn Promotion dialog was hard to see in the 2D Monochrome skin if you were promoting a Black pawn. Now the pieces have an opposite-colored background behind them.
  
• Made the App Settings dialog less ugly (it had like 3 different background colors, and 2 font colors that were left over from other games).
  
• The Audio wasn't going through it's playlist properly before, so a song would just repeat until you pause/unpause. It's supposed to cycle through them all, and now it does.
  
• Audio was glitching out after a while. We think this is fixed, but it's hard to prove that something that occasionally happened isn't happening... so if you see it (hear it?) again after this update, please let us know!
  
• Bugfix: there were cases where the Turn Timer would show up in offline games if you had played an online game just before that (without closing the game).
  
• When people try to upgrade without Steam open, or with the Overlay disabled, it wouldn't work, but it also wouldn't give very helpful explanations. Now there are good explanation dialogs (you need Steam open and the Overlay enabled to use Steam's Microtransactions, btw).
  
• Fixed the HUDs so that when black is on the bottom, the gamer pictures (avatars) still line up properly.
  
• Bugfix: The text on the HUD that says whose turn it is would disappear when you clicked on a piece, and would often not be there on the first turn of the game. Fixxxed.
  
• Fixed some infinite-loop-support in Audio library.
  
• Made the turn-indicator text more descriptive (less confusing). So instead of just saying "It's your turn" on the correct player's HUD. It'll say something like "waiting for opponent..." for an online game, "waiting for computer..." against the AI, and if there are 2 people playing on the same computer it'll say "White's Turn" or "Black's Turn"... all of these messages still appear in the same spot on the active player's HUD.
  
• Added options for 3 Minute turn timeout and 5 minute turn timeout since we had a lot of people thinking that 1 minute or 10 minutes was way too big of a gap.
  

• We now show the turn timer in the game. Thanks to every player and also their mothers, cousins, and some random people on the street for reporting this... twice.
  
• Geoff solved a ton of graphics card issues. If the game was not working for you at all before, and now it's working... that was probably his fault.
  
• We added a "Forfeit" option because winners never quit... but sometimes losers want to lose faster. ːsteammockingː I kid... this one was as overdue as the timer being shown on-screen.
  
• Fixed the contrast on the default 3D chess set. You should be able to see the pieces better now & they probably look more like actual wood.
  
• The levelUp.wav sound (like super-loud windchimes) has been decreased 15db so it doesn't freak people out anymore ;) thanks to user Toadofsky for pointing it out
  
• Some people were getting confused with why their game ended in a "Draw" so we've changed the game to understand what caused the game to end & we'll show "Stalemate", "Draw by Insufficient Material", etc.. That should at least give people a good idea what to look at in the Rules if they're confused.
  
• Found that the 50 Move Rule was implemented more like the 25 Move Rule. Most likely nobody hit this (because that's still 50 half-moves which is a lot) but we noticed it in the code & fixed it to match the official rules. We also corrected our Rules page to reflect the change.
  
• Fixed some issues where castling was allowed twice in the same game in certain situations. Thanks to user "Bears" for reporting this.
  
• When reconnecting to an online async game, if there had been a Check at any point in the game, it would say "Check" when it reloaded the game. Now it only says that if the last move is ACTUALLY putting someone in Check. Thanks to user n0v0leg for reporting this.
  
• Some games would crash when reloading from Steam Notifications... and we would crash a decent amount on our test-environment because it's different.... all related to a race-condition. Fixed this.
  
• The window was opening up off-center, especially too far to the left or the top which made it annoyingly hard to move the window. It was also in a weird spot when returning from fullscreen. It should be centered again.
  
• The TurnTimeout value is now "sticky" like several other options. That means if you set it to 1 Minute turns, the next time you try to create a game, that will be the default so that you don't have to constantly click around to get to your favorite mode.
  
• Fixed some memory leaks in our Animation engine and our Online Game Menu Screen (OGMS). This has been around for a while but never mattered until someone hung out in our Online Game Menu Screen (which is actually quite busy in Simply Chess) and their memory just ballooned until they crashed. This helped us find it, so now the game will not be just randomly wasting memory & shouldn't crash if you hang out in the OGMS. Thanks to user ProCommando for reporting this.
  
• Some accessibility stuff.. but we're not done with it, so I'm not going to announce it yet :P if you watched the stream, you probably know what I'm talking about. Almost done!
  

• The default Turn Timeout will be 10 Minutes instead of 7 Days. This is just a default though, so you can still choose any of the options.
  
• Made the ratings show up on the hud (they were the same color as the background before)
  
• Re-positioned the Chat buttons to not overlap the HUD backgrounds & be centered better
  
• Verified that the "Dark Horse" achievement is granting, then updated the wording on the achievement to be clearer. Both players must be fully (non-provisionally) ranked.
  

• We fixed the "upgrade" process for foreign users. There were exchange rate issues. Before, it was always "4.99" in local currency. This was fine for some people and a ton of Russians got to upgrade for the equivalent of 7.4 cents :) [don't worry, you get to keep that upgrade]...but it was a bad bug for people in Indonesia and Japan because the conversion was SO low that Steam wouldn't process it (it was less than 0.01). Should work for everyone now!
  
• There was an error that would pop up in the case where one player moved a pawn forward 2 spaces, then the other player immediately did a Pawn Promotion or Castled. ^_^ ...the fact that people were able to give us such great bug reports on this so quickly is a huge benefit of having 80,000 players!
  

Fixes

• BLACK CAN BE ON THE BOTTOM NOW! Player 1 starts out on the bottom regardless of color now. If you're the only person on your computer... you're player1.
  
• If you don't like the default side (player1 on bottom) you can now press "F" to flip the board sides.
  
• Did you know that you can press "D" to switch between 2D/3D? I hadn't written that in the Advanced Controls section before, but it's been in the game ;)
  
• There was an error with threat-detection (knowing when a King is in Check) related to pawns needing to move 2 spaces to block a Check. Thanks to some screenshots from users, we were able to fix this up quickly :)
  
• The music-volume would go back to full when you restarted the game even if you'd turned it down before. Now it will correctly remember the setting across sessions.
  
• Mojoshader.dll was crashing on startup for some people. This was a dependency issue in the installer & we've fixed it.
  
• The board-spaces were backwards on the 3D Bauhaus board (eg: light square always goes under white's kingside rook)... now it's right.
  

Next up!

• The game is still crashing on startup for certain graphics cards. This is really 2 problems: 1) it should be selecting your better graphics card 2) it should work on Intel HD graphics even if you don't have a better card. Working on it!
  
• We gotta get Mac & Linux up to speed at some point.
  
• More random bugs
  
• Later this week we'll try to figure out a way to make the card to Steam Trading Card drops (apparently, this doesn't normally happen until you spend $9 on a game... we don't have a way for you to spend $9 yet, since the Premium version is only $4.99).
  
• Some PC Master Race people have been really upset about ads (cross promotions for our 3 other Steam games) in free games... they want hats or something. ...or paid Chess Sets (which we were hoping to do for free)... we're thinking about it. Bugs are more urgent than making money off of this though... so we're fixing bugs first, then we'll figure this out. The game has only been out 3 days and we're scrambling to fix issues that the 70,000 of you found... we will definitely think more about monetization stuff when things calm down. Thanks for your patience & understanding!
  

• Last night, the Online Game menu was lagging for a while because we were trying to repeatedly re-generate the list of 1,912 in-progress games!! Needless to say, I've never stress-tested it to that level ;) Now you'll see open lobbies, games you're a member of, and then the most-recent 150 in-progress games that you're not a member of.
  
• Durp... actually made the leaderboard show up on Steam. You need 15 ranked games to get onto the list.
  

• The upgrade wasn't explained before, if you chose it from the main menu. Now it tells you what the upgrade does.
  
• The BlueLine Cloud Signup Dialog had huge text.
  
• Rematch functionality has a ton of edge-cases so we took the button out (took this out on Windows right before launch). It's only a problem when both users have the button & hit it at the same time, so it's not too dangerous unless Linux & Mac users are playing each other right now & both hit Rematch really quickly.