soulsync 3.1.9 — dev → main
the chat room gets an arcade. chess, connect 4, battleship and a slot machine, played over soulseek with no server anywhere — every board is folded out of chat messages, and your client and your opponent's each work it out independently. plus preset avatars, and a fix for mentions never working.
the arcade
a games section in the chat sidebar. open it and you get a lobby of what's on the tables, and clicking a game opens a real board.
there is no game server. a match is nothing but hidden messages in the soulsync soulseek room. every client folds the same messages into the same board. the board even tells you so — "no server · folded from 34 room messages", and you can click it to see the actual messages behind the position.
chess
- proper rules. castling, en passant, under-promotion, stalemate, threefold, fifty-move. the engine is checked against the standard perft positions, so move generation is exactly correct rather than roughly correct
- drag or click to move, legal-move dots, last-move and check highlights, algebraic move list, board flips for black
- correspondence style — no clock. close the tab, come back tomorrow, your sidebar tells you whose move it is
- resign, offer a draw, or take over a seat that's been idle 24h
- PGN export. a game played over soulseek opens in lichess like any other
connect 4, battleship, slots
- connect 4 — click a column, first to four
- battleship — the interesting one. your fleet never goes on the wire until the end. both players publish a fingerprint of their board up front, and when a fleet goes down both reveal, and every client checks every answer you gave against the board you showed. lie about one miss and no board fits, so the game ends as cheating. your client answers shots automatically from your own board, so nobody sits waiting on a "were you hit?" prompt
- slots — solo, with play money. 10k a day, and if you're below that at midnight you're topped back up. winnings above it are yours to keep
you vs the room
one seat is you, the other belongs to everybody else. they vote, and the move plays when enough of them agree on the same one.
room ladder
elo, folded out of finished games. persistent ratings with no server and no database of record.
games that survive real life
the fiddly part of a serverless game is what happens when someone closes the tab for a day, or their slskd restarts.
- a client that missed moves catches up from the position carried on the next move
- if both sides are waiting on each other and nothing arrives, a client asks the room where the game actually is
- the room answers, and it's outvoted rather than trusted — answers are grouped by position and only overrule yours when independent clients agree, so one loud client claiming a fake board gets ignored
- matches are archived, so a game survives an slskd restart even when nobody's around to ask
avatars
pick from 100 presets in the chat settings cog. shows on every message, in the member list and on your account strip, and it's saved to your account so it follows you to another browser.
fixes
- mentions never worked. soulsync read your soulseek name off an endpoint that doesn't carry it, so it was always blank — which meant @-pings never highlighted and reserved avatars never appeared. it now asks the endpoints that actually have it
- spotify rate-limit popup appeared for people not using spotify. it only shows when spotify is actually your metadata source now, and a 30-minute ban needs a real 429 rather than any error containing the letters "rate"
- re-matching a tv show left the old show's episodes behind, so "lucky (2026)" showed two 2026 episodes stacked on top of six from a 2022 series. the old title's episodes are cleared now, while episodes you actually have files for keep their files
- the soulsync room shows the soulsync logo instead of "so", and your avatar shows on your own account strip