Important note: 18.3.0 broke the 'Click to restart & apply update button'. Please just quit the app (Ctrl+Q, Command+Q on macOS) and start it again to apply the update.
Translation highlight: Norwegian Bokmål
Thanks to the relentless efforts of Flesk and friends, our Norwegian Bokmål translation is now 98% complete:
Norwegian thus joins the list of highly-complete translations (97%+) of the app, along with Russian, Japanese, French, and Spanish. Anyone is welcome to contribute translations on our translation server!
Game highlight: Kentucky Route Zero
The fourth act of Kentucky Route Zero is out, and you can now get all four acts (+ the fifth when it comes out) DRM-free on itch.io. Confirmed working in the app on Windows, macOS & Linux!
Link to game page: Kentucky Route Zero — All acts
Time zones
The app incorrectly interpreted some dates as local time instead of UTC. It now correctly interprets API dates as UTC, stores them as UTC (already did), and displays them as local time (already did but as date +0200 rather than date (CEST)
Update checks
As a result of the app incorrectly interpreting some dates as local time, users behind UTC (for example, EDT (Montréal, Canada), UTC-4) kept getting prompted to install updates for a game, if they installed it a few hours before the update went out. On the contrary, users ahead of UTC (for example, CEST (Paris, France), UTC+2), could potentially miss out on updates if they installed a game a few hours before an update went out.
Since the app was already storing everything correctly, the only difference in 18.4.0 is that users behind or ahead of UTC will now see correct update checking behavior, when manually picking which upload to install.
Scroll position restore on back/forward
When navigating any website using the itch.io app, hitting Back wouldn't restore the last scroll position. Since that is not a built-in feature of Electron (but since Chrome does it), we've implemented it directly into the app.
It'll even attempt to restore the scroll position on pages with lazy loading (all browse pages on itch.io), for up to ten seconds.
Note that it will no longer be accurate if the window is resized while navigating — we don't have any solution for that at the moment.
This feature is rated 'experimental', please use the 'Send feedback' button (bottom-left menu) to tell us how you feel about it!
Linux compatibility
A virtual repository for Debian stretch has been added on Bintray. Our .deb package has been confirmed compatible with stretch on /r/linux_gaming.
Additionally, the portable Linux build (.tar.xz) has been fixed in the following ways:
- When extracted it would create nested folders:
build/v18.4.0/itch-linux-x64/it now creates a single folder, like so:itch-18.4.0-amd64/ - When no system packages (.deb or .rpm) of the app were ever installed, the Unity dock was not showing the app's icon. After jumping through ridiculous hoops (cf. #804), this issue is resolved.
Known issue: The .deb package now shows up proper metadata when opened in the Ubuntu Software Center, and also ships with appstream metadata for launchers and other package managers. Hahaha actually no, that's only if your .deb is in an official repository. In fact even installing third-party .deb files from the graphical interface in the latest Ubuntu is broken. Please just sudo dpkg -i itch*.deb && sudo apt-get install -f instead if you care about your own sanity.
Search performance
Using the app search on large libraries (or lots of collections) used to be slow. It still is, but it'll at least let you type your search query in peace and only then start looking for games. I would like to thank my colleague @leafo for having such a large library of games and bringing this to my attention.
Manifest support
App manifests are now validated better (use right click -> Developer -> Show debug log to see warnings, errors will display the 'Could not launch 'dialog).
Additionally, the args property is now being correctly handled (lets developers pass command-line arguments to their executables), and the documentation has been clarified with regards to specifying multiple actions.
Automatic issue reporting
Automatic issue reports when a game won't launch on someone's machine, now includes the output from diego, our diagnostics tool.
Known issue: the Github gist created with the log is not editable (since it's anonymous) - we're looking to move to something else (cf. #762) but in the meantime, you can always hit 'Preview' before submitting your issue report, and change the link to point to another gist, without the information you want to censor.
macOS support
The application menu on macOS now feel more native - some things have been moved around, only when the app runs on macOS. Additionally, Command+H will now hide the window, just like any mac app.
Various bug fixes
- The 'retry' button on the downloads page didn't retry. Now it does. It was a silly mistake, and measures have been taken so that this particular kind of silly mistake doesn't happen again.
- Non-executable pages on itch.io (books, soundtracks, game assets) would show up as dimmed in the search results, because the app thought they were not platform-compatible. It now knows better.
- Font alignment (#814) of the search and filter text boxes was amiss both on Windows and Linux, but not macOS, ever since we shipped a version of Lato that includes non-Latin characters. Running the font through FontSquirrel's webfont pack generator fixed vertical alignment (along with a minor CSS change).
- Navigating search results with the keyboard (up and down arrows, enter to select) is now usable, but still incomplete. More improvements will follow.
- On Flixel games,
flixel.exewas sometimes incorrectly selected instead of the main game executable, for games without a manifest. It is now given a lower score, which prevents this from happening. - Games with a malformed manifest (missing
actionsfield, etc.) used to fail to launch silently. The app now displays the standard "Couldn't launch" dialog with the option to 'Send feedback' or 'Examine cause of failure' (#760) - With sandbox enabled, but not setup yet, when launching a game with multiple manifest actions, the app would cycle between two dialogs (#826)
- A tooltip was clipped in the downloads tab. It now points in another direction.
- The 'Last played' row would get stuck on 'now'. Now it doesn't.
Important note: 18.3.0 broke the 'Click to restart & apply update button'. Please just quit the app (Ctrl+Q, Command+Q on macOS) and start it again to apply the update.