The playtime search that found nothing, and Pressless edits on the page

Twenty-one projects moved this week and two were quiet, against twenty and two last week. Six of them published releases with downloads attached: seventeen releases in all.

This week's thread is checks that passed without looking. A search filter that was ignored. A size test that passed because two different figures printed the same. A self-test that said "ok" while saving was broken. A Windows test that reported a pass when the game never started. And, the other way round, two faults in a RetroDB download that only filming a trailer found.

RetroDB: ten releases, and a search that found nothing

RetroDB published ten releases, 3.23.14 to 3.26.0, on the 15th and 17th, each for Windows, macOS and Linux.

What you get:

A Play button on every game card in the Library and on each system's page. Press it and the game starts without leaving the list.
Every page fits its window. On a phone, the trophy pages, Help, Settings and others no longer scroll sideways.
A tidier sidebar: the five trophy links are one Achievements page with a tab for each service, and it reopens the last tab you used.
On a game's page, other names for the game sit in an "Also Known As" card, and an anti-piracy disclaimer sits in About.

The search that answered "not found"

The find of the week. From 22 September, every HowLongToBeat lookup reported "not found". HowLongToBeat had renamed its search a third time, and the old address answered with an error. Fixing it turned up something more: the platform and year filters were being ignored. A test search for "Halo 3" filtered to the NES still returned Halo 3. Both are fixed in 3.23.21. Super Mario World now comes back at 5.0 hours.

Two more were found while filming RetroDB's trailer on a fresh install:

3.23.14's download had no trophy or platform icons. Every RetroAchievements badge showed as a broken picture. The folder they live in also holds each user's own downloaded trophy art, so it was left out of the build. 3.23.15 ships the icons.
Picking a language in Settings did nothing, and the page stayed in its old language. It had been broken since 3.23.8. 3.23.16 fixes it.

And one release fixed the one before: 3.24.0's Windows download stopped at "Core dependencies failed to install", because one part it needs on Windows only was missing from its list. 3.24.1 installs again.

Waiting for the next release, now numbered 3.30.0:

Regional versions of a game show as one game. The first try on my own library paired sequels with their first game: 30 of 56 suggestions were pairs like Doom 2 and Doom. It no longer suggests a sequel.
The setup page accepted a 4-character password in the browser, while the server refused anything under 12. Every password form now asks for 12.
Uploading a PS4 trailer replaced the game page with a bare error. Videos were capped at 50 MB. They can now be 500 MB.
RetroAchievements matched "Donkey Kong Country 2" to "Donkey Kong Country". Sequels now keep their own entry.
A Next disk button for multi-disk games started in RetroArch.

Pressless: last week's list ships, and the next one is bigger

Pressless 0.9.0 and 0.9.1 were released on the 15th, for Windows and Linux. Everything I listed as waiting last week is in 0.9.0:

You edit a page by clicking on it and typing, shown as it will look, with a panel beside it for pictures, buttons, video, music and columns.
You can add, remove and rename pages, and the menu keeps up. A renamed page's old address still reaches it.
Pressless asks once whether it may send anonymous usage reports. Nothing is sent unless you say yes.

Also new in 0.9.0: the header, footer and menu change without code; sections can be dragged into place; and a page can hold a slideshow, questions that fold open, a picture that enlarges when clicked, a back-to-top link or a countdown.

One security fix: a preview page opened on its own, outside the editor, could run a script from your site with Pressless's own access. No file Pressless serves runs a script now. Your published site is unchanged.

0.9.1 is small: Google has approved Pressless, so the visitor-numbers setup drops its steps for getting past Google's warning.

0.10.0 was tagged on the 19th but is not yet on GitHub, so all of it waits:

One copy of Pressless looks after several websites.
A whole site saves to one file, and Pressless backs up every site by itself each day, keeping the last seven. A guide moves Pressless to a new computer.
A Look screen changes colours, fonts, text size and layout, with a live preview, and warns about text that is hard to read.
Upload songs, videos, PDFs and ZIP files, up to 50 MiB each; choose your site's icon and sharing picture; and the three starter looks turn dark for a visitor whose computer is set to dark, keeping every text colour at 7:1 or better.

The browser checks now also run on my Windows test machine with nobody at the screen. Edge passed 120 of 120, and so did Firefox.

Games Hub 1.2.0: every move in motion

Games Hub 1.2.0 was released on the 20th, for Windows and Linux.

Every game shows its moves instead of jumping to the result. A chess piece slides to its square, a draughts jump travels hop by hop, and captured Reversi discs turn over nearest first. New Game deals in motion in Klondike, Spider, FreeCell, Pyramid and Hearts.
Every card game can be played without a mouse. Arrow keys move a gold cursor, Space lifts and drops a card, and Escape puts it back.
From last week's waiting list: Klondike, Spider and FreeCell move cards by clicking as well as dragging, and in FreeCell, double-clicking a buried card no longer sends the column's top card home instead.
Minesweeper makes a sound only when a click does something, so the sound tells you it worked.

A small one with a familiar shape: the step that publishes a release always titled it "Games X.Y.Z", whatever its name. 1.1.0 had been renamed by hand.

Groundwork: two releases, and a drive ready for openSUSE

Groundwork 0.3.1 came out on the 15th and 0.4.0 on the 16th, each with a Linux download.

0.3.1: Groundwork installs as an openSUSE package, from its own repository for Tumbleweed, Slowroll and Leap 16.0.
0.4.0: it prepares a drive for installing openSUSE. It lays out a whole drive, or the free space beside Windows, then lists what to choose for each partition in the installer. Nothing is written until you switch on "I understand".
Two switches for developers: tools for Claude Code, and tree-sitter.
Started from a USB stick or disc, Groundwork no longer sets anything up, since nothing there lasts a restart.

The switch that would have erased Windows

Caught before 0.4.0 shipped: on a drive with Windows, switching on "Room to hibernate" could make the layout page pick the whole drive, which erases Windows. That happened when the bigger swap no longer fitted beside it. Now it picks nothing, and Next stays off until you choose.

A test in Arabic found another: drive names like "/dev/vda3" showed as "dev/vda3/". They keep their direction now.

Waiting for 0.5.0: save this computer's setup to one file, a USB stick being the usual place, and start a new install from it.

OneUp 1.4.10, and a size test that could not tell

OneUp 1.4.10 was released on the 14th, with the Linux download. Its openSUSE package moved to a new address; the old one keeps getting updates until 2.0.0.

Pressing Stop during a download said the update had failed, with a red badge. Nothing had gone wrong. It now says it stopped.
If a package with "gpg" or "key" in its name was in a failed update, OneUp blamed your signing keys and offered to import new ones. It now does that only for a real key error.
The download figure could never reach the end after a stopped run.
A run that updated only Flatpak apps said everything was already up to date.

The rest waits for OneUp 2.0, including everything on last week's waiting list. New this week: an estimate of the time left while packages download, and a password box that says whose password it needs.

The find: sizes now print with one decimal place, "14.8 MiB" rather than "15 MiB". A test wrote 86.0 MiB against a total of 86.4 MiB, and both printed as "86 MiB", so the check that the download reaches its total passed without it reaching it.

demoreel 0.9.0: installs like any other program

demoreel 0.9.0 was released on the 14th, and for the first time it has downloads: packages for Debian and Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch, plus an openSUSE Build Service repository for 11 systems. That is last week's waiting list.

Waiting for the next release:

demoreel check said "ready" when it could not tell. On a busy computer, its question to the video tool timed out and was read as yes. It now says the question took too long. That is the same shape as last week's find.
A trailer with windowed scenes failed on a computer with 8 GB or less. The video tool reserved 4 to 6 GB while using 1.3 GB, and the limit counted what it reserved.
On Mageia, check gave Fedora's install commands, because Mageia's system file names Fedora as a relative.

Local Web Server Manager 0.3.0

Local Web Server Manager 0.3.0 was released on the 15th, with no files attached, so there is still nothing to download. It carries last week's waiting list: a health check that asks a running site whether it works, the port each project really ran on, and how long a start has taken.

The check gained a plain word beside its number after a hand try-out. RetroDB sends its front page on to its dashboard, and the bare "HTTP 302" read as an error. It now says "HTTP 302 redirects".

Waiting: quitting the app from the desktop stopped every server it had started. They now keep running. A start refused because the port is taken names what is taking it. And one of its tests, which flaked under load, could not fail at all. It can now.

Short notes

Ants Terminal published nothing, so everything waits, including last week's list. A tab where Claude waits on you is now bright red; it was orange, close to the yellow of a tab reading files. The status bar says when Claude's background work is still running, and it could say "Claude: idle" while a question was waiting for you. That is fixed. The welcome window offers to install Claude Code. And a new speed test found that copying a large selection builds its text twice, about 430 milliseconds each time for 9.06 million characters.

UT Ants still has nothing to download. Light now bounces more than once. Against the reference that traces real light, AS-Frigate's outdoor views went from a gap of 0.25 to 0.29 to one of 0.06 to 0.10. Flags, sails and curtains sway, and water rises and falls. TheBoat's lower decks were nearly black, at 0.01 to 0.18 of the original's brightness; 18 lantern lights bring them to 0.62 to 0.87. And a map with no navigation points could make the lighting step run for days.

Vestige published nothing; last week's waiting list still waits. New: the game's Audio, Controls and Accessibility settings were names with no pages. They have pages now. The physics walk fell through the meadow, because its only ground was a flat box metres below. Fog and light shafts can be switched off in Settings. The birdsong is now a song thrush: the first recording's birds were only about 2 dB louder than its own wind and microphone noise.

DOOM Ants published nothing. Waiting: Solid and Ultra show the damage flash, pickup flash and radiation-suit tint, and the screen melts between levels. Loading a mod froze the game at startup, waiting for Enter in a terminal that does not exist when you start it from an icon. And the Windows test reported a pass when the game was never started.

Album Builder published nothing. Waiting: its self-test only made a PDF, so it printed "selftest: ok" while saving was broken — which is how the Windows save crash in 0.9.1 got out. It now saves a file too. Report PDFs printed wrong on some printers because of a damaged font. A 1,000-song library opens in about 3 seconds.

finbreak published nothing. It will not be listed on Flathub after all; on Linux, use the AppImage or the openSUSE packages. Waiting: the dashboard refreshes four times faster, 145 milliseconds at 20,000 transactions against 603. And the queued test findings from the September audit are done. One test checked running totals in a way that was always true. Another looked for "500" in an amount, and would still pass at "R 1 500.00".

LottoTracker published nothing; its first release is planned next. It now says which wins the bank has not yet paid, instead of "still claimable", since the bank pays by itself. A lottery text from a sender the bank does not use is flagged, so a forged "winnings paid" message cannot hide a real unpaid win.

Rolodex published nothing. Waiting: select several entries to move or delete them, a layout for narrow windows, and seed phrases always hidden. "Qwerty123!" used to rate Fair or better in Password Health; the thousand most common passwords now rate Weak. And its check before each commit had printed "NOTHING WAS CHECKED" on every commit. It checks again.

MAME Curator starts even when its settings file holds a setting it does not know. Rolling back an update could leave one there, and the app refused to start. Settings → About gains a support link and a disclaimer.

Snatch's Windows build broke because the video-player part it bundles was deleted upstream, which keeps about 30 days of builds. Snatch now keeps its own copy.

Contact List: ticking several contacts no longer unticks the first, waiting for a release. RetroArch (my fork) sent four more fixes to official RetroArch on the 15th; one sent earlier was merged on the 11th. Slipcase and Perch moved only in their own records.

Quiet this week: Hell's Gate and Rusty PSN.

What changed on the site

New downloads picked up this week: demoreel 0.9.0, Games Hub 1.2.0, Groundwork 0.4.0, OneUp 1.4.10, Pressless 0.9.1 and RetroDB 3.26.0.

Project pages are centred, and each download button says what kind of file it is and how big, with install help and a View source link. demoreel has a button for each family of Linux systems. Mac buttons say "Apple Silicon" when the file is for Apple Silicon Macs only. Vestige's Linux button gives the AppImage, and RetroDB's give the build with Python included.

A "Just released" row on the home page, swiping between screenshots, and a screenshot viewer that stops at the first and last shot. Each video's description now folds away under it.

Trailers for Games Hub, Groundwork, RetroDB, Contact List and Album Builder, and a new one for Ants Terminal, with the first kept below.

Pages caught up with what each project shipped: RetroDB's 3.23 to 3.26 releases, with fresh screenshots; Pressless's page editor, Google's approval, and a privacy policy that covers its usage reports; Groundwork's 0.4.0 and its disclaimer; Games Hub's 1.2.0, Large play and turn light; Album Builder's note on Windows Developer Mode; news for Groundwork, Snatch and RetroArch; OneUp's 1.4.10 and new repository; Local Web Server Manager's 0.3.0; Lotto Tracker's "Not yet paid"; and the features Ants Terminal's page was missing. RetroDB's page says I do not condone piracy.

Also: a new script pushes a change, waits for the deploy and checks the live page. The private stats page I keep for myself now has tabs, a list of open issues and pull requests, and counts openSUSE installs per project.