A release about joining — getting players into a game faster, keeping them there, and being smarter about which screen in the house should be running it.

Off Bluetooth, onto the LAN

Bluetooth is how a phone reaches a host when there is no shared network — it needs no WiFi at all, which is what makes it worth having. But it is the slower road. Clients now move onto the LAN as soon as one is available:

• A client that starts on Bluetooth and then finds the host on WiFi switches over automatically, without dropping your slot or interrupting play.
• Once a client is on the LAN it stops being a Bluetooth controller. Previously a device could be attached both ways at once, and the two paths competed for the same radio.
• Bluetooth traffic itself is much lighter. The redundancy that protects against a dropped tap has been clamped down so that several controllers on one host no longer saturate the link — which is what made taps arrive late once a few devices were connected.

Kiosk mode

Kiosk mode turns a host into an open table: anyone on the LAN, or anyone running the Joustine app, can join a game already in progress rather than waiting for the lobby to come round again.

• Game controllers plugged into or paired with the host can drop in mid-game the same way.
• Every client in kiosk mode gets the simple three-tap controller — a walk-up player should see three big buttons, not a shrunken copy of the screen they are standing in front of.

Choosing the right host

With several Joustine-capable devices in one house, the game now settles on the best host for the situation rather than whichever device happened to speak first. An Apple TV outranks a streaming stick, which outranks a Mac, which outranks a phone — and a device that is already someone's client stops advertising itself as a candidate.

Soft-claimed player slots

A slot is now held loosely for the device that had it. Step out of range, or have your phone sleep for a moment, and the slot waits for you instead of being handed to the next person — while still freeing up properly once you have genuinely gone.