
Fixing the flicker in the koi reels
For about two weeks, Koi Pond Reels had a strange flicker right as the reels stopped turning. It only showed up on certain screens, which made it maddening to reproduce, since it looked fine every single time we checked it ourselves on the usual test devices sitting on the desk.
It turned out to be a small timing issue between when the reel animation finished and when the result was drawn onto the symbols underneath. On slower screens, there was a gap of a few milliseconds where the old symbols and the new ones both tried to show at once, which is exactly the sort of flicker nobody wants to see.
The fix itself was fairly plain once we found it: hold the animation on its last frame a beat longer before swapping in the result, so there's never a moment where both states exist together. It's the kind of change that takes an afternoon to write and several days to actually track down.
We tested it across a handful of older phones borrowed from around the house, since that's usually where these things show up first. The flicker hasn't come back since, though we're keeping half an eye on it for another week or two before we call it properly closed.
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