Problems playing on iPad

[Daisyflower64]

I love to play star battles on my iPad and apple pencil, but have been getting frustrated with the page constantly freezing. Idk how to explain it but if I try to place dots or stars in quick succession, the page will often freeze and I have to click to a different tab, or click the search bar and then back into the game to continue. Trying to get faster times is real hard when I have to keep stopping and starting hahaha. This might be a Safari issue that I’m not aware of, or ads making the page slow. Any help is appreciated :)

[admin]

Hi Daisy -

We seem to intermittently have problems with iOS users complaining that ads cause the browser to hang and/or restart. I've gone back and forth with our ad management company on it and they've put out some "fixes" but I'm not sure it's yet been fully addressed. I'll follow up with them again on Monday.

In the meantime I've bumped you up to premium (ad free) for the next 10 days free of charge to see if that fixes the problem for you. Please let me know.

[Daisyflower64]

Hi! Thank you so much for the reply and quickly trying to address the issue. Sadly, the website continues to freeze even without ads. I’ve tried it on google chrome instead of safari and it isn’t any different :( I would love to blame my Apple Pencil but I do lecture note-taking with it and it holds up! Hopefully you can get an answer soon, and thank you again :)

[admin]

Ah interesting that you're using an apple pencil - I've not had a chance to play around with one of those yet and am not familiar with how it may change the dynamics of gameplay. Out of curiosity, if you play the game entirely without the apple pencil does it still hang for you?

[jimjim]

I am not OP, but I thought I’d add my 2 cents since I’ve also been playing on iPad + Safari with my Apple Pencil as well since ~March. I haven’t had any issues at all putting down leaderboard times even while drawing lots of dots/eliminations, and have found the pencil to actually be way quicker than a mouse or even my finger. This is on iPad Pro 11-inch (1st gen.) with Apple Pencil 2nd gen. However, I did attempt to get a friend hooked who has a newer model of iPad than mine, and we noticed that the dots placement was significantly more latent and would often lag or skip like DaisyFlower64 described.

My insight here is a long shot, but it’s possible that the Apple M-series chips used in newer iPad models, which have a couple additional ISA extensions for Javascript, might be the culprit. But I have not looked through the puzzle page’s code to corroborate one way or another.

[admin]

Very interesting. Question: did your friend experience lag just tapping individual eliminations with the pencil or was it while dragging multiple eliminations at once? I could see the drag feature being the culprit here.

[Daisyflower64]

I have an IPad Air fifth addition that does use the M1 chip. And sadly yes it does continue to skip when I use my finger :( However it’s not specifically the dragging dots that makes mine freeze, it’s placing individual dots and stars when lifting up my pen. Like if I find a spot where a couple of stars can go I’ll be quickly tapping all the squares around it and double tapping to make stars, and that seems to overwhelm the site? Jimjim might be on to something with the apple models!

[admin]

Thanks Daisy - I've gone ahead and bought an iPad Air M3 + Pencil Pro so that I can do some proper testing on this. Clearly this has been a blind spot for me. Will post here once I have more information on what might be going on.

[jimjim]

> did your friend experience lag just tapping individual eliminations with the pencil or was it while dragging multiple eliminations at once?

I remember it being both, since I had the same line of thinking as you and tried to test out non-drag and that didn’t make it any better.

I have an M1 mac that I just tested in Safari on without any skipping, so I’m not too sure the issue is purely CPU-related. Newer iPad/pencil models have added this feature called “hover” (https://developer.apple.com/document...turerecognizer) in which literally hovering the pencil over the screen without contacting it can trigger similar behavior to when a desktop user hovers the mouse cursor over a position without clicking. I’m about the furthest thing from a frontend web developer as one can get, but I see there’re some event handlers in `play.php` for mouseover events in addition to touchmove. Totally spitballing here, but could it be possible that WebKit on these newer iPads is triggering a combination of both events and slugging the UI when the pencil is only a few cm above the screen while the user is repeatedly touching and lifting ? I don’t have the necessary hardware myself, but this would be pretty easy to instrument and find out one way or another. Doesn’t really account for the behavior when using a finger instead of pencil though, so I wouldn’t be convinced it’s the (only) culprit.

> I've gone ahead and bought an iPad Air M3 + Pencil Pro so that I can do some proper testing on this

Maybe I can finally inaugurate that same friend into Star Battles once it’s all sorted out! But happy to provide any reference behavior from my older, fully functional iPad + Pencil 2 combo to assist in pinpointing the issue.

[admin]

Have done a few hours of testing so far and haven't yet been able to replicate this issue yet on the M3 iPad, with or without the apple pencil. Will keep at it but if there's any additional info you can provide about what exactly you're doing when this issue gets triggered that would be helpful. i.e. what puzzle size do you tend to play, do you use the undo function a lot, does this happen more towards the end of a long solve or can it happen even at the beginning of a puzzle, etc.

[Daisyflower64]

I almost exclusively play 10x10 2 star games, and I rarely use the undo button. It can happen at any time during the game. I have been learning to use the drag function more to reduce lots of clicking. I would also be open to screen recording the gameplay footage and somehow getting it to you, if you are unable to replicate the issue, maybe via an unlisted YouTube video or directly into this forum.

[admin]

Hi Daisy - great info, thanks! A screencast showing the issue would be absolutely brilliant. Feel free to email me at puzzlebaron@gmail.com if you are able to capture it. Cheers!