A Splitter Warning You Can See, and a Sound Switch for Each Game

Two small fixes went into the browser games this week. Neither changes how a game plays, but in both a game wasn't doing what it was meant to. In DODGE.IO, the warning that a Splitter is about to burst was being drawn in a color you couldn't see. And in ORBIT.IO and SPLIT.IO, turning the sound off in one game quietly turned it off in the other.

What a Splitter is

Splitters join a DODGE.IO run at 1:40. Each one is a white dot that enters from the edge aimed at where you were, at 80% of a bullet's speed. It lives for 180 game ticks, which is three seconds at the game's fixed 60 ticks a second, and when its time is up it bursts into four small bullets that fly outward at right angles to each other, with a short two-note chirp. If you're right next to it when that happens, one of the four is likely to be heading your way.

The game gives you two warnings. The first is a thin white ring that draws itself around the Splitter, starting at the top and sweeping clockwise. When the ring closes, the Splitter bursts. The second is meant for the last stretch: once 70% of the countdown has passed, roughly the final 0.9 seconds, the Splitter's center is supposed to throb.

The pulse you couldn't see

The throb is a circle drawn on top of the Splitter at 30% opacity, growing and shrinking between 40% and 100% of the Splitter's size, about three times a second. The problem was its color. It was drawn in the same white as the Splitter's body, and pale white laid over the same white leaves the body looking exactly as it did before. The code ran, and nothing showed. The browser version inherited this from the original Android code, which draws it the same way.

The fix changes one color. The pulse is now drawn in the arena's dark background color, still at 30%, so it shows up as a darker core that swells and shrinks inside the white dot. The timing, size, ring and burst are unchanged. A Splitter now has a visible tell for its last second, not just a ring you have to watch while dodging everything else.

One detail is worth knowing. A Splitter's countdown runs on the same clock as its movement, so the Time Slow power-up stretches it too. Under Time Slow, threats age at 40% of normal speed, so a Splitter takes about 7.5 seconds instead of 3 to burst, and its ring and pulse slow down to match. The DODGE.IO guide's threat table already gives the advice that goes with it: get some distance before the burst, so the four bullets have spread apart by the time they reach you.

One sound switch per game

Each game remembers your settings in your browser's local storage, on your own device. Every game on this site shares that storage, because a browser keeps one store for the whole website. ORBIT.IO and SPLIT.IO both saved their sound setting under the same name, sound_enabled. So if you muted ORBIT.IO and then opened SPLIT.IO, it read the same setting and started muted too, and turning sound back on in SPLIT.IO also turned it back on in ORBIT.IO.

Now each game saves under its own name, so muting one leaves the other alone.

The fix also keeps any choice you'd already made. When either game finds no setting of its own yet, it reads the old shared one as its starting point. If you had sound off before this change, both games still open muted. The first time you flip the SOUND switch in one of them, that game saves its own setting, and from then on the two are independent.

Where this leaves things

Both fixes are live. The Help page covers the sound, vibration and motion settings in every game, and where scores and settings are saved. If a warning ever seems to be missing in any of the games, or a setting won't stay put, the contact page is the place to tell us.