Fixing The Flicker In The Glow Sign

A handful of members got in touch to say the glowing neon-style sign above the games floor looked like it was flickering badly on their screens, which was confusing to hear because it looked perfectly steady and calm on every screen I had personally tested it on, which is always the single most frustrating kind of bug report anyone can possibly receive as a site owner.

It eventually turned out to be a mismatch between the glow animation's timing and certain screens' refresh rates. The pulsing glow was set to run for a fixed number of animation frames rather than a fixed amount of real time, so faster screens ended up speeding the whole flicker up into something noticeably jarring, while slower screens barely noticed anything was wrong with it at all.

Switching the animation to run on real elapsed time instead of a raw frame count sorted the problem out everywhere I could get my hands on to test, including one genuinely old laptop that redraws noticeably slower than everything else currently sitting in the flat. The sign now pulses at exactly the same gentle rate no matter what device happens to be running it.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to send screenshots and short screen recordings of the flicker in action, because that kind of specific detail is what makes a bug like this one solvable instead of just a vague mystery. Please keep flagging anything that looks even slightly odd on your end — a flickering sign is a small thing right up until it is the very first thing anyone sees.