Solar Puzzles 1.6.3: your style
solarpuzzlesreleaseengineering
Solar Puzzles 1.6.3 is out on the App Store and Google Play. It changes no rule of any game. What it changes is how the games look — and, for the first time, it lets the player decide some of that.
What’s new
- Planet Portals has a Your Style page. Pick a frame for your blocks — none at all, Classic, or Glacier, Obsidian and Helios with the Space Pass — tint it to the block or keep the artwork’s own colours, set how thick it is, and finish the face with a Crystal, Prism or Glass surface (Space Pass). Gates wear the matching hardware.
- No frame is the default. A new save gets the bare block: its colour, a little gloss, and nothing around it.
- The forty Portals levels sit on one road — a horizontal strip with a signpost where each chapter begins, replacing three tabs. It opens at the level you are about to play.
- Cosmic Marbles has marble materials: Ceramic, or Glass, Cloud and Prism with the Space Pass. A burst marble snaps in its own material, then rings and sparks outward.
- Every ship is redrawn with two seats — one for the loaded marble, one for the spare — and a tap on the ship swaps them, with the seats turning as the ship does.
- Planet Blocks wears new artwork: a pearl-white rocket, six kinds of asteroid, a satin-gold artifact with a warm shimmer under its star, and ice that looks like ice, intact and cracked.
- Planet Portals’ asteroids are stone now, round and cratered, in place of the grey discs.
- The level lists end with their last level. The “more levels are on the way” note is gone from all of them: the app now says nothing anywhere about content that does not exist yet.
A showcase is not a picker
Both Portals and Cosmic Marbles now open their level list with a “Choose a style” card: the look you have equipped first, then four others. The obvious way to build that card is to make each sample a button that equips its style. We built it that way first and took it out.
The trouble is what a tap on a sample means. If it swaps the draft, then a child who taps the shiny one to look at it has just lost the ship she picked yesterday — or believes she has, which on a screen she cannot read is the same thing. So every tap on the card, samples and heading alike, opens the editor on what is actually equipped, and only the editor’s own button changes anything. The card shows; it never picks. Android and the web had this from the day the card appeared; iOS caught up in this release.
A frame that is not there has no colour to match and no rail to widen. While None is previewed, the colour switch and the thickness slider step aside rather than sitting there disabled — a control that cannot do anything should not be asking to be touched.
Why the default is no frame
Classic was the default for as long as there were frames. The bare block took over because, put side by side with a block in any frame, it reads faster: the colour is the whole signal in Planet Portals, and a frame is a second thing on every block for the eye to get past. A frame is a choice you make because you like it, which is exactly what a style page is for. The golden carrier — the one block that leaves through any portal — keeps its Classic frame whatever you choose, because that frame is how it is told apart.
The same instinct decided what a lapsed Space Pass shows. The paid frames and surfaces stay saved; the board simply shows the default until the pass is back. Nothing is erased and nothing has to be picked again.
A ship with two seats
Every Cosmic Marbles ship used to carry its marbles as two dots. The redrawn hulls give each one a seat for the loaded marble and a socket for the spare — in the tail, on a shoulder, at the side — and the swap is an animation between the two, following whichever way the ship is facing. The loaded marble turns slowly on the game clock, so a paused board is a still one. None of it touches the shot: the marble keeps the same size on the ship, in flight and in the chain.
Materials are the one cosmetic that reaches the chain itself. Ceramic is the free one; Glass, Cloud and Prism come with the pass and change nothing about which marbles match — the six colours were tuned in 1.6.2 to be told apart on a moving chain, and a material sits on top of a colour without moving it.
The road
Three tabs held Planet Portals’ chapters, and a tab is a door: nothing behind it is visible until you open it. The road puts all forty levels on one strip, two tiles per column, with a signpost standing where each chapter begins and the neighbouring chapter’s tiles running past the edge of the phone. That peek is the point — it is what says the journey continues. The strip opens at the level you are about to play, with what you have cleared on the left and what is locked on the right, and a clear drives on to the level it opened.
The sample that would not redraw
One fix is worth a paragraph because it hid well. On iOS, the equipped sample on the Portals card sometimes kept the old frame colour after a new one had been applied in the editor. Every other picture of the block — the board, the rules sheet — updated; the one on the card did not.
The card was reading the saved look straight out of UserDefaults inside its body, and nothing in SwiftUI observes a value read that way: the view redraws when something it depends on changes, and a plain read is not a dependency. Whether it happened to redraw after the editor closed depended on the navigation stack noticing, which it sometimes did. The board never had the problem because its tile reads the same keys through @AppStorage, which is a dependency. The fix was to make the card’s sample read the saved look the same way, and to stop hand-assembling a preset from raw reads in a view body at all.
Get Solar Puzzles — free to play, no ads, nothing collected, every puzzle offline. On both stores.
