This is really cool. Fascinating how the intuition maps neatly onto this grid
As a notorious Minesweeper speedrunner I find the animation uncover animation when middle clicking to be a little slow as I find myself waiting it for it to finish for a second or so.
I've done quite a few iterations of the speed at which they get uncovered, and it's definitely tricky to nail down. I've tried to find a middle ground between something that's rewarding/satisfying (so should take 1-2 seconds, long enough to be enjoyed), but also doesn't block you (so should be instant). And that animation would need to very different if it's revealing 10 tiles or less, or 500+. I realize this still isn't quite right.
So thank you for saying that, I'll try and improve it.
An idea (not sure if it will work well) - how about uncovering fields with a "wave" rather than one by one? So instead of linear time, make it linear-by-distance time. First reveal the original tile, then its neighbours, then their neighbours, ... It should still feel pretty fluid, but faster.
If I understand correctly what you're describing, it's more or less what's happening now. But it may not look like it if you're on the beginner grid, and may only look good/better on the larger grids (either expert size, or custom with very large size).
But in short, when you uncover the first tile of this wave, at each frame I uncover only 1/60 of the total. So if you've uncovered 600 tiles, 10 should be uncovered on each frame, and it should be done in 1 second if your display is at 60FPS.
But if you uncover 60 tiles only, it will uncover 1 per frame, and that can look pretty bland. Could it be what you see? If that's the case, I believe (with a good 60% certainty!) that I mostly need to revisit the method when it's for a small number of tiles.
Yes, I'm on a small grid, so only see a "chain" of the boxes being uncovered one by one. It does feel pretty slow, even though I'm nowhere close to speed solving : - )
I've thought about what you said a bit more, and I think you meant it should accelerate with time?
In any case, I've just done that and deployed it. So if you refresh the page, the animation should - hopefully - be less bland. Feel free to let me know what you think.
As a notorious Minesweeper speedrunner I find the animation uncover animation when middle clicking to be a little slow as I find myself waiting it for it to finish for a second or so.