Update: HTML5 bug fixes

there’s this bug with the emiter were the positioning is off

Hey, sorry for taking so long to get back to you.
Busy weekend. I will email (Probably by the end of the day) all of these issues again but with examples, screenshots and with some more in-depth/simple explanations.

Oh okay @grazer . Other than that, I have one other suggestion: Could you make it so there is an alert with two different buttons? For example: When pressing one button, it leads to one thing, while the other button will do another thing. Could you do that in this update? It would help with a lot of my future and current games.

Just sent this HUGE email to you @grazer
It is full of bug reports and I did my best to make it understandable. Really hope all of that helps somehow.
RIP free day. :slight_smile:

Please tell me if you have any issues reading it.

@grazer These issues are all in the HTML5 version:

1) The HTML5 version in Firefox feels a lot slower than in Chrome. It feels like everything is delayed, you should try it out yourself.

2) This one is hard to explain so just do the following:

  • Open the behavior screen of an object
  • Copy a behavior block
  • Paste the behavior block
  • Nothing happens, pasting doesn’t work
  • Close the behavior screen
  • Open the behavior screen again
  • The panel on the left side looks really weird now and you can’t drag behaviors anymore
  • Reload the page
  • Open the behavior screen of the object again
  • The behavior you tried to paste is now there

3) When doing something like this:
Once -> (start) Animation (done) -> (start) Animation (done) -> (start) Animation

The object will flicker when an animation ends and a new one starts.

4) This bug has been here since forever: If a sound is played for the first time, it’ll have to load first until it starts playing. The sounds should load before the game starts so there’s no delay.

Thanks for the bug report @Latif

  1. I use FF all the time, so I’m aware that the interface doesn’t feel as snappy. I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing and rewriting things to make them more performant in HTML5, but I’m definitely not done yet.

  2. The behavior pasting being busted is a known issue: https://trello.com/c/YA8VvUR0/89-behavior-copy-paste-in-html5

  3. This is a new one, I’ll check it out - thanks!

  4. This is a tricky one. The engine intentionally doesn’t load every sound at startup, since many sounds might never be played, and this could potentially use up a lot of memory and add significant loading delay (especially for music, many games have different music for each level). Maybe it would be worth adding an option to preload a sound so that it is available immediately.

5) In the HTML5 version you added a display order property for objects in the user interface, but it doesn’t seem to work. If this feature was unintended, please fix it instead of removing it. I’ve always wanted it.

Maybe the engine could load every sound of all objects present on that specific level.

Sometimes you shoot something and there’s no sound… but out of thin air, everything plays super loud with loads of sounds from previous actions you did.

It’s been awhile since I tested those bugs, but I do distinctly remember UI and background really needing layers, because there is no way for them to know which layer to be on, so sometimes the wrong thing will be on top and cover up stuff that should be on top

And sometimes more than two or three sounds won’t play at once, which I assume isn’t fixed, since I recall some of my games that played music and combined sounds for unique sounding ones didn’t work right.

I’ll check into it, but I can almost confidently confirm those two need to be fixed, alongside the volume problem with sounds

@grazer
This is a good opportunity to bring up the old flowlab beta custom splash and loading screens. If you add an option to preload sounds and massive levels, instead of sitting at a white screen, I’d really like to have an actual loading screen.

A custom loading screen would be really nice. @grazer

I also want loading screens… I think all of us want loading screens @grazer :lol:

Loading screens are outdated. Wouldn’t it be better if your game DIDN’T need a loading screen?

I know that everyone, or most of us, here love arcade and old games. But we don’t really need loading screens. 2019. Time to move on to another aesthetic bois.

So you have a point @PixelPizza - it would be nice to not need them. Most modern games have clever schemes to hide the “loading screen”: Pretty much any time you squeeze through a narrow passage like in Uncharted or Tomb Raider, or take an elevator like in Mass Effect, or fly a spaceship in Destiny, that’s just a fancy (3D) loading screen.

It would be tricky to do something like that in Flowlab, but there has to be some sort of time allowance to load in new game level data and objects, and we have to show something during that time.

It would be really straightforward to allow for a single image to be assigned to each level, which could be that level’s “loading screen”. That would allow for a custom image to be displayed while the game (or a single level) is loading and initializing, but wouldn’t allow for fancy animations.

I’m open to better ideas if anyone has them.

@graxer

http://flowlab.io/game/play/1158344

Click on “level select” levels 10, 12, 13, 14, and 15 won’t show the full graphic that I uploaded. Is there some quirk in flowlab that I am accidentally exploiting, am I doing someone wrong, or have I run into a bug?

I have tried multible times to get these levels to show the full graphic, by re-uploading them and doing all I know to get them to stay, but every time I reload the page the full graphic disappears.

Black fade-ins and fade-outs would be completely fine for me. I will add them anyway aha.

Otherwise, I could use other similar ideas. Like the “Loading Room Screen” from Revita (Still on Early alpha). Which is pretty cool and it’s fast. That’s what players want.

The gif is obviously sped up. But you can see how smooth and FAST the transition is.

More info on Revita: https://twitter.com/BenstarDEV

I’d honestly like something like shown in the gif, or at least be able to change the color of the loading piece to something other than white.

The current loading in flowlab is like a flash of a white screen but loads pretty quick.

My only suggestion to do is to let us pick what color is shown.
A flash of white is quick but kinda blinding. I would like the option for a black screen.
Other colors could be cool cause you could also match the background of the next level.

Animation or images shouldn’t be need for how fast Flowlab is actually loading the game.

Agreed @“JR 01” , but if someone wanted one, and if it did load for a while, then the option would also be nice to have.

My game takes forever to load, I think its cause it has so much stuff in it.