This is a mystery : I published "igor"and it runs perfect when I play it (without logging in), yet friends seem to get a frozen screen all the time!

https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/bfxei9svhusesifwbbnuea/igor

I tried running it on my phone and it runs ok, except there is no sound!?

Some Friends feedback :
1." On my phone it says insecure page!"

2. "Screen is frozen."
3. "the page loads but there is nothing interactive on it"

Now I see the game has been put into "sandpit" with reason saying "there are errors". I cannot see what errors can happen, when it works perfect for me even when not logged in on my PC?! How can errors be fixed if there is no way of seing them?

I have no idea why others cannot play it!

Is it worth publishing anything if unknown errors happen with no explanation and no way of knowing what can be done to fix it?

I tried running the link to my game on Microsoft Edge and the game freezes and is umplayable! Becasue it says website is NOT SECURE!

Bottom line is this : textadventures.co.uk is NOT SECURE ! so people see a corrupted game, frozen screen or cannot play it and they seem to miss the option of allowing the website to run due to it being branded dangerous!?

It doesn't play on line, but plays fine when downloaded.
This is the game link:
http://play2.textadventures.co.uk/Play.aspx?id=bfxei9svhusesifwbbnuea
hmmm not https:
... https: doesn't work either.

I just wanted to clarify a bit since I was the one to categorize this into sandpit for now.

I'm not sure why it isn't working, but I did try it through multiple browsers with a secured connection. I haven't used Quest much over the last few years so I can't really help with the technical aspect.

I think I've been doing most of the game sorting lately, and I've had to sandpit quite a few for not loading properly or having errors. If you can get it working I'd be more than happy to re-categorize it, though. I don't like having to sandpit games even if most of them end up there.

I'll keep an eye on this thread and if someone else can help you through this we'll make sure the game ends up where it should be. The same goes for anyone else with a sandpit game that can fix it up. We can always put it into a real category later.

Think it's likely audio policy again.

Because of annoying audio ads that play in the background, web browsers have been trying to prevent sites from playing audio without prompting the user.

As far is the browser is concerned, the user is following a link to a new site (play2.textadventures.co.uk) which immediately tries to play sound in the background using javascript. This is suspicious, so is blocked.

Browsers are constantly updating, while annoying ad companies constantly try to find ways around them. As it stands, the main ones have a pretty decent algorithm for determining if the audio is likely to be wanted by the user. This is why it works for you – you've played games that used sound on this site before, so it assumes you know what the site is. Whether it works for any specific person will depend on how much time they've spent playing Quest games online, how often those games contain sound, and how recently they played one.

(I tested this using multiple user accounts on my computer. The ones that I normally use to play text adventures can play your game; the other ones can't)

To override it (in Chrome): Click the padlock to the left of the game URL when it starts playing. Site Settings → Sound → Allow.
Then refresh the page and it works fine.

I would suggest giving an option for someone to play without sound (in case they're in public or something, so they can see a text description instead). If the game starts with a "do you want to play sounds?" message, and the 'yes' option triggers the first sound, the browser is much more likely to allow it. (playing media in response to a click is generally permitted; which is why a lot of filesharing sites now have their ads start paused and play when you click a download button)

Thanks everyone for your insight and advice.

Always Greatly appreciated and valued.

I have suggested that friends download game and also download Quest offline to play it with sounds and no web-blocking shenanigans!

Cheers.

P.S. Now I still need my much bigger game "Find Andy" downloadable so I can remove all the marge wav files/replace with mp3 versions. Though I actually done the replacement online of wavs to mp3s for all sounds, I still cannot publish or even Download my game!! This one is driving me nuts and it looks like there is no solution. Have contacted Admin (if they actually exist?) but no response now for months!

Trying to come up with something that might work, but it's a hard one to test.

Something like this might help:

msg ("This game includes sound to enhance your experience. The game will start when the first sound ends. If you don't hear the sound <button onclick=\"$('#jquery_jplayer').jPlayer('play');\">Click here</button>.")

Alternatively, you could do some JS like:

if (platform == "webplayer") { $(function () {
  var time_remaining;
  var last_time_remaining = 1;
  $('#jquery_jplayer').bind($.jPlayer.event.timeupdate, function (event) {
    time_remaining = event.jPlayer.status.duration - event.jPlayer.status.duration;
  }).bind($.jPlayer.event.play, function (event) {
    last_time_remaining = 1;
    time_remaining = 0;
  });
  var timer = window.setInterval(function () {
    if (_waitingForSoundToFinish) {
      if (last_time_remaining == time_remaining) {
        // Something went wrong - Quest is waiting for a sound to finish, but the sound has failed to load, stalled, or been paused by an ad blocker
        finishSync (true);
      } else {
        last_time_remaining = time_remaining;
      }
    } else {
      time_remaining = 2;
      last_time_remaining = 1;
    }
  }, 1800);
}) };

Off the top of my head, this has the browser run a check every 1.8 seconds. If there's a sound playing for longer than that but its "time remaining" hasn't changed, then we assume something has gone wrong and trigger the "sound ended" event manually.
(And I won't be surprised if I've made an error there).

In a form that you can put directly into your UI Initialisation script, that would look like:

JS.eval("'webplayer'==platform&&$(function(){var n,t=1;$('#jquery_jplayer').bind($.jPlayer.event.timeupdate,function(t){n=t.jPlayer.status.duration-t.jPlayer.status.duration}).bind($.jPlayer.event.play,function(a){t=1,n=0});window.setInterval(function(){_waitingForSoundToFinish?t==n?finishSync(!0):t=n:(n=2,t=1)},1800)});")