Forums » Help » I need to figure out a way to make Impact run in the Background

I recently developed an Idle game Overlod, it's doing quite well as it is among the most played games in Kongregate this week, but it has a fatal flaw;

It doesn't run when in background tab (basically all progress halts when you are not staring at the game).

I'm really at a loss here, if you have any tips I would love to hear them.

I played the game a little while. Well, the game is quite addicting :)

I guess there isn't any way to make Javascript run when the tab isn't in focus. I guess you are short on options there. But I'm no expert, there might be a solution.

However, if you can manage to use the system clock instead of the ig.system.tick and on every update check the system clock, you might do a 'catch up' based on the "real" elapsed time maybe.

Here's a similar situation where some code was improved so that it would work better despite being in an inactive tab:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5927284/how-can-i-make-setinterval-also-work-when-a-tab-is-inactive-in-chrome

Edit: It sounds like for the most part though, you're going to have to deal with ImpactJS running at about 1 frame per second while the tab is inactive. If you have timers that reset multiple times per second, they will seem to slow down.

Thanks very much Joncom!

This is pointing me in the right direction :) (I can live with 1FPS, I only need to multiply progress for a delta).

I may be able to create a special kind of Timer that uses this method instead of the Impactjs timer