Forums » Impact Engine » Web testing of my game -- some good news -- some bad news

The good news was how amazingly fast the game loaded and played.
I thought maybe there was some oddity with cache in my browser, so I started to try different browsers. This is when I encountered the bad (or not so good) news.

Turns out impact engine does not run on IE 8. I could probably hack the code to fix the addeventlistner thing (gotta love those ms idiots for doing everything their own way).

But, I read somewhere on the forum that impact uses the canvas which is missing from IE 8.

Is this correct?

I don't mind telling IE users to slip into something a little more comfortable in the way of a browser. But, I wanted to do a check to see if this is true about IE 8 being a total wash out.

With 20% of the browser market being excluded I would have expected a heads up in the documentation somewhere (color me embarrassed if it's in 60 point font somewhere in the docs). Or, maybe a little html widget in the index.html to announce, "We noticed your browser does not support html5......" Or, even a little javascript to paint a nice friendly Announcement instead of trying to load the game then crashing.

Having the game just freeze makes it look like the site and site owner are the lame-oids. Whereas a nice message could put the burden of the game not loading back on the user -- along with a clear way to fix it by dl a different browser.

Anyway back to the good news. Man that thing loaded so much faster than I thought it would. Happy camper. :)

Hi gxxaxx,

Not really answering your question but I must say I'm a bit surprised you didn't knew it uses Canvas/HTML5 since this was the main reason I (and many others?) chose it in the first place. My thought at least is that Canvas will replace Flash eventually so I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of compatibility just to have a head start. Think of ImpactJS as a next-gen game engine for the future.

Regarding the "We noticed your browser does not support html5......" I think you just need to put it between the canvas tags and it should show exactly that for browsers not supporting HTML5 but maybe you need to change something in the JS as well to avoid errors.

Thanks for the response Kxen,

I'm with you on the "willing to sacrifice a bit of compatibility just to have a head start". My partner in this little adventure is even more so.

I've never used IE so the significance of the "uses canvas" didn't dawn on me. There is so much to absorb in the HTML5 world.

And, the suggestion of trying to put the "get a better browser" in between the canvas tags is brilliant in its simplicity. I will see what can be done to make that work. No testing for browser and guessing at abilities. Just put in some text that the engine dumps when it starts up the canvas. Hope that works.

Regards,
Claude

Because of the new advances that are coming in Flash 11 Air 3, I believe that both Flash and HTML 5 will both be viable platforms -- but for different applications.

Recently Adobe demoed Unreal running in a browser in a flash app at 60 fps -- this gives me hope that Flash is in it for awhile longer.

IE8 does not support <canvas>, <audio> and various other stuff. From the homepage:

Impact runs on all HTML5 capable browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and (behold) even Internet Explorer 9. Of course this also includes the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

I think the best solution for those sorry souls using IE, is Google's Chrome Frame. To the user, it's nothing more than a plugin like Flash, but under the hood it uses Chrome's rendering engine for everything.