I got C2 working in IE7/IE8!!! - Audio HELP?

Just a quick note, about Ashley last comment, but Internet Explorer is also automatically and silently updated since the beginning of this year, capped by the OS limitations (IE8 on XP, 9 on Vista and 7) if I'm not mistaken.

That's true, but organisations tend to install Windows Updates when it suits them, i.e. very rarely and years between. So that tends to mean they're lagging behind even the current Windows Updates.

Ashley,

By the way I got audio working:

mcgraw-hill.faceyspacey.com/rocket-blast-3-v11

it's using audio.js (http://kolber.github.com/audiojs) with a connector I wrote. It still needs a lot of optimization. If anyone has any advice, let me know.

Otherwise, I got a quick counter-argument for you, Ashley: by supporting more platforms, you'll be able to segway more people into the future. Many people don't use your solution because it won't work easily in IE<9. You could be a stepping stone for them. Basically the opposite of your argument could be true. By supporting more platforms, you can get more people using HTML5 than otherwise.

In general, martyrdom rhetoric is always the loss of stubborn individuals. I'm sorry, but you're not really going to make a difference in the whole movement to html5. I mean you could, but it's not worth your time. It would be more beneficial to C2 as a whole to do whatever it takes to get more people on board with it.

With full IE<9 support, you could get a host of new developers who otherwise passed on C2. Once they're with you, you now got a bigger ship of developers moving to the HTML5 world. They have flash easily working, but overall they're more supportive of the HTML movement. Just think about it, man. What's fantasy and theory vs. reality? Reality is I just need to get the above game a little more optimized and a huge percentage of your games can easily work in IE<9. Now coding in HTML5 first is an option for tons of flash developers that would otherwise stay entrenched in flash for even longer.

It's all about the segway, man. That's how we'll most quickly and most smoothly get to where we wall want to go where browsers kick ass and are cross-compatible.

I understand your problem faceyspacey i just suffered with IE7/8 in my university with their desktops, many organizations wont update their system after 4 or 5 years, and today browsers improving so much fast than before, and I'm glad you made it work finally, and also Ashley is totally right too for not wasting time and resources on outdated technology, but again i sensed you made it work by yourself, i believe this a good reason to let those who refuse to use new browsers to try HTML5, even it's limited with IE7/8 and not worth to support, but it's enough to grab their attention to update, convincing them to HTML5 . <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I think supporting old browsers won't make anyone excited about HTML5 at all. Old browsers are extremely slow and have very poor feature support (see the list I made off the top of my head). I imagine people being more disappointed than excited. The future of HTML5 is new browsers.

I think it all comes down to business reasons that will truly excite people. Maybe newbs will be more excited, but you'll capture a lot more serious professionals that have demanding clients if you create a build functionality using flash canvas.

As you may have saw, I got sound working very well using Sound Manager 2. Here's the latest link:

mcgraw-hill.faceyspacey.com/rocket-blast-3-v12

And I'm on the verge of solving the flickering completely by injecting the images into the flash canvas swf using loadImage(), which the swf than caches. I.e. I'm pretty sure the flickering is happening cuz of the loading of content.

Ultimately, the user experience in this particular game is nearly as good as the HTML5 one. The space blasters demo I did, which is very fast, also works very well.

So maybe it wont support all the cool new upcoming features, but brother most the games in your arcade will work using flash canvas just fine.

Your platform is perfect kids' education games, and all publishers in that world require it to work in IE<9. ALL OF THEM! And will for 3-5 more years. That's just the deal in the public US k-12 education system, and probably k-12 everywhere.

There is big money here, and you're missing out on a huge opportunity. I've concocted a very solid solution here. Maybe it doesn't support 100% of the things you can do with C2, but it does support the 80% most common use cases. I'm getting a lot of help from the developer of Flash Canvas. I'm sure we can improve it more for the needs of C2. You go to great lengths in various articles you've published to state how C2 works in like 24 environments (i.e. in your benchmarks article). I'm not sure why you don't want to add such a large percentage of computers to your roster, specifically a percentage that could end up being disproportionately large in terms of the total C2 game players if the education market took a liking to your platform, which they could and will, especially after I make 200 games with your platform for one of the biggest textbook publishers. Like, 10-15% use IE<9 below on most sites, but in the education market it's between 30-50%.

I honestly may be interested in funding this stuff being added to your build process. I know you have your path, and tons of cool stuff you want to do. So this is just annoying bullsh*t. But dude, C2 is literally made to make the sort of learning games I'm making for young kids. It's a perfect fit. I mean what if an entire school district or textbook publisher came to you and said they wanted to make C2 the exclusive tool for making their games, and they'll bring a ton of developers to start using it, what would you say?

It would only be good for C2, and much of the work, research and testing will have already been done so you just need to generate more pristine less hacky and more integrated versions of the code I got.

I know it goes against the mission statement you've been sharing with the world for so long, but if it's working tight enough, and doesn't take much time for you to integrate, I don't know how you can deny it as a smart business decision. If it took tons of time, fine, i get it. But this may actually be extremely easy for you. For example, here's all the code I needed to add (besides the library) to make SoundManager2 work with its hidden swf:

jsfiddle.net/7Uvm9

and of course I have conditional HTML tags triggering this only for IE. Check the source here:

mcgraw-hill.faceyspacey.com/rocket-blast-3-v12

faceyspacey, just wondering why you still decide to use HTML5 (with hacky fix) instead of using Flash right of the bat ?

(which probably will give you better performance + no sound problem too)

Is it because C2 is too awesome <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> ?

And will for 3-5 more years. That's just the deal in the public US k-12 education system, and probably k-12 everywhere.

No, not everywhere. In France, schools use the latest versions of firefox and/or chrome. It's possible, it works and it's fine.

Also, Flash canvas is "FLASH". It's not HTML5, HTML5 is the promise to get rid of annoying ressources taking plugins to download and install.

Having a bastard version running in an inferior outdated web browser is no performance, only scamming.

You're right that C2 is the perfect tool to make small/easy educationnal games.

It is, in modern browsers for which it has been thought for and designed.

If you want to invest, invest in the training of the network/computer responsibles in schools so that they update their software (OS, browsers) to provide better browsing/learning for the pupils and risk less security issues than with obsolete bastarized hacks.

Firefox and Chrome are free (as in "COST NO MONEY"), why not simply use them ?

And the publishers, inform them about the current status of HTML5 games, convince them that they would bet on the future and it wouldn't represent much investment.

THAT'd be a smart business and responsible/future oriented move.

And you could still make your hundreds of thousands of $ out of the kid's education.

nobody's doing that brother. the game works this way: schools and big players in supplying these schools are staying with IE<9 and don't want to install anything new. It's big business. It's big old-fashioned school districts that don't want to spend money upgrading their computers or having their IT staff install new stuff. It's just the way it goes. We can be as theoretical as we want about preaching to them to upgrade, but it's not happening and not a solution. For me specifically, it's not because I don't get this mega job unless I can do all platforms. They've hired me to prove I can make this work across all platforms, and if I can, i make $$$. If I can't, i make $0. And the kids lose too ;).

Anyway, Potato, cuz we need to work on tablets and phones too :), and it's best to align ourselves with the future of technology so we can make use of upcoming features and other places HTML5 is supported and not flash, etc. And HTML5 is better, no on cheap school computers crashing.

Well, I guess there is a case for supporting old browsers. But the practical side of it is we have over 20,000 lines of official javascript code (and a lot more from third party plugins) that would need to be carefully reviewed alongside compatibility tables for all the old IE versions, and hacks and workarounds added as necessary. I would not want to sell a broken product to schools and I don't think you fully appreciate the work needed to test and verify all features work properly with old, non-standards-compliant browsers.

For example, does 'Fullscreen in browser' work? Does every combination of project and layout setting work? Does WebStorage work prior to IE8? (It doesn't.) Does XML parsing work properly? Do the form controls work? etc. etc.

It is easy to wave away broken features. But suppose a school somewhere is using IE7 and wants to use WebStorage to teach client side storage vs. server side storage (as a random example). Oops, it doesn't work... they send us a support request, and if we officially support it, we're obliged to fix it. That could be a lot of work re-writing a plugin for an old browser when we're halfway through adding support for the latest features being added to browsers. Again, I predict there are countless issues where there will be technical issues like that. It's difficult for us to spare the resources to either fully test our entire engine on IE6-8, or to deal with support requests as they come up.

Again, browser upgrades are free and should be relatively straightforward, and can be installed side-by-side with IE as a non-default browser so exact compatibility with their version of IE is preserved. I am finding it difficult to understand why this is such a huge problem for schools. If they are going to the bother of installing Construct 2 over computers site-wide, why not just bundle it with Chrome at the same time? They're already doing the work... then everything will work much better with C2 as well.

By all means use FlashCanvas if it works for your needs, but us supporting it officially is a thorny issue that we'd prefer to avoid. We'd rather say: this software requires a modern browser.