Warrior General Games

This suggestion is for users who use mobile devices to play GLB.
Beginning in August 2012, Flash no longer supports Android devices. Much of the internet world has transitioned to HTML5. I will no longer be able to watch flash sims on my phone, and as more users upgrade their devices, they won't either.

I prefer watching sims in the flash format and am not fond of the old style replays. I also prefer to avoid downloading flash onto my new device through a third party source and risk corrupting my device just so I can enjoy GLB.

Please replace flash with HTML5 or add HTML5 as an additional option.

Originally posted by T♠2♠
add HTML5 as an additional option.

This is better than "Get rid of Flash replays"

Originally posted by dahman32
"Get rid of Flash replays"

Not do this

If adding HTML5 is plausible without replacing flash, cool. If not, we need to get with the times.

Admittedly, I don't know much about graphics, but isn't the canvas tag part of html5?

Originally posted by TruthHammer
Admittedly, I don't know much about graphics, but isn't the canvas tag part of html5?

Yes and there is a canvas tag in the replay. If I had to guess, I'd say it's for the fading play boxes, but honestly, I don't know. Unless I've missed a change somewhere, it certainly doesn't look like it gets any serious use in the play animation. And FWIW, converting just the animation over to HTML5 looks to be fairly trivial. I've written most of what my scripts need already. It wasn't a big deal, I've just never seen a need to finish it. Completely duplicating the flash replays looks to be a much bigger task due to the rosters and such.

But instead of just ignoring the old replays, might it be more useful to say what's wrong with them on a mobile? It's probably much easier to fix the problems than to start from scratch.

Originally posted by pabst


But instead of just ignoring the old replays, might it be more useful to say what's wrong with them on a mobile? It's probably much easier to fix the problems than to start from scratch.


Well, my issue with the old replays is that it is choppy between plays, so if I want to watch a game unfold it's cumbersome. I have to pinch and zoom every play. Not fun. Even at home on my laptop, I use Flash to watch replays unless I am lolscouting.

Flash sucks anyway. Steve Jobs proving yet again he knows his shit

+1

Originally posted by T♠2♠
Well, my issue with the old replays is that it is choppy between plays, so if I want to watch a game unfold it's cumbersome. I have to pinch and zoom every play. Not fun. Even at home on my laptop, I use Flash to watch replays unless I am lolscouting.

Ok, I'm confused. Is your complaint that the page changes caused by switching plays is resetting your view settings and causing the pinch/zoom ballet?

If that's it, the trivial solution isn't possible since just switching the replays to a canvas won't fix that. Bort would have to replicate the entire flash display via canvas. It's not impossible, but it's definitely not a single pot of coffee undertaking. However, the need to change pages can be removed without using canvases at all. All it requires is for the running replay to pause itself, fetch the next replay via xmlHttpRequest (which should be universally supported by now), and swap all of the necessary data from the fetched page. I know nothing about the flash replay code, but I'm guessing it does it the same way. Implementing that is certainly easier than starting from scratch with HTML5 and would probably make a much better suggestion than "Bort, gimme HTML5 or the balloon gets it!"*


*Just an attempt at levity. Don't panic.

The problem with using html5 like you're saying is that most canvas scripting with html5 is done in javascript, which is what the old replays are written in. So you'd basically be downgrading. There are more api's to make things run a little smoother but it's still going to be considerably like the old ones. Trust me, as a web designer I would LOVE if GLB could drop flash completely and switch to HTML5 replays but unless there's some API that could be used for these replays, it's basically going to be javascript.

Well, I didn't assume this would be something that would be implemented today, but the reality is GLB has users who watch replays with flash, and they no longer can with many new mobile devices. It also sucks to have to readjust your screen from replay to replay. Seems like a serious problem to me. I dunno, maybe this site is closer to shutting it down than I realized.

I agree with you about readjusting the screen sucks... I'd imagine there's a way to fix that. All I was saying is that HTML5 replays == javascript replays which are already there

Originally posted by Pook
So you'd basically be downgrading.
I wouldn't call it downgrading. Yes, you still use javascript, but a canvas does have a few advantages. The primary one being hardware acceleration on most browsers plus iPhone/Android leading to much better performance. Instead of 20fps, you can pretty much make it seamless. If you've got greasemonkey available, run the script ... you can't help but notice the difference: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/150862 .

Originally posted by Pook
I agree with you about readjusting the screen sucks... I'd imagine there's a way to fix that.
Yep, xmlHttpRequest. It ain't hard.