Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Tuesday 10 January 2012

"Cut The Rope" and HTML5 Audio

Microsoft released an HTML5 version of Cut The Rope which is pretty cool. Unfortunately they use Flash audio by default for Firefox users because, they say, "some Firefox users could have run into an audio problem but will notice we fall back to a flash plugin to ensure that sound effects and music will work." They don't mention specific Firefox bugs (although they do for Chrome), and when I try the HTML5 audio version it works fine for me. So, please try the HTML5 version in Firefox (release or nightly), and if it doesn't work let me know and file bugs! Thanks!

Comments

Mardeg
I get the same pauses in audio that I reported in bug 704450
Anonymous
for me on firefox 9.0.1, vista 32, it works pretty normal, as with flash. I checked and plugin-container.exe wasn't running.
Tomer Cohen
Site doesn't loads to me on a recent Aurora build.
Anonymous
The game doesn't work if you don't have Adobe Flash Player installed. Disable Flash Player through Add-ons Manager and try yourself, even if you forced HTML5 Audio it will be stuck at 00% and simply won't load. Gecko/20120110 Firefox/12.0a1 Retarded developers should get off the web.
kazé
I confirm the game doesn’t load if Flash is disabled (latest Aurora 11 on Ubuntu 11.10). :-/
Marco
Enabling html5 audio I crashed due to bug 713381.
Ernst Sjöstrand
Ah it works super for me with the HTML5 audio version. Firefox 10 beta here. It wouldn't load first, but that was probably because I had FlashBlock installed.
Anonymous
Like the previous commenters, it hangs on load for me if I disable Flash (with html5audio=true of course). It's doing something weird with Flash as the plugin keeps using CPU, but once it's loaded you can kill it and the sound keeps playing, so I guess it's working as it should. With that out of the way, I don't notice any sound problems. That said and while we're at it, a drive-by complaint: volume changes take a long while (a buffer length's worth, ~2 seconds?) to propagate. It doesn't affect this game but is annoying enough for video playback, and could be a big issue for games that use dynamic attenuation.
David Aitken
I'm running standard plain ff on the release update channel, and I would like to echo the comments of the previous, anonymous, commentator. Cheers.
Anonymous
Doesn't work in Lunascape with Trident either
Nigel Parker
Check this out for an explaination http://nerdplusart.com/why-is-there-flash-in-the-html5-version-of-cut-the-rope If a user comes to the site in an HTML5 browser that doesn’t support .mp3 (mostly Firefox which only supports .ogg) then the library will force Flash audio. So, in Firefox we inadvertently ended up with a hard dependency on Flash. This, understandably, was frustrating to Firefox users. The good news is that we’ve fixed that check and will deploy a build with the fix in (hopefully) the next 48 hours. If you’re curious about the audio bugs, you can force the game to use HTML5 audio (no flash) with this link: http://www.cuttherope.ie/?html5audio=true
Robert
Nigel: thanks, that helps, but my question remains: what specific Firefox bugs did they hit that makes them prefer Flash for Firefox users? I'd like to know so we can fix them :-). Maybe it was https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=713381, which we have a fix for ... but maybe it was something else.
Anonymous
http://chrome.angrybirds.com/ How about Mozilla asking retarded Rovio to remove the Flash dependency from Angry Birds "HTML5"? Sigh, all these retarded so called "HTML5" developers should not do any HTML5 work if they can't do it right in the first place.
Anonymous
I am exicited about HTML5 but Flash can do all these things html5 audio player can do in a better way.Creating slideshow in HTML5! wow! what, flash did that 10 years ago! It is very easy to create a flash animation, for example a ball bouncing in flash professional in less than am minute. Javascript is a mess when compared to AS3.