Bonody’s ferpect : 6 tips to improve your online gaming life on Board Game Arena (and probably anywhere else too)

[CanuckEddie]

I have no specialized knowledge. But a cursory Google found a source that claimed Webkit was the compliant one, and Blink was the one causing trouble.

A cursory Google (and the Internet in general) can find you a source claiming anything that you want to be true, but as a developer I can assure you that the anger in the web developer community against Safari is getting strong because the opposite of what you are claiming is true. Hence Firefox is aligned with Chrome and Safari is the odd one out. And hence this post by the BGA people (with whom I have no affiliation) expressing the frustration web developers are experiencing at all the time they lose making things compatible with Safari.

The thing is, by your actions here, you are more interested in picking a camp and advocating for it than creating a customer experience. I'm not saying you are wrong, but a second cursory google found resources from the other camp so its not nearly as black and white as you are saying, and nonsense web politics - while massively complicating your life, I understand that - have nothing to do with *us* - the BGA devs can bitch about this over beers, but official messaging to the client base? Poor choices..

Keep in mind that Google's revenue depends on the health of the web, and for Apple it is the opposite.

This is political polemic nonsense. It is fine you believe it, have fun with that, I'm saying it has no place in a big BGA post like this. The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote. While you use very nice language, this is nothing but web development *whining*, and I have done web dev I get how its hard and frustrating and anger inducing....but if BGA adopts an official policy of "Safari users can suck eggs" thats stupid.

[Een]

I have no specialized knowledge. But a cursory Google found a source that claimed Webkit was the compliant one, and Blink was the one causing trouble.

A cursory Google (and the Internet in general) can find you a source claiming anything that you want to be true, but as a developer I can assure you that the anger in the web developer community against Safari is getting strong because the opposite of what you are claiming is true. Hence Firefox is aligned with Chrome and Safari is the odd one out. And hence this post by the BGA people (with whom I have no affiliation) expressing the frustration web developers are experiencing at all the time they lose making things compatible with Safari.

The thing is, by your actions here, you are more interested in picking a camp and advocating for it than creating a customer experience. I'm not saying you are wrong, but a second cursory google found resources from the other camp so its not nearly as black and white as you are saying, and nonsense web politics - while massively complicating your life, I understand that - have nothing to do with *us* - the BGA devs can bitch about this over beers, but official messaging to the client base? Poor choices..

Keep in mind that Google's revenue depends on the health of the web, and for Apple it is the opposite.

This is political polemic nonsense. It is fine you believe it, have fun with that, I'm saying it has no place in a big BGA post like this. The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote. While you use very nice language, this is nothing but web development *whining*, and I have done web dev I get how its hard and frustrating and anger inducing....but if BGA adopts an official policy of "Safari users can suck eggs" thats stupid.

You seem to be assuming that Tortom is a BGA developer. As far as I know, he is not, except if he recently started developing as a volunteer on BGA studio. So please consider his answer only as that of a user having a strong opinion about the subject, just like you

First of all, sorry if you (or any Apple user reading this thread) have been feeling personally implicated, that was not the intention behind this article.

To clarify, the purpose of this article is to give tips about how to get the best experience on BGA in the current state of affairs. Playing with Safari on BGA currently provides a less satisfying experience than playing with Chrome or Firefox.

This is just how it is at the moment. It doesn't mean that we are satisfied with it and that we don't want to improve things on Safari (I did spend time recently to fix a game for Safari). It just means that it's the current situation, and for people who can, we recommend to use another browser to get the best out of BGA. Unfortunately sometimes they can't. It's a well established fact that on iOS, there is a browser engine lock-in from Apple (reference here to the Apple documentation viewtopic.php?f=3&t=21939&p=92095&hilit=webkit#p92095). It's not political polemic nonsense. People can have varying opinions about it, positive, negative, neutral, but independently of opinions, it's a fact.

On Android at the moment, Chrome works better than Firefox for BGA as we have setup a very good auto-zoom feature relying on a Chrome specific non-standard property, so I would advise to use Chrome there. It doesn't mean that I don't like Firefox (quite the contrary). It just means that for playing on BGA, on Android you'll get a better experience with Chrome today.

[CanuckEddie]

You seem to be assuming that Tortom is a BGA developer. As far as I know, he is not, except if he recently started developing as a volunteer on BGA studio. So please consider his answer only as that of a user having a strong opinion about the subject, just like you

First of all, sorry if you (or any Apple user reading this thread) have been feeling personally implicated, that was not the intention behind this article.

To clarify, the purpose of this article is to give tips about how to get the best experience on BGA in the current state of affairs. Playing with Safari on BGA currently provides a less satisfying experience than playing with Chrome or Firefox.

This is just how it is at the moment. It doesn't mean that we are satisfied with it and that we don't want to improve things on Safari (I did spend time recently to fix a game for Safari). It just means that it's the current situation, and for people who can, we recommend to use another browser to get the best out of BGA. Unfortunately sometimes they can't. It's a well established fact that on iOS, there is a browser engine lock-in from Apple (reference here to the Apple documentation viewtopic.php?f=3&t=21939&p=92095&hilit=webkit#p92095). It's not political polemic nonsense. People can have varying opinions about it, positive, negative, neutral, but independently of opinions, it's a fact.

On Android at the moment, Chrome works better than Firefox for BGA as we have setup a very good auto-zoom feature relying on a Chrome specific non-standard property, so I would advise to use Chrome there. It doesn't mean that I don't like Firefox (quite the contrary). It just means that for playing on BGA, on Android you'll get a better experience with Chrome today.

Yeah I tried to tap dance and pivot around responding both to the original text and additional community commentary, but I can see how I made a mess of it. The comment about polemics was specific to their specific statement though, I think you've misused it in your followup a bit there.

But as a matter of practice BGA Devs, both the core team and the volunteer squad, need to *accept* the user base, and our crazy use of Safari either through choice or through force, not lecture us (I write that in the first person, even though I use chrome).

[Mogri]

But as a matter of practice BGA Devs, both the core team and the volunteer squad, need to *accept* the user base, and our crazy use of Safari either through choice or through force, not lecture us (I write that in the first person, even though I use chrome).

As an independent developer, I'll echo Tisaac: we make the games so they run on iOS, but we do so by offering a degraded user experience. It's not because we dislike Apple; it's because iOS browsers will literally hard-crash when loading certain games.

[Waddington]

How to configure this BGA-MAXIMA feature? I could not find any guide to it.

[CanuckEddie]

How to configure this BGA-MAXIMA feature? I could not find any guide to it.

I posted previously, and was not corrected so I'll suggest it again, that this "feature" is just opening two windows and pointing them at different parts of the table.

I tried it this week, it was somewhat useful, but since most games only support zoom at the browser level I was obligated to have both windows zoomed to the same degree. (I suppose if I use a different browser for the second window this might be worked around).

[CanuckEddie]

But as a matter of practice BGA Devs, both the core team and the volunteer squad, need to *accept* the user base, and our crazy use of Safari either through choice or through force, not lecture us (I write that in the first person, even though I use chrome).

As an independent developer, I'll echo Tisaac: we make the games so they run on iOS, but we do so by offering a degraded user experience. It's not because we dislike Apple; it's because iOS browsers will literally hard-crash when loading certain games.

I never doubted this, although I certainly would enjoy an example. Has anyone ever tried delivering both experiences?

But...lets remember that the mantra of "wouldn't it be better if everyone used the same browser" was last seen printed on T-Shirts in the Microsoft boardroom circa Windows Vista. I would expect that, while rendering tech is getting fancy so deviations are more sophisticated than ever, the common baseline is still plenty fantastic to make games wonderful. I don't see Santorini going down in flames on Safari.

[Mogri]

But as a matter of practice BGA Devs, both the core team and the volunteer squad, need to *accept* the user base, and our crazy use of Safari either through choice or through force, not lecture us (I write that in the first person, even though I use chrome).

As an independent developer, I'll echo Tisaac: we make the games so they run on iOS, but we do so by offering a degraded user experience. It's not because we dislike Apple; it's because iOS browsers will literally hard-crash when loading certain games.

I never doubted this, although I certainly would enjoy an example. Has anyone ever tried delivering both experiences?

Yes. Check out Beyond the Sun in Windows/Linux/Android versus iOS. The shadows on the pieces caused the browser to actually crash.

I agree that it's great when you can choose your own browser. That's not what iOS lets you do. You're getting the same rendering engine on your iPhone regardless of which browser you download.

[Tisaac]

But as a matter of practice BGA Devs, both the core team and the volunteer squad, need to *accept* the user base, and our crazy use of Safari either through choice or through force, not lecture us (I write that in the first person, even though I use chrome).

As an independent developer, I'll echo Tisaac: we make the games so they run on iOS, but we do so by offering a degraded user experience. It's not because we dislike Apple; it's because iOS browsers will literally hard-crash when loading certain games.

I never doubted this, although I certainly would enjoy an example. Has anyone ever tried delivering both experiences?

But...lets remember that the mantra of "wouldn't it be better if everyone used the same browser" was last seen printed on T-Shirts in the Microsoft boardroom circa Windows Vista. I would expect that, while rendering tech is getting fancy so deviations are more sophisticated than ever, the common baseline is still plenty fantastic to make games wonderful. I don't see Santorini going down in flames on Safari.

Santorini is a very bad example. When we released it we got ton of players complaining that it was not loading on their old browser/devices and ranting "why do dev use fancy 3d stuff ?".

[wcraigtrader]

To add another perspective, generally speaking I much prefer text > videos. I didn't end up watching the Q&A stream (internet too slow for 1080p). And videos tend to be much longer than text anyway. And you can't really skim/skip the sections that you aren't interested at, so you might end up wasting an hour or two hoping for something interesting, while if that is in the form of text, you can just skim it in like 5-10 minutes.

Put me down for text is better, cleaner, faster, easier to translate.