May 2018 ~ Adventuron

Thursday 17 May 2018

Keyboard shortcuts in Adventuron Editor

May 17, 2018 Chris

It has come to my attention that I have not properly drew attention to the keyboard shortcuts that make editing in Adventuron's editor fast and easy. So here they are.

Adventuron Actions

Adventuron actions trigger adventuron specific events .

Control + Spacebar = Context Sensitive Autocompletion Options.
Control + S = Save document (to local storage) + refresh game window. NOTE : Currently Adventuron's web UI does not support saving more than one document at a time locally.

Text Navigation Actions

Text navigation options allow game authors to navigate around the document using the keyboard.

Page Up = Move up by one screen worth of text
Page Down = Move down by one screen worth of text
Home = Move to beginning of start of text on current line
Home then Home = Move to absolute beginning of current line (before column 1)
End = Move to end of current line
End then End = Move to end of text on current line
Tab = (not after autocompletion has been selected) Insert three spaces into a document. (After autocompletion has been selected) move to next demarcated block of text to be edited.

Text Selection Shortcuts

Text selection allows game authors to select blocks of text without using the mouse (or touch).

Control + A = Select all text in document
Control + Home = Go to beginning of document
Control + End = Go to end of document
Shift + (Up or Down or Left or Right or Page Up or Page Down Or Control + Page Up or Control + Page Down or Control + Start or Control + End) ... select additional text between current cursor position and new location - as per descriptions above.

Text Mutation Options

Del = Delete character to right of cursor, or delete SELECTED TEXT.
Backspace = Delete character to left of cursor, or delete SELECTED TEXT.

Text Actions

Control + F = Find text in document
Control + F then Control + F = Replace text in document.

NOTE : This list is Windows-centric. Please replace "Control" with "Command" on OSX.

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Friday 11 May 2018

Adventuron 0.5.7 released - Fixes for Chrome 66

May 11, 2018 Chris

Adventuron 0.5.7 has been released with fixes for the new audio blocking features of Chrome 66

See Article:

A Google Chrome update breaks the audio in numerous web-based games

Unfortunately, in adventures exported (via HTML5 export) with 0.5.6 or earlier engine, any Adventuron adventures using a BEEP command will hang on Chrome (66 or greater).

This happens because Google appears to have broke web standards in it's implementation of blocking audio on autoplay media.

Google's heart was in the right place, but it just broke thousands if not hundreds of thousands of web based games, many of which were and are absolutely standards compliant.

Adventuron sequences game events using callbacks, so a sequence of commands is structured as a chain. You can think of this as a game of pass-the-parcel, with each task that Adventuron executes, being aware of the person they will pass control to next.

Tasks such as "set the value of a variable", "create a game object - such as a lamp or a shovel", "make a beep sound", "clear the screen", "display an image", etc.

With Chrome 66, the audio playback policy changes created an issue when playing a beep instigated a non-handled error that meant the next command in the callback sequence was not being executed, therefore the person at the end of the chain that is responsible for re-displaying the prompt, never performs their task.

This lead to a hang of any games that used a BEEP command (on the Chrome 66 or above browser).

The fix for 0.5.7 was threefold:

To create the JavaScript AudioContext ONLY when the first beep is played. This is usually after the first user interaction (touch, mouse click, or keyboard press). It's possible that games that start with a beep will still hang (I haven't fully tested it yet), but this should be a fix for 99% of scenarios, which is better than nothing for now. It'll be 100% in the next release, just thought it was better to get this out there.
To call AudioContext.resume() prior to any any beep. This is near-zero cost (in the grand scheme of things).
Strengthen exception handling in the audio playback - this should hopefully mitigate bugs that might occur on games that start with beeps before user interaction.

Future fixes (not in this release):

Detect when games start with beeps before user interaction, and force a "Click to start game button" to appear first.