In Blocking Autoplay Videos, Chrome Is Breaking Many Web-Based Games (arstechnica.com) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An update Google rolled out for its popular Chrome browser this weekend helps prevent those annoying auto-playing video ads on many websites from disturbing your day with unwanted sound as well. But that update is causing consternation for many Web-based game developers who are finding that the change completely breaks the audio in their online work. The technical details behind the problem involve the way Chrome handles WebAudio objects, which are now automatically paused when a webpage starts up, stymying auto-playing ads. To get around this, Web-based games now have to actively restart that pre-loaded audio object when the player makes an action to start the game, even if that audio wasn't autoplaying beforehand. "The standard doesn't require you to do this, so no one would have thought to do this before today," developer Andi McClure told Ars Technica. "With Chrome's new autoplay policies, developers shouldn't assume that audio can be played before a user gesture," Google told The Daily Dot in a statement. "With gaming in Chrome, this may affect Web Audio. We have shared details on what developers can do to address this, and the design for the policy was published last year."
No big deal... (Score:3)
Re: No big deal... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: No big deal... (Score:4, Insightful)
I vote for no autoplay anything without user permission.
CNN. Goddammitt, if I'm reading the news I'm probably listening to music. I don't like having a newscaster jabbering over Echoes. If I want to watch the story about the article I'm reading, I'll ask for it.
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It's blocking audio on websites whose sole purpose is to play an audio file, and there is no way to turn it off. So it's without user permission, but in a different way.
Found the LUDDITE! (Score:2, Funny)
Modern app appers know that only apps can app apps, and the appiest apps are apped using Apps on Appdows 10 S! The LUDDITES at LUDDITE Google broke LUDDITE Chrome so it can't run appy app apps anymore!
Apps!
Found the newfag (Score:1)
Netcraft confirms it: Apps are dying!
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Who's writing video games in HTML anyway? Why would you write a game in HTML?
Flash and Java applets provides a method of writing games you could play in web browsers, and no one particularly cared when those technologies went away, because web games are universally terrible anyway.
Gemcraft was the king of Tower Defence games. Even that game is a proper game now and not some Flash monstrosity. Overall I agree though, web is a terrible way to write a game. There are much better ways.
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Overall I agree though, web is a terrible way to write a game. There are much better ways.
What are these "better ways" that don't require certifying and pushing out six separate binaries, one each for Windows UWP, Windows 7/8/10 desktop, X11/Linux, Android, macOS, and iOS? Web is the only JIT allowed on iOS, for example.
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Well because it makes sense to make a game on the web. You get immediate multiplayer, access to a global consumer audience, you do not have to worry about what the condition of the OS is that the game is playing on, you do not have to worry about what OS the game is playing on. You do not have to worry about a distribution channel or other overhead as 100% of revenue directly goes to the controller or owner of the site and most likely directly to the developers who had a hand in creating the site/game.
It
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Almost forgot about the update cycle. With a web based game you alter 1 copy of the game and everyone gets the upgrade. With a binary game you have to download and install patches using a mish-mash of various techniques some which work well and others which fail miserably and could hose your operating system or the game.
Overall, the question is not why people would make a game run in a browser, it is why would they make anything else?
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They do suck ass, I agree whole heartedly. What I'm saying is that this is not because of technology but rather a lack of investment on the part of developers. Browser games could be absolutely face meltingly awesome with graphics on par with your favorite consoles.
I know you do not believe that because you have never seen a game like this before, but if you check out three.js you can immediately see that it is not a physics, processor, ram, or graphical limitation. We can have amazing graphics and aweso
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Btw, browser patches wouldn't affect this in the least, no idea why you brought that up.
The article you commented on is literally about a browser update messing up web-based games. Could you even conceivably be more of an idiot?
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If you take a look at three.js you can see that xbox level graphics are available from within the browser
So fucking what? I don't play C64 games these days, why would I want xbox graphics?
I want games that look like theHunter:Call of the Wild, that run as smoothly, that do so at high resolution with a modest graphics card. Has anybody done anything remotely like that with three.js?
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because web games are universally terrible anyway.
Pretty much this. Web games are essentially digital drugs. They're addictive by design and their entire goal is to try to get you frustrated enough to pay up for boosters and items. Nothing of value was lost.
Re:Broke my Captivate tutorials as well (Score:5, Insightful)
It broke all of my Captivate tutorials that use autoplay feature as well. Chrome is really making it difficult for me to recommend it lately.
I wouldn't recommend Chrome anyway, BUT this is a positive rather than negative. What broke Captivate was Captivate with its assumption it has rights and access to autoplay.
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It broke all of my Captivate tutorials that use autoplay feature as well. Chrome is really making it difficult for me to recommend it lately.
Your tutorials having autoplay have made them hard for me to recommend too, but not just lately.
Not my problem (Score:1)
Fuck web based "games'. I'm supposed to be subjected to unwanted videos because some retard wants to play "games"? Fuck that shit.
This has been in Firefox for like 15 years (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't this a solved problem at this point? It seems like all the Chrome users are suddenly rediscovering all the features that have been in Firefox for decades.
Back around Y2K, you got this feature by installing the Flashblock extension. I stopped installing it when Firefox made it so that you had to click to start any plug-in. Now it is available as "media.autoplay.enabled" setting in about:config. I guess I am in shock that anybody *doesn't* set their computer this way. I think there is even an option in Firefox to say "it's okay to let *this* site autoplay stuff."
Re:This has been in Firefox for like 15 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Mozilla owns neither an ad network nor a massive video site.
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It's been working for me since forever. Currently on Firefox 59.0.3 (64-bit). I just tested it and it seems to be working.
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Well hopefully those sites will fix it soon, since it is causing trouble for Chrome users too. I see that YouTube works fine but Vimeo doesn't.
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To clarify: It blocks html5 audio & video autoplay on both sites, but Vimeo's play button never actually plays the video.
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A few things are wrong with your post (I like how it got a 5).
1. Browser extensions are not a browser (duh?)
2. You've been able to disable flash for a lot longer than 15 years in any browser I can think of, this article is about DEFAULTS, not available options.
3. Try telling your grandma to go to about:config, find the setting and toggle it. Point being browser's aren't just used by techies.
Lastly, the browser game developer's having to maintain their code is a trivial price to pay for some site loading
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Just tested. Youtube is fine but it does break Vimeo. The play button just sits there. I have to turn off the setting and reload the page.
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Not really. Have you ever browsed/searched Youtube? You get a single screenshot and a cut off title. I can figure out if it's the video I want without playing it, but not without clicking the link. Access to the full description and comments without playing the video is helpful.
AI (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, it can. And yes, they are / will (Score:2)
Automated systems can make a pretty darn good guess whether a particular user wants to play a particular piece of media, and Google's comments seem to indicate they are headed in that direction.
Another person who posted mentioned the current behavior causes problems for online courses created with a tool called Captivate. If you are taking online courses, from an institution that uses Captivate, it's not hard for Chrome to notice "this week, this guy has loaded fourteen other Captivate pages, and every time
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chrome://media-engagement/
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They should use AI technology to determine if the user wants the audio to start automatically or not. Can't AI do that?
No, only poorly. And don't give them any ideas.
Google has already added technology to track the collective user-interaction with a site, to authorize some feature automatically if it thinks you are interacting enough with the site. Once that goes out of experimental, everything will become non-deterministic, and full of security holes.
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They should use AI technology to determine if the user wants the audio to start automatically or not. Can't AI do that?
The did. They fed the users into the AI and the AI answered "no". So that's what they are programming into Chrome.
IE6 (Score:1)
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It's the modern day IE6, they can do whatever they want. Doesn't mean they should, or that they'll always be able to, but it seems likely they'll continue to do so until it starts to hurt their wallet. Or they lose interest in it.
In this case- blocking autoplay videos IS the right thing to do though.
I suspect Google has learned the lesson from IE6 too. They know it is easy for a new browser to knock them off their perch if they misbehave too badly.
Good (Score:3)
It took Google Chrome doing this to have websites like Netflix fix their broken video player when you have autoplay disabled (in firefox my case).
Vimeo is still broken though, even after countless bug reports to them over the years about it.
Wonder when Google will fix YouTube where you have to press play twice in order for it to start playing a video with autoplay disabled.
Chrome is already breaking web games (Score:3)
They're in the process of disabling flash. In the version I'm running, Flash is technically supposed to ask to play, but Chrome doesn't actually display a prompt and treats it as if the plugin isn't present at all. You have to enable it for specific sites, which means you're doing an all-or-nothing approach.
In my case specifically, I disabled the option "Use hardware acceleration when available" because it was a troubleshooting step in the past (Youtube was somehow misbehaving under Chrome.) The result is some Flash/WebGL games are unplayable because they don't show critical images, such as the phasing bloons that don't show in Bloons Super Monkey 2 [kongregate.com].
Basically, those playing web games need to use Internet Explorer (version 8/9 that still supports plugins), Pale Moon, or Vivaldi. Sticking with Chrome/Firefox/Edge means those web games will die.
There are other solutions (Score:3)
Developers should be used to changing rules, as annoying as they are. Maybe Google could have found another way, but if it was too easy to work around then the ads would do so?
In this case the issue appears to stem from preloading behaviour. Maybe the alternative here is if Chrome asked for permission, on behalf of the site, just like the location API does?
The main solution here seems to be to delay resource loading until there is user interaction.
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The main solution here seems to be to delay resource loading until there is user interaction.
Define "user interaction". Clicking? Scrolling? Touching? What? And then, once your user 'interacts', now the website is suddenly free to play/popup/advertise/ whatever?
No, the correct solution was to, (a) forsee exactly where all this HTML5+javascript+canvas+openGL was going, which was OBVIOUSLY to lead to a world that was WORSE than flash, and (b) not change the supposedly standard APIs on people.
This is about open web standards (Score:2)
Two of my games broke.
I can't add the click callback fix, because both games don't even use the mouse (keyboard only), and load with the game in a centered div. Neither game is fixable, unless I tell my users to click, for no reaso
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I'm glad somebody here gets it.
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It's not that things change, it's that Google, with 60% of the browser market, was too cavalier with this change. They didn't appear to think about how to implement this change at all, breaking thousands of web applications, including many of their own, in non-trivial ways. The immediate knock-on effect to livelihoods of creatives who are already struggling is very real.
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Neither game is fixable, unless I tell my users to click, for no reason,
other than Google is stupid. I don't like ads either, but I think everybody should follow the rules.
I despise google and avoid them wherever possible. But the fault here isn't googles it is every fucking site that abuses auto play, the feature is fundamentally broken due to it being in the control of the website instead of the user and every arsehole website, news site and ad company abuses it by autoplaying content. this isn't just a problem with ads. yes you are an unfortunate victim, but the standard is broken and heavily abused. What needs happening here is modification of the standard.
Is Enter on a button a "user gesture"? (Score:3)
Load the page with an autofocused <button> element, and instruct users to press the Enter key. Chrome should be treating activations of that button as user gestures.
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Auto-Play Anything via WWW is Bad by Design (Score:1)