v0.105.1 Keeps You Posted

A patch for browser builds. After a player pressed Play, a web game showed a black page for as long as it took to start, sometimes many seconds, with nothing to say it was still working. The loading screen now stays up until the game is actually running, and says what it is waiting on.

The loading screen stays until the game is ready

Pressing Play used to take the loading screen down straight away. The game still had to get the graphics card ready, open the project, start its scripts and load its world, and all of that happened behind a black page. A large game could sit there for fifteen seconds or more.

Now the loading screen stays up through all of it and names each step: preparing the graphics, loading the game, starting the game, loading the world. The bar keeps moving the whole time, even while the game is busy loading. It comes down once the game is drawing smooth frames with nothing left to arrive. Terrain that is still being built and models your scripts ask for as the game starts load behind it, instead of in front of the player. A game whose world keeps streaming in without end is shown after 20 seconds.

If something goes wrong while it loads, the loading screen says what happened instead of leaving a black page or a bar that never finishes.

The download bar counts the whole download

Before the game's own download began, the page fetched the engine, tens of megabytes, under a bare "loading…" with a bar that did not move. The engine and the game now download together on one bar, with the megabytes counted. When the host does not say how large a file is, the bar moves to show the download is still going.

Browser builds learn about new Cloud regions

A web build only knew the Floptle Cloud regions it was exported with. Now the page asks Floptle Cloud for the current list when the game starts. A region that opens later, or starts taking browser players, reaches games already on the web without a new export. If the list cannot be read, the page uses the one it shipped with.

Upgrading

Export your web build again to get the new loading screen. Desktop builds do not change.