Greetings, I thought I'd take a moment and talk about know issues in Paraphore. Just to make people aware of what recent and ongoing issues we are aware of and what we plan on doing about them.
* Random inconsistencies in story text TLDR: I'm going through all the text word by word to make sure it's correct, it's taking me a long time. During development the engine has gone through multiple major rewrites while attempting to preserve all of the story text via automatic conversions. It's gotten to the point where this is creating subtle errors undetectable by automatic processes. The story text is about 9mb uncompressed it very roughly translates to over a 100k words by my, probably very wrong, napkin math. So I've been rewriting it all myself over the past week and a half, it's over half way done and should be finished soon. This isn't the biggest issue with the game in my opinion, but it is an issue that is only going to get compounded with time, so I'm doing it now to prevent me having to port much more in the future.
* Saving and loading old versions of the game TLDR: It's broken, I'm fixing it. This simply doesn't work, when you start a new game, you effectively have 0 of every item in the game. This ensures that when the game checks for how much of an item you have it can correctly resolve the math, however, when loading game without that item reference the game will crash due to math on null values. What needs to happen is that upon loading, the game needs to know what items might exist that you don't currently have. It's a relatively easy in theory, the issue being that story text is in text files that are basically interpreting JavaScript at runtime, meaning I have no info about which items are in the game until it's too late, the porting I'm doing as discussed in the above section will make this issue trivial to solve. In the meantime, if you'd like your save file ported, feel free to PM me it and I'll return a correct version.
* Copying text out of the game is mostly broken TLDR: Ctrl+A Ctrl+C When saving a game, you save it to your browser cookies, which is obviously very volatile and will disappear after an arbitrary amount of time based on the website, the browser, and OS's cookie policy. To mitigate this as the game grows larger, the game data can also be converted into a base64 string that you can copy to your machine, although there's various issues with this process. Originally, the game was meant to open a "Save as..." dialog window for saving and an "Open" dialog window for loading. I had this working nicely with what ultimately came down to FileReference in AS3. I tested it on some private web hosts to make sure it worked online, but when uploading to popular websites I suddenly realized that security policies on those sites broke the feature, at best case did nothing, worse case it crashed depending on the version of Flash Player. I quickly make a feature for displaying the text in a text field with a copy button using Clipboard.setData() in AS3, which I'd never had issue with in the past. Sadly this too is broken by some security settings, I've seen some games on these sites do both of these things correctly. It will be fixed, I just need to spend some time researching Flash Player security and possibly decompiling some games to figure out how they do it. For now you can copy the saves by clicking the text and pressing Ctrl+A(select all) and Ctrl+C(copy) and load by clicking the text field and pressing Ctrl+A and Ctrl+V(paste)
* Getting the game to import/export correctly is confusing Right now this is how it works, saving to the browser saves a browser cookie, pressing "Export" loads that cookie, converts it into a string, and displays that on the screen for you to copy. Pressing "Import", pasting text, and clicking done converts the string into a cookie and saves it in your browser, then you can load from the browser to load that game. I'm sorry this is so confusing, it's a remnant of all the system described above, as soon as I fix the above problem it should trivial to rearrange the menu to make it more obvious how this works.
* Mobile support The game is a Flash and hence is unplayable using standard mobile software. I've been made aware of an app called Photon Browser that seems to reimplement Flash Player. Of course I can't directly support this platform, but mobile support is on my checklist. I could compile the game as a native app (.apk for Android .ipa for iOS) and distribute it online, Android users could install the package relatively easily but iOS users would require a jailbroken device, as for obvious reasons the game will never be on any kind of app store. The second option is to compile the game to target js and webgl/html5(canvas). This would work just by browsing to a site and playing there, I've never done this with a large project, but I'd guess that you'd get worse performance but it would largely work on Android. On iOS Safari is notorious for purposely hurting HTML5 to the point of being unusable and since every iOS browser is just Safari skinned I'd expect those users would have issues still. This would also mean buying a domain and web hosting as there's no furry websites that support HTML5 content as far as I know, although that relatively easy to deal with. I've casually attempted both and would have to work through some issues either way, I'd appreciate any feedback on which they'd prefer.
* Performance issues The game is not terribly well optimized right now, mostly due to supporting the JavaScript interpreter discussed in the first section. Soon this will no longer be an issue, but I have gotten a few reports of randomly extremely poor performance on high end machines. I've also had such issue although I'm unsure if they're related, in both of my cases it was because I had strange USB devices plugged in categorized as "gamepads". This causes one core of my cpu to almost completely lock up as Flash Player was attempting to receive "gamepad input". I may find a way of preventing Flash Player from doing this in the future but I'm unsure it can be done. Others reporting of moving between Firefox and Chrome causing a 100x difference in performance, in this case it's likely due to Flash Player, the browsers, or Windows. I'm not planning on working on this any time soon as I can't easily reproduce those issues.
Thanks you for being patient with us, please let me know if there anything I've missed, as always supporters can play the updated dev version of the game on Patreon, thanks for all your support!
