I guess m4as don't work in IE9:

wellesley.edu/~kenny/JW-HTML5/audio.html

I guess we're supposed to manually make the mp3s since there is licensing costs involved in encoding mp3s as I think I read in one of Ashley's articles.

Funny thing is I tried a .mp3 and it worked.

So this works:

var sound = new Audio;

sound.src = 'http://mcgraw-hill.faceyspacey.com/rocket-blast-3-v13/media.mp3';

sound.play();

but this doesn't:

var sound = new Audio;

sound.src = 'http://mcgraw-hill.faceyspacey.com/rocket-blast-3-v13/media.m4a';

sound.play();

I thought IE9 was supporting .m4a as well. Whatsup with that?

Hey guys, after focusing on only IE<9, I just realized that sound doesn't work in IE9 itself!

Anyone experienced that? Why could that be?

mcgraw-hill.faceyspacey.com/rocket-blast-3-v13

You need to use a beta version of Flash Canvas:

download.revulo.com/Canvas/FlashCanvasPro-20110927.zip

The creator of Flash Canvas is very responsive by the way and helped me solve this. Here's what was recommended and what I did that solved it:

jsfiddle.net/wA6eG

Basically you load all your images into the Flash Canvas using loadImage(), which is a method added to the latest beta of Flash Canvas. And then in the callback of the last image loaded, load C2. C2 will load, and be injected into the swf, and all images will be drawn without causing flickering because they are already cached in the swf by the loadImage() method.

Next, there is a few issues with easing in flash canvas that must be solved. But overall, we're finally pro.

nobody's doing that brother. the game works this way: schools and big players in supplying these schools are staying with IE<9 and don't want to install anything new. It's big business. It's big old-fashioned school districts that don't want to spend money upgrading their computers or having their IT staff install new stuff. It's just the way it goes. We can be as theoretical as we want about preaching to them to upgrade, but it's not happening and not a solution. For me specifically, it's not because I don't get this mega job unless I can do all platforms. They've hired me to prove I can make this work across all platforms, and if I can, i make $$$. If I can't, i make $0. And the kids lose too ;).

Anyway, Potato, cuz we need to work on tablets and phones too :), and it's best to align ourselves with the future of technology so we can make use of upcoming features and other places HTML5 is supported and not flash, etc. And HTML5 is better, no on cheap school computers crashing.

In desktop safari on a mac (and probably windows too), sound is really delayed and messes up the timing of my game.

Does desktop safari have issues preloading sounds and waiting until it's loaded before starting the game?

Here's the game:

mcgraw-hill.faceyspacey.com/rocket-blast-3-v13

I think it all comes down to business reasons that will truly excite people. Maybe newbs will be more excited, but you'll capture a lot more serious professionals that have demanding clients if you create a build functionality using flash canvas.

As you may have saw, I got sound working very well using Sound Manager 2. Here's the latest link:

mcgraw-hill.faceyspacey.com/rocket-blast-3-v12

And I'm on the verge of solving the flickering completely by injecting the images into the flash canvas swf using loadImage(), which the swf than caches. I.e. I'm pretty sure the flickering is happening cuz of the loading of content.

Ultimately, the user experience in this particular game is nearly as good as the HTML5 one. The space blasters demo I did, which is very fast, also works very well.

So maybe it wont support all the cool new upcoming features, but brother most the games in your arcade will work using flash canvas just fine.

Your platform is perfect kids' education games, and all publishers in that world require it to work in IE<9. ALL OF THEM! And will for 3-5 more years. That's just the deal in the public US k-12 education system, and probably k-12 everywhere.

There is big money here, and you're missing out on a huge opportunity. I've concocted a very solid solution here. Maybe it doesn't support 100% of the things you can do with C2, but it does support the 80% most common use cases. I'm getting a lot of help from the developer of Flash Canvas. I'm sure we can improve it more for the needs of C2. You go to great lengths in various articles you've published to state how C2 works in like 24 environments (i.e. in your benchmarks article). I'm not sure why you don't want to add such a large percentage of computers to your roster, specifically a percentage that could end up being disproportionately large in terms of the total C2 game players if the education market took a liking to your platform, which they could and will, especially after I make 200 games with your platform for one of the biggest textbook publishers. Like, 10-15% use IE<9 below on most sites, but in the education market it's between 30-50%.

I honestly may be interested in funding this stuff being added to your build process. I know you have your path, and tons of cool stuff you want to do. So this is just annoying bullsh*t. But dude, C2 is literally made to make the sort of learning games I'm making for young kids. It's a perfect fit. I mean what if an entire school district or textbook publisher came to you and said they wanted to make C2 the exclusive tool for making their games, and they'll bring a ton of developers to start using it, what would you say?

It would only be good for C2, and much of the work, research and testing will have already been done so you just need to generate more pristine less hacky and more integrated versions of the code I got.

I know it goes against the mission statement you've been sharing with the world for so long, but if it's working tight enough, and doesn't take much time for you to integrate, I don't know how you can deny it as a smart business decision. If it took tons of time, fine, i get it. But this may actually be extremely easy for you. For example, here's all the code I needed to add (besides the library) to make SoundManager2 work with its hidden swf:

jsfiddle.net/7Uvm9

and of course I have conditional HTML tags triggering this only for IE. Check the source here:

mcgraw-hill.faceyspacey.com/rocket-blast-3-v12

I know about the solutions in the native wrappers. In this case, I'm actually not looking for polyphony, but simply no delays in audio playing in browsers on mobile phones, or at least in iOS safari.

It would be nice to have Pode's solution part of your C2 build process.

Pode, you available for hire? I'm on a very tight deadline of tomorrow. You want to help me with your audio sprites solution? Email me at jamesdvo@faceyspacey.com. I PMed you, but I'm not sure you saw it.

do you have any code to share for that? I'm about to implement your solution in the other thread? is the caching code the there cuz it didn't seem like at the time you had implemented.

So for those of you who've been tracking my ventures into making IE<9 work with Construct 2, i recently got audio working with Audio.js:

kolber.github.com/audiojs

But because I had to hack it to use its functionality that creates unnecessary dom and flash elements for every sound, it was horribly slow and the sounds had a lot of delay.

So today I decided to replace it with Sound Manager 2:

schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2

I wrote a lot simpler code to make the connector, here it is:

jsfiddle.net/7Uvm9

And you can see it in action here:

mcgraw-hill.faceyspacey.com/rocket-blast-3-v12

So again, my guess is that soundManager 2 is simply faster and doesnt require creating tons of elements on the page. Basically it's designed to be called via javascript to trigger flash sounds, whereas Audio.js is designed to turn <static> audio elements already on the page into flash audio players.

My last thing to perfect IE<9 using flash canvas is to prevent some flickering and blinking. If anyone has an ideas of what to do to stop it, I'd greatly appreciate it. Previously when I first got it to work using the Space Blasters demo, i thought it was because the game was so action-packed and fast paced. But now I have a very simple game with very little animation, and very slow animation at that. So I'm wondering if there is anything in C2 itself I can do to make the game basically appear simpler and smaller to Flash Canvas??

i'll check out your thread.

ps. im about to try SoundManager2 instead of audio.js int the IE flash canvas solution. i think it will make the audio faster.

ps. how did the Web Storage thing go for caching audio?

Anyone have a an audio sprites solution for C2 to make audio not so poor in iOS safari?

Ashley, you building this into C2 any time soon?

Edit by Ashley: audio sprites are no longer necessary with iOS 6, you do not need to use them any more.