Fix the f****** game!

Anonymous

Game: klondike
Game #: 1343160016
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120306 Firefox/3.6.28
The game is jerky and slow as molasses! I can"t change the card back colors. It takes over 10 minutes to play the game because it is sooooo slow! Fix it!
Please describe the problem in detail:

Anonymous

What an absolutely charming person you seem to be!
I obviously can't speak for all the other grateful users of this excellent site, but it works fine on any of two computers and a tablet for me so I suggest you check your own hardware before ranting. And put a check on your language before posting on the forum please.

jim

Tomtoe2 wrote:

The game is jerky and slow as molasses! I can"t change the card back colors. It takes over 10 minutes to play the game because it is sooooo slow!

Hi Tomtoe2,

That sounds frustrating, but it's likely caused by something other than Green Felt. You might try rebooting, or running an anti-virus program.

Good luck,
-Jim

jim

Actually it looks like you are using an old PowerPC Mac running Firefox 3.6.8. Wow! We haven't tested on that platform is in long time, though we used to work with it.

Here are some things to try:

• Close other programs beside Firefox
• Make sure Green Felt is the only Firefox window open
• Try smaller cards (you can override our choice by clicking Size in the upper left corner).

Was this a recent change? i.e. had Green Felt worked smoothly before?

If I can find an old PPC machine, I'll try out Green Felt and see if there is some obvious problem.

Until then, good luck!
-Jim

david

So I actually booted up my old PowerPC macintosh and tried the game out in Firefox 1.5 and… it was horrifically slow. All the super move calculations we do don't scale well to old, slow machines—we've taken advantage of browser and hardware advances so that our game has neat features.

That said, we could probably speed some of that up. It would end up also benefiting iOS/Android users, since phone and tablets are underpowered compared to desktops.

The easy way to speed it up is to just disable some of the advanced features on slow machines. I may be able to do that fairly easily...

-David

david

After debugging this more I found a surprise! A bit of debugging code I added recently runs horrifically slow on old old Firefox versions. The super move calculations I was previously blaming aren't fast on old machines, but they weren't even close to the slowdown I found.

Basically on a fast modern browser and computer the super moves take no time at all. On a old machine and browser they take about 500ms (1/2 second). That's slow and slightly annoying, but still playable. The debugging code should take under 1ms (1/1000th of a second), even on slow browsers, but for some reason on this old firefox it was taking 250ms (1/4 second). We run that code 20 or so times a move and so it was 5 seconds or more on these old machines. That's well into the realm of unplayable.

Once I knew what the problem was it was pretty easy to work around the issue.

So thanks, Tomtoe2. It should be playable on your computer again. We really do appreciate bug reports (though we do wish they were more level headed sometimes ).

-David