I have been having problems with Parchment lately, and I was wondering if other people are having the same experiences.
First of all, I don’t seem to be able to play glulx games in the browser anymore. Any attempt to play a .gblorb file through iplayif.com results in “Parchment loading…” followed by a blank screen. zblorb files seem to work fine.
Furthermore, trying to play any file hosted at ifarchive.wurb.com results in a bunch of angry red error messages, even though the file can be downloaded with no problems. Changing the address to www.ifarchive.org fixes the problem, but it seems strange that this makes a difference when I can access the file normally at both locations.
Has anyone else experienced either or both of these problems?
This is a problem with IE8 and IE9. I think there’s an “issue” on the parchment site about JS files not being loaded in the correct order. It may happen with IE7 as well. Compatibility mode doesn’t help.
There’s some other behavioral weirdness with the more recent versions of IE. On my system, any time I try to play something from IFDB, it tells me that the page cannot be displayed. Possibly because of the URL encoding. But Mozilla plays it like a champ.
I am using Firefox, so that can’t be it. Parchment doesn’t seem to work at all in IE9. When i try to run a game in IE9, I just get a message explaining what Parchment is. In Firefox 8 I get the problems mentioned above.
That is odd. I just upgraded to Firefox 8.0.1 last night and it’s working fine for me. Possible add-on conflict? Could try installing Firebug and see if that shows anything unusual?
I just checked from my work computer, which is running Firefox 8.0, and it’s running fine as well. Both systems are running Windows 7 x64. Wouldn’t hurt to go to “Firefox > Help > Restart with Addons Disabled” just to see if it makes any difference. But I have two machines with Firefox running it fine, so it doesn’t seem like it can be in the browser itself.
If anyone else is running Firefox would would care to chime in on their experiences with it, that may be helpful.
It’d be helpful if you could look at the error console and see if there are any errors displayed there. You can view the error console by pressing ctrl+shift+J.
For examples, check out the IFDB entries for PataNoir and Taco Fiction. For the former, clicking the “Play Online” button just gives me a blank screen, while the latter, which points at ifarchive.wurb.com, produces the error message “Parchment could not load your story. Check your connection, and that the URL is correct.” In both cases, I get exactly the same errors if I try to copy-paste the archive link in after “http://iplayif.com/?story=”.
Edit: I should probably mention that the “Play Online” links at the IfComp.org page work just fine. I am not sure what the difference is.
Dannii: I haven’t pulled down a new copy in a couple of days. I reinstalled it this past weekend because I was having the issues with IE. I thought it might be related. You may have already removed the tag and I haven’t updated, but it’s still in my copy.
I just removed the defer tags from my copy and IE appears to be working fine in it now. I’ve tested on both IE8 and IE9. However, attempting to run anything hosted at iplayif.com still work, so I’m guessing theirs hasn’t been updated.
On further investigation, I can’t say that my copy of the file was updated or not. Some code that I had written (for another purpose) is at the top of that page. I can’t say whether I used the old copy or whether I added the code to the new copy. I’m 95% sure that I added the code to the top of the new copy and deleted the old one, but don’t hold me to it.