Hello everybody,
till yesterday Reach The Roof exclusively ran on two browsers: Firefox and Safari. Now the users of Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) are able to enjoy our tower defense game too! After three days of debugging we found the error source and a way to repair. For those who say “Bullshit, it doesn’t work for my Browser!”: Clean up your browser cache (Chrome tutorial). Read on if you are interested on the solution:
Starting from version 30.01.2013 (with the huge update) the browsergame could not be loaed during a fatal content error produced with Chrome and IE after loading the webfile that is about 8 MByte big. Our first thought: Something has to crash while initialisation runs or to be precised calling the Start()-functions throws the error. Bit by bit we reverted all major changes from the last version and extracted the problem faster than we thought: the new implemented monster-wave-generator was throwing the error. The ca. 3000 Lines of spaghetti-code could not be translated by Chrome/IE and caused the unity web player plugin to crash. Strangely enough this version of the game was running well with Unity-Editor, Firefox and Safari. We noticed this error very late because we were testing everything exclusively with Firefox. The actual reason is still unknown. Maybe the plugin crashed because of a browser cache overflow. A post at the official Unity-forum could not name the error as well. After implementing the monster-wave-generator in a more generic way and excluding code in some external functions, the new version of Reach The Roof now runs well with Chrome and IE.
Lessons Learned:
- outsource often used code in external functions
- keep on weekly documentation and changelog-news
- spread tests on different browsers
