Player.io with android and iOS

Nov
7

I’d like to get to the penelope c# rewrite after this, but wasn’t able to get to it this week.

Instead I did a quick test today about something that was on my mind.

Player.io is a pretty interesting framework for Flash allowing you to develop multiplayer games ( and more ) with out having to deal with setting up servers and such. It is beyond robust including the ability to create some service scripts for handling the traffic between clients if you need something more than a back and forth.

I had always wondered if it was able to compile into the iphone using the as3 to ipa process adobe has.

I basically went though the starting tutorial (fridge magnet) of player.io , compiled and tested it to make sure I could get it working, which I did. Then I converted the fla to compile an iPhone ipa and it created the app. Unfortunately when I tried to run the app on my iPhone it got stuck on the connecting part of the ‘game’ and wouldn’t progress. Not sure if more massaging would fix this issue, but would be happy to know if there is a way to get it running on iOS. UPDATELooks like player.io generates a swf when you hit this url http://api.playerio.com/flashbridge/1 and since you can’t load swfs at runtime on the iPhone its out of luck.

I also navigated to the test page on my Droid running Froyo, and initially I wasn’t able to get the page to load. I had the plugin’s set to run on click (instead of just run when the page loads.) When I changed the option to run when the page loads, android was able to load the swf and connect to the multiplayer server. Not sure if the plugin setting was just a fluke on my phone, but figured that I’d mention it. Speed wise, looks like the Droid’s communication was a bit slow, but not painfully so.