Winter Forest Mystery

Dear Author! This time I really didn’t want to describe my impressions of your new game, so as not to upset you.

But now I still have to say, because, I’m afraid, you are going to look for “mistakes” in the game, although there are none there. All errors, glitches, brakes and other troubles are not yours at all, but the Ruffle emulator.

I can say this with complete confidence, since I specifically downloaded your SWF file first and got through the game locally many times. And only then I compared it with the online mode – both in windowed and full-screen versions. And with exactly the same way – by repeating the game many times.

If interested, I can tell you more about the conclusions I made. Now I urge you “not to try to look for a black cat in a dark room – it’s NOT there anyway”.

At first I thought of describing everything in detail – with evidence. Then I realized: it would be not just a big, but a HUGE sheet of text. I’ll try to keep it short, although there will still be a lot of text. This is a warning to everyone else.

Where and what was checked.
OS: Windows 7 and 10.
Locally: Swiff Player, Adobe Flash Player 32.
Browsers (all Chromium-like): Catxp, Slimjet, Cent.
Browser kernel versions: from 80 to 121.

Conclusions: the game “winter-forest-mystery-game.swf” works perfectly and without failures in any local player, as well as in the old Cent browser with flash support (it doesn’t care about all sorts of Ruffles and plays flash on its own).

The presence of glitches, animation brakes, and pop-up labels freezing have only one reason: major shortcomings in the Ruffle emulator engine. Differences in browsers or OS have virtually no effect. But what comes to the fore is the difference in the hardware of the computer, most of the resources of which during the game are not spent on the game itself, but on covering the overhead costs of the Ruffle emulator.

In short: a REGULAR computer is enough for the game itself. For playing under Ruffle – only a modern gaming one with a powerful processor.

Dear Author. I do not undertake to force a decision on you. Judge for yourself whether your experiment was a success. Let me just remind you that in the version with Ruffle, the presence of glitches in players will be beyond your control AT ALL. Some will have it, others won’t. Which ones exactly are unpredictable. You cannot correct mistakes – they are not yours. And it is useless to advise players to install a new OS or update their browser. Just buy “powerful hardware”. No other way.

I myself would be very happy about the revival of flash. But…

By the way, now I understand where Selfdefiant comes from with such brakes. After all, their graphics are no match for yours, let alone their ideas… Then why are the brakes like in this game? It’s simple: they included the Ruffle engine directly into the games, but in reality they make the same flash. It turns out that whether you try or not, in the end everything will still go down the drain.

Enough about the sad stuff. I still want to speak about the game itself. Like I said, the game is PERFECT. The scenery and music are very well thought out. And I really liked the new idea with the tooltip: if you don’t move the branch, the tooltip won’t appear. There’s no need to fuss, it’s better to inspect everything carefully.

There are two wishes. First: I would remove both puzzles with codes after solving them – why were they left on the screens? And second: it is better to make a white outline for the black numbers of the bird counters (lower right corner) so that the numbers are visible against ANY background.

Well, something like this.

Honestly, I wish you were right about Ruffle!

I may well have been too gloomy in my assessment of his prospects. The fact is that it’s currently in an “extensive” stage of development. Not all Flash games can run under it yet. As I understand it, “omnivorousness” is the main focus of the Ruffle developers’ efforts. There are hardly any new Flash games being released right now. This means that when Ruffle becomes “omnivorous” for almost all old games, some sort of “standard” of compliance will be created and publicized for new ones. From that point on, I hope that Ruffle’s development will follow an “intensive” path – by optimizing code, reducing resource consumption, etc.