Frequently Asked Questions
Q: "The game doesn't work on my computer!"
A: You need to have a Windows system, preferably XP (though it is not required). You also need a relatively recent version of Internet Explorer, even if it's only for this game. Age of Penguins does not install any spyware on your system -- so you can make this one exception to your boycott of IE. Just use IE whenever you want to play Age of Penguins. Every Windows machine has IE available (it's part of the OS), so that shouldn't be a problem.
Q: "Why isn't the game compatible with Firefox?"
A: Because it would not allow this kind of game to be written. Most of the game COULD have been written cross-platform, that is true. But there are things crucial to the game, such as disabling keystrokes, reassigning mouse buttons (right-click, scroll wheel, etc.) that would not have been possible on Firefox. That is mostly because Firefox wishes to be platform-independent, while IE has special tricks available for Windows users only. It would have been frustrating to get most of the game working on Firefox, only to find that certain important functions were not available.
Q: "You made a game starring penguins, and made it incompatible with Linux. That is a cruel irony."
A: Yes, I know... not much I can do about it though. Perhaps someday a special "Mozilla-friendly" version could be released, though it would have to be redesigned for a different platform, as it were. See the last answer to understand why.
Q: "Sometimes the game window stays in the shape of a square, and never loads. Why is that?"
A: The program itself works fine, but once in a while (clogged Internet connection?) the game fails to load. Just close the Game Window, reload the page, and the game will probably launch just fine the second time around.
Q: "I had a different loading problem. The game got past the first part of loading up, and the Game Window went to full size. But the game stopped loading some time after that. I gave it several minutes, and it made no progress. What is wrong?"
A: We occasionally experienced this problem during development. It has nothing to do with the program itself (bugs, etc.) but rather the fact that AoP is a webpage cached by your browser. When a game involves the Internet, many "links in the chain" become outside of the programmers' control. (Such as the web server, routers, miles of cable, your ISP, your cable/DSL modem, network router/hub, Windows XP, Internet Explorer's caching mechanism, etc.) None of these things can be dealt with by a webpage -- it can only be passive to such things. Anyhow, the problem you describe seems to have to do with A) IE's method of caching files, or B) A Windows XP networking issue.
Here is how to fix the problem:
1. Give the program 4 or 5 minutes to load. (Don't worry, it won't always take this long -- it seems to need this long, occasionally, when the program is run for the FIRST time on a given machine.)
2. Make sure you're giving Age of Penguins all of your Internet bandwidth -- make sure no other program is hogging your connection (especially if you're on a dial-up connection!)
3. Close the browser window, and completely delete (clear out) your browser's cache. In Internet Explorer, to go Tools --> Internet Options. It's on the first page you see, right in the middle of the screen. Under the heading "Temporary Internet Files" there are 3 buttons -- you want the middle one, "Delete Files". This could take several minutes to perform, since the average computer might have a browser cache of 100 MB or more -- containing 1000's of GIFs, JPEGs, MIDIs, webpages, etc. There are NO bad side-effects when you do this. NOTE: Your cookies will be safe -- they ARE NOT deleted by clearing your cache. (So all your favorite websites will still remember who you are.)
4. If the game still hangs while loading, reboot your PC. When rebooting is complete, clear your cache again (which will take less than a second -- there will only be a few files in it) and when you try running the game again, it is almost certain to load without a problem. We had to do this once or twice.
Q: "When the game started, it was strange -- in place of units, there were these boxes with X's in them. Then they suddenly became penguins, soldiers, etc. What is wrong with me? Am I going crazy?"
A: This usually happens when the game can't find a given graphic, and gives up during the loading process. It is usually a sign of a clogged Internet connection. It often happens when the game takes more than 1 minute to load -- but the solution is always to re-launch the game. You can also try the solution to the above question (clearing your Browser cache). This only happened a few times during development, and it was fine when I tried loading it again.
Q: "How can you even release a game like this -- it's slow as molasses in January!"
A: I doubt you have a 333 MHz PC, and I doubt you are trying to encode/burn a video to DVD while playing Age of Penguins. So the most likely solution is one of the following:
Onboard Video/Shared system RAM - You have a motherboard that saves you the "hassle" of getting a real video card. Some budget PCs have onboard video, which uses 16 or 32 MB of your system RAM -- which, unfortunately, is about 100X slower than normal video memory. So any drawing to the screen is going to be horribly slow. We have invested much time and effort to optimize the rest of the program, but the video performance itself will always be the main bottleneck with your system. It has been tested on machines as slow as 1 GHz, and it runs plenty fast -- with a real video card. You don't need a high-end gamer's video card either -- a $10 clearance special will do.
Antivirus Software - Make sure you disable any anti-virus software that runs in the background. (No, not because Age of Penguins wants to install a virus!) It takes a lot of processing power, and makes the game run very slow. Javascript is inherently slow as a programming language. I have actually seen 2+ GHz machines with discrete (separate) video cards experiencing poor performance, and upon pausing the PC's antivirus program, the game began running at normal speed!
Other Running Programs - If you have other programs that scan/run/think in the background, you might want to pause or disable them while you play Age of Penguins, if they seem to affect the game's performance.
And don't forget to try turning on Turbo Mode from the Main Menu (Press [F5]). The video hardware is accessed a bit less, and everything is sped up. This could make the game playable, even on a machine with a slow video card or other problems.
Q: "If I switch to another Internet Explorer session and then return, all the scenery in the game redraws slowly and piecemeal -- like a webpage in the process of loading. Why is that? The game was completely loaded and everything was instantaneous before!"
A: This seems to be an Internet Explorer issue. I noticed that if you click on the banner ad (at the bottom of the screen), let the pop-up webpage load, close it, and return to the game, the same thing will happen. Perhaps Internet Explorer reclaims some resources (stuff used by Windows: memory, IDs, handles, etc.) that aren't being "used" and then has to re-allocate them when you return to the game. The game DOES use a lot of resources! However, it doesn't happen if you only switch to a different program on your taskbar (your e-mail client, music player, etc.). You have to switch windows to another IE session. At any rate, the problem seems to rectify itself after a couple minutes of playing -- but for best results you might want to save your game and exit out, and re-launch the game window.
Q: "Why is there only one race -- Penguins?"
A: Since a browser-based game of this magnitude had never been attempted before, we thought it best to "start small" in SOME areas. Think about the wisdom of this adage: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
The game has plenty of features though, so don't get the wrong message -- we DID go "all out" in most other areas! Of course, with only one programmer and one artist, you can't produce Warcraft II in only 6 months. This was the first game of its kind -- it was more important to finish one, than to have a "much more awesome" game stuck in perpetual development.
More reasons: 1. Having only one race reduces load time, and lesssens the memory and CPU requirements for the game. 2. Much easier job to balance the races, which is a BIG part of developing an RTS game (Blizzard's development team spent several months getting the 3 races in Starcraft to have balanced strength. You don't want the Zerg to be pushovers, the Humans to win every battle, the Protoss to have one unconquerable unit, etc.) Perhaps later on, we might put together another race for "Age of Penguins II". But for now, we believe the game is great fun as is!
Q: "Why does it take so long to save your game?"
A: Even though Age of Penguins does a very good job of making you forget it's a browser game, it IS still hosted in your browser. It's essentially a very slick webpage. No browser (not even IE) allows a webpage to read/write files on a person's hard drive -- if you think about it, you'll understand why. Webpages could access your personal files, corrupt them, delete them, etc. You can imagine what a security nightmare this would cause!
So to get around this limitation, we used Ajax technology to send your game data to our server, where it is saved to disk. There are some real advantages to using this kind of system -- for one thing, you can load your saved game on any PC, not just the one you started it on. However, sending 41 KB of data in small chunks to a remote server is much slower than writing that same amount to a hard drive. So Age of Penguins requires 1-2 minutes to save a game, and about 4-6 seconds to load one. But since using the player's hard drive is completely impossible (not just very difficult)...
Q: "Since this is a browser game, can I play it offline if I've downloaded it once?"
A: Even if all the files were on your hard drive, and Internet Explorer would go for the idea, you would STILL need Internet access to do things like save and load your game, save your score, etc. But Internet Explorer might complain if you were completely offline.
Q: "When can we expect a multiplayer version of Age of Penguins?"
A: Probably never. The large amount of data involved in a Real-Time Strategy game imposes an insurmountable obstacle to writing a multiplayer RTS for the Browser. This large amount of game data is no problem for a regular Windows program -- but when you have to send/receive data via AJAX, it becomes impossible to deal with. The "lag" would be outrageous. Only a turn-based game could handle the flood of data, and even then there would be large delays.
Game-related Questions
Q: "I had a few Workers building a Tower. When I came back a few minutes later, the Tower was built but the Workers were gone!"
A: That is actually a feature of the game, so you don't have to worry about keeping your Workers busy. After all, the Computer doesn't have that problem! To give the human player a bit of an edge, a Worker will start gathering a nearby resource if he finishes gathering or building. However, he will stay put if you click "Stop", or tell him to move somewhere. That way if it's "dangerous out there", you won't have Workers wandering off to their untimely demise.
Q: "Is there a quicker way to select multiple units?"
A:There are several ways to select units. The general rules are: [ALT] + click selects ALL nearby units of the type you clicked on, and [SHIFT] + click toggles the selected status of the unit you click. You can use any combination of these to select your attack party, etc.
