Playing WebUI game inside an iframe on your own website

There were lots of discussion about ease of use of TADS webplay. Authors seems to want a way to allow players to play games on an author’s own website so the game feels it is part of the site, right? Ideally one would like to embed game to some page, leave navigation accessible and tweak fonts and colors so the overal design look good. And more over do this with ease.

So what about embed the game inside an iframe on the page the same way you can embed stupid YouTube videos? Just one HTML tag and one file hosted anywhere. No, it won’t work offline, but neither your website :slight_smile: I’ve made a little test page here together with deeper explanation:

http://tads.cz/en/play-webui-game-in-iframe

Of course its not much tested and for sure there will be bugs which will need to iron out. Please test in different browsers and report, known to work good in Chrome 55.0 and FF 60.3 ESR under Linux. Known to not work due to my lame programming on old FF. Maybe someone more proficient in JavaScript could help to iron things out?

That’s pretty nifty. One concern I have in general is who owns this “free public cloud service”? The whole gs.tads.io is cool but it has that sort of feeling of “it might go away.” So as you state, if people want that extra bit of security, they have to set up their own game server or storage server. That would be the only possible sticking point I can see. I’m not sure issues for many were they want it “so the game feels it is part of the site” but rather that the game actually is part of the site, similar to Inform.

What a great idea!

I tested in recent Win 10 versions of chrome, firefox, IE and MS Edge. They all worked. Both of the MS browsers exhibited a shadow/phantom/derelict X when I used “x” to examine an object. The other browsers did not. I will test the RPi based browsers later.

Having a server is not a large obstacle, a very capable and robust virtual server can be found at linode.com for $5 per month.

Thank you,
v/r
Jeff

What a great idea!

I tested in recent Win 10 versions of chrome, firefox, IE and MS Edge. They all worked. Both of the MS browsers exhibited a “shadow/phantom/derelict” X when I used “x” to examine an object. The other browsers did not. I will test the RPi based browsers later.

Having a server is not a large obstacle, a very capable and robust virtual server can be found at linode.com for $5 per month.

Thank you,
v/r
Jeff

I’m not sure, I think Mike runs IFDB and storage server and a pool of game servers are probably run by various people - I don’t know how many, but they are definitely at various locations around world. My server is not part of the cloud, but wouldn’t be a problem when needed.

Well I run my own server not because I’m afraid public service will go away but rather because I want more customization and unrestricted network access from the game itself so I can have it tightly integrated and because it is easy form me.

Hm, can you explain me the difference? You can style it, you can keep it in layout of the site etc. Lots of things on web are embedded in iframes, like youtube, like social networks spy icons etc., but I’m not sure what effect could help to be more like you need it. Can you tell me what would be needed specifically so I can think about it?

That hardly works. Anything added to the t3m file is overridden at compile time and all modifications disappears - no matter when there line is inserted.

When using Workbench under Windows add the resource folder by clicking in the GUI - whatever I do not know, but I’m quite sure there is some equivalent somewhere. I’m using frobtads and t3make to compile game from command line so for me it is little more straightforward.