Flash games (shared media) no longer respond to key presses

[Icarus Lytton]

At my hangout I built this nice arcade with loads of working arcade cabinets. Or at least, they used to work. It seems the games load fine (Flash based) and key presses work fine too but the second you try to type anything or use the cursor keys to move, it won't work. SInce most games require the keyboard this means almost all games are broken.

Does anyone have any idea why these games no longer accept any input? Playing the same games in a browser works fine ... .

[Nalates Urriah]

In-Viewer-Flash has been somewhat broken for some time. Flash and other media in SL is dependent on Webkit, a now mostly, if not completely, unsupported technology. As drivers and viewer updates arrive few parts of Flash seem to work. No one is going to fix Webkit or Flash for SL. So, you have a problem.

What is going to happen is the Lab is changing media from Webkit to Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). As most of the web world is changing to HTML5 and CEF this is the way forward. 

See the CEF forum for information on getting Flash to run inside CEF. 

A project viewer for CEF will be available for testing in Oct or Nov of this year. Some time after that, likely only a few weeks, the change will promote to the main SL viewer and spread to third party viewers. All the timing is dependent on numerious factors and thus unpredictable. So, this may happen well ahead of my guess.

Those like yourself should be testing the new project viewer as soon as it arrives. During the testing perios as a PROJECT viewer it is easy to get changes made and omissions added. It is much more difficult after the viewer goes to RC status.

For more information see: http://blog.nalates.net/tag/cef/

[Icarus Lytton]

Thank you for your in-depth reply - it seems very very few people know about this. Even people who sell Flash games didn't know this it seems. I hope HTML 5 games will be possible then since I love my Arcade in SL - and it's a lot less straining on the sims than if they were Second Life games.