DirPlayer

DirPlayer 0.4.1 has been released. The headline changes are hardware-accelerated graphics, major performance improvements, and custom font parsing and rendering.

That last one is particularly relevant to Supremacy, as the previous version had broken fonts. I’ve updated the JS polyfill on the Supremacy page to the latest version, and the game does look noticeably better as a result. Most of the fonts now render properly, and all of the buttons are readable.

Unfortunately, it still isn’t quite playable. The runtime error that stops progress is still there, but it seems simple enough I may try to fix it myself. Which means learning some Rust…

I recently posted about Flashpoint Archive, a way to play old Shockwave (and other) content. I have just discovered another option DirPlayer.

What is DirPlayer?

DirPlayer is written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly and is available two different ways:

• As an extension from the Chrome Web Store. This is useful for visiting any old or archived sites and just automatically loading the Shockwave content.

• As a single JS polyfill. This allows people hosting the content on pages they can still edit to make their Shockwave content available to any modern browser.

Current status

At time of writing, version 0.3, has just been released. I’ve tried Supremacy in it. There is good news, and bad news.

The good news is the game launches. The fonts don’t work properly, and some buttons do not have colours making them hard to read, but you can actually start a game. Sadly, there is then a runtime error.

But I’ve decided to add Supremacy back on to the site in its original location and included the DirPlayer polyfill, which I hope to keep updated as development continues.