iPlay works for 1 day, now obsolete

Sandy and GMC Administrator Chronic had only just finished announcing the release of a Firefox 3.0 compatible Instant Play plug-in when the Mozilla team decided to update its browser yesterday to version 3.0.1. For users still using version 3.0, they will be constantly reminded (in the form of a corner pop-up message) that they should upgrade to 3.0.1. Pretty soon most users will be up to date, and will be without a working Instant Play plug-in yet again.

The plug-in in its current state was not designed to install on future browser versions. It’s very unfortunate that just hours after YoYo Games took time to release the plug-in, it had already become obsolete. For users looking for temporary/work-around solutions, see below. At this time, there is no statement from YoYo Games to indicate if an when a new version of the plug-in will be available.

Chronic used this method to override compatibility of the plug-in:

Download the addon (YoYo.xpi, right click, save as.)
Rename from YoYo.xpi to YoYo.zip
Unzip to a new folder
Open Install.rdf in Wordpad
Find this line: em:maxVersion=”3.0.*.*” />
Change it to: em:maxVersion=”3.*” />

Once you’re done with that close and save the file and rezip all of the files in the folder and rename it to YoYo.xpi then drag it in to a firefox window to install it (uninstall the previous version first).

Now, I’m not sure that this will 100% fix the issue, but its working for me. So do this only if you must, otherwise wait for an official solution.

For users with the nightly tester tools add-on, you shouldn’t have to make any modifications, a simple press of the ‘override compatibility’ button should do the trick.

iPlay & G-Flash

In the interest of conserving time and title space, iPlay will now refer to the official YoYo Games Instant Play plugin in any future articles.

For anyone who uses Firefox 3, it’s quite obvious that iPlay does not share your enthusiasm for browser upgrades. When you visit the YoYo Games site, you’ll have no choice to download games, and instead will be prompted to “Play Now”, a feature incompatible with the world-record breaking Mozilla software.

Although the YoYo games team is taking their time to fix the problem, there are now several users have discovered work-arounds. One of Scorptek’s very own programmers, ari_aaron, modified the YoYo Games .xpi plug-in installer to make it fully compatible with version 3 of Firefox. Unfortunately, after contacting YoYo Games with ‘high priority’ to demonstrate the easy fix, the YoYo Games staff neglected to respond to our support ticket and seemed to have ignored it altogether.

Also to our dismay, the YoYo Games website ‘Terms of Service’ strictly prohibits us from distributing the modified plug-in to others :(.

So the next best thing we can do is recommend an alternative work-around which keeps your browser safe and secure (un-like the common about:config ‘hack’ which could potentially put your web browser at risk).

1) Download the Nightly Tester Tools add-on for Firefox
2) Upon reboot (of Firefox), install the YoYo Games plug-in and click Force Install

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I thought I would also take time to mention Caniac’s continuing efforts to send in news tips (so if you want to win this month’s prize I suggest you get cracking). Caniac wanted to let our readers know there are some new developments to G-Flash, an oldie project long assumed dead until now.

According to Caniac, about 20 new functions have been added to the Game Maker to Flash converter, and the project now has four new members on the team. It is hopeful that with some help, the project can be brought back to life again.

Check out the G-Flash subforum here.

GM7 *Is The* Decompiler

By now all of you are most certainly aware of the GM decompiler floating around, but what Caniac discovered today may come as a bit of a shock to some readers.

The user discovered that GM7 in fact ‘decompiles’ packaged extensions for Game Maker 7. This allows any user to view the source code to any Game Maker extension and possibly steal and modify said code without permission from the extension’s author.

You may know that the GM7 decompiler can already ‘decompile’ such extension packages, however this is a bit different. This method of extracting the contents of the package does not require any additional decompiling software, tools or hacking methods. In fact all that is needed is notepad to remove a single line from the extension file Game Maker outputs after the package has been installed in the program.

This is just a small warning to those Extension Makers who are perhaps concerned their work could be stolen or modified without permission. One use of Extensions (prior to this discovery) was to release a secure library of functions to perform various programming tasks which could only be called by the programmer, not viewed or modified. Now it is no longer possible to share programming functions with other developers without also exposing the source code behind them.