New "Play Online" beta at textadventures.co.uk

I have rewritten the “Play Online” feature of textadventures.co.uk.

It is now running WebPlayer, which is the open source online player component of Quest 5.0.

Things to be aware of or excited about…

• It is much faster than the old "play online" feature
• It no longer uses Flash - instead it's using AJAX. This means that it works on iPhone and iPad etc. But note that the current layout is not very iPhone-friendly. Also it didn't work on the Android browser I tried for some reason.
• It is free and open source, so if you wanted to host your own WebPlayer in your own design, you can.
• It supports games for all Quest versions - both "classic" Quest (4.x and earlier) and "new" Quest (5.0).
• It works properly - if it works in Quest, it should work in WebPlayer too. The old "play online" feature doesn't show embedded CAS resources for example - WebPlayer does.

To use the new WebPlayer, you must first log in to textadventures.co.uk. You will then see a “Try the new beta online player” under the usual “Play online” link. (There’s no technical reason for requiring a login, it’s just that I don’t want every casual player on the site hitting the new WebPlayer until I know it works properly).

Note that the very latest games added to textadventures.co.uk won’t be available on WebPlayer yet, as I haven’t set up the service that grabs new game files on the new server.

Please, please, please give me your feedback and report any errors you see.