The Coli and Fair games only seem to want to run at good speeds on computers much faster/newer than mine; I'm running it on a Win XP Pro (updated) desktop at 2GHz with 2 GB memory, using Opera to do it since Chrome lags all the games even more frustratingly for me. (Curiously, Chrome loads all the gene and breed change previews correctly, while Opera doesn't want to.)
The Coli in particular bothers me. On both my desktop and the iPad I'd borrowed for a while, the whole thing runs at what feels like about a third the speed it does on my brother's rather higher-end-than-my-desktop laptop. Besides being generally slow, it seems to randomly slow down further for me for a while, often just after the enemy casts a magic attack, or someone scores a critical hit (at which point not only does the framerate drop as I'd expect it to to try to keep things running, but the whole thing slows down overall.) Rally takes roughly ten seconds to cast, from selecting its target, to being able to select the next dragon's commands. It makes grinding for food incredibly tedious.
More frustrating than simply being slow, though, is that sometimes it hangs between me telling a dragon what to do (such as, Ability -> Scratch -> select target) and it doing it. The buttons on the bottom right disappear, including Cancel, but instead of the attack's graphics or the dragon moving anywhere, nothing happens, sometimes for a few seconds, and sometimes for so long that I gave up (on the iPad; it hasn't stalled indefinitely on my desktop... yet....) and just reloaded the page. The Coli itself hasnn't entirely stopped during this, though, as I can see the environmental animations still happening... it's just that the logic that governs the game's actual "what do I do next?" decision-making seems to've stalled on something, and is left sitting there dumbly.
I'd be much happier if there were an alternate, no-frills version of the Coli, preferably text-based "action" and entirely still images rather than animated; perhaps then my even-more-outdated lappy could load it in the first place. It isn't that I don't appreciate the work that's gone into it so far (I do; I think it's really cool!) ...it's that I simply don't have a new computer, and won't for a good while yet because priorities, and I can't keep borrowing other people's computers to play it on. :(
The Coli in particular bothers me. On both my desktop and the iPad I'd borrowed for a while, the whole thing runs at what feels like about a third the speed it does on my brother's rather higher-end-than-my-desktop laptop. Besides being generally slow, it seems to randomly slow down further for me for a while, often just after the enemy casts a magic attack, or someone scores a critical hit (at which point not only does the framerate drop as I'd expect it to to try to keep things running, but the whole thing slows down overall.) Rally takes roughly ten seconds to cast, from selecting its target, to being able to select the next dragon's commands. It makes grinding for food incredibly tedious.
More frustrating than simply being slow, though, is that sometimes it hangs between me telling a dragon what to do (such as, Ability -> Scratch -> select target) and it doing it. The buttons on the bottom right disappear, including Cancel, but instead of the attack's graphics or the dragon moving anywhere, nothing happens, sometimes for a few seconds, and sometimes for so long that I gave up (on the iPad; it hasn't stalled indefinitely on my desktop... yet....) and just reloaded the page. The Coli itself hasnn't entirely stopped during this, though, as I can see the environmental animations still happening... it's just that the logic that governs the game's actual "what do I do next?" decision-making seems to've stalled on something, and is left sitting there dumbly.
I'd be much happier if there were an alternate, no-frills version of the Coli, preferably text-based "action" and entirely still images rather than animated; perhaps then my even-more-outdated lappy could load it in the first place. It isn't that I don't appreciate the work that's gone into it so far (I do; I think it's really cool!) ...it's that I simply don't have a new computer, and won't for a good while yet because priorities, and I can't keep borrowing other people's computers to play it on. :(
