Suggestions

Swing back by this site after a couple years' hiatus due to how badly optimized it is for mobile, only to discover:

it is still just as bad on mobile.

I didn't *really* expect any better, but I certainly dared to hope.

Later, taters.

tl;dr: Suggestion: make this game remotely useable on mobile. Or don't, I guess, since you haven't yet and I know this forum is filled with people invested in this game begging you to do it. /shrug

@Smaller Hello! Your title has been edited to better reflect the subject. Thank you!

Cool. I've gone ahead and added a tag to your edit to reflect the original spirit of the title.

This site is almost completely unusable on mobile and I really hoped for better by now. Almost ten years eh?

OP: please post your device/browser version combo. Devs can't fix what they don't know is broken.

i feel like mobile optimization or an app aren't really ever going to happen because that stuff requires an entire secondary team who understands that stuff and can dedicate time to it

Yeah, I agree.

It's been 10 years and this site is still horrible on both mobile devices and anything that isn't a laptop/pc.

Over the years (I joined in 2013) I've had numerous mobile phones and it's been horrible on all of them and I've also tried using it on a kindle and a brand new iPad Pro and the issues are the same.

Pop up windows are a headache to deal with, with text obscuring parts of a desired window and whatnot, some of the games are mostly or completely unusable with Jigsaw being the worst offender and even moving things around such as dragons in the den or items of clothing is just. Appalling.

I could understand it being a thing if mobile/tablet use was niche? But it's not. It's a really common way to use a site. Especially, I might add, for younger players who may have been given something like an iPad instead of a laptop for their internet use.

I even have a combo-type laptop (it flips so the keyboard folds under, making it gigantic tablet) and the site even sucks if I use my actual laptop like that.

It's awful being locked out of or struggling with numerous site activities due to the site lagging behind the times. It really is about time it was optimised for, if not mobile specifically, then at least touch-screen browsers. Especially since jigsaw would be so much easier with a stylus than a mouse. The only way I got it to work halfway well over the years was with an old-fashioned non-screen wacom tablet attachment.

I'm not talking an app -- just being able to use it with a touch screen would help.

I get your frustration, and agree that it's annoying, but the title comes across as you attacking the staff, and that's not really cool. Yes, they could focus on fixing mobile accessability, but with everything else that they do, it's not like they just completely gave up on the game.

Actually, you said it's been a couple years? They've been working on accessability in many areas ^^ only a matter of time before they fix a bigger issue.

I don't think it's going to happen, it requires more server costs, backend code and in real time to do it. If they decide to proceed, they will just simply present the Flight Rising website disguised as an app, effectively redirecting you to the same content you are reading right now when visiting the FR website on your phone.

Implementing this change would place a greater burden on the backend team, including those who have been involved in its development. This also affects some fairground games and coliseum. Most fairground games are outsourced in other countries (as indicated in the games credits), they'll need to contact with these teams and start from scratch

The website is already mobile-friendly, although I'm unsure about its compatibility with iPads, tablets and iPhones. Fairground games rely on the utilization of a keyboard and mouse for maximum efficiency. However, they can still be played on mobile devices, which is great but playing them on mobile will be tedious.

Nevertheless, there's still a room for further improvement in terms of mobile usability


Already said this before on a different thread, I'm just repeating it myself lol

Site is very much not mobile friendly.

The sidebar links are crammed close together and are constantly on the page, rather than behind a menu button to save space. The contents are not sized nor fitted for mobile browsers, and zoom level is not maintained between refreshes even on the same page (tomo's is literally hellish on mobile, for instance, because you have to zoom way in on the answer buttons to ensure you're clicking the correct one. Then the reward pop-up appears off screen at the center of the desktop-fitted content and you have to scroll over and accept it. Then when you click to play again you're back in the top left corner, and start the process over.)

HTML links for posts do not allow you to insert formatting on highlighted text without either playing chicken or bumping it down a mile first, or typing out all the brackets and BBCode by hand -- exceedingly annoying on a standard mobile keyboard.

All the confirmation pop-ups that the site utilizes do the same obnoxious thing Tomo's does.

Coli resizes almost at random. The contents are again shaped to a desktop browser, making them work poorly outside a landscape-oriented screen--but the average screen is so narrow up and down that just turning your phone 90 degrees means you have to stay zoomed way, way out to get your buttons without scrolling up and down. I have a galaxy note 20 ultra, it is a couple years older as a model but it is not a tiny phone.

When you accidentally get info box pop-ups by hovering over an item or an ability, they like to stick and as annoying as it is on desktop, on mobile because you have to manually zoom into pages they cover a full third of the screen. Then, because of how you have to get rid of them (multiclicking), your entire manually-set zoom changes and you have to zoom again. In coli this is extra awful because you may have JUST finished lining up the window at the right size to semi-functionally play.

Don't even want to talk about captcha. Or dealing with the fact that multiple tabs (for, say, widgets) is not as comfortable on a phone as it is on a desktop even with the newer chrome tab group options.

The auction house is fully desktop sized and there is no way to see an entire listing together without scrolling back and forth if you're zoomed in enough to see images properly--which makes shopping for dragons obnoxious.

The market's page system means you had best be on your home's wifi in your living room, because unless you have a 5-bar signal good luck.

The site being functional on mobile does not mean it's mobile friendly. It very much is not. I say this as someone who, despite all of the above, plays on mobile probably a solid 50% of the time.

ALL THAT BEING SAID

Developing a mobile site mirror takes resources. This is not a site where they can just grab a template and slap stuff together--this would be from scratch. It's patently unrealistic to expect a tiny indie team (because even if this is a major petsite that's like being the biggest guppy.) To have the developers, the time, the money, etc. To just drop everything and get a mobile app or mobile site developed alongside the desktop site when they're still in the process of cleaning up the desktop version due to how it was initially coded. That is just the nature of a website that was written by hand a decade ago. Those big mobile optimization strides need to have the groundwork laid when the site is being built to work flawlessly.

Just coming in to say "site sucks bc no mobile bye" is neither a suggestion, nor constructive. "Make it work on mobile" is not a small ask. It's also not helpful without a list of pain points they could at least start making a list of. (Again, functional does not mean friendly. Also some parts I only refer to as functional because the buttons do what you tell them to, even if getting to those buttons makes you hate everything.)

An app doesn't make sense, but there's a lot that could be done - without specialised knowledge - to make the site more mobile friendly. This would include:

- auto-sizing for mobile
- hamburger-style menu on small screens
- implement the drag bars on the dressing room
- fix non-mobile-compatible fairgrounds games
- Change how tooltips etc respond to touch

(Issues with moving dragons around in the lair/den is probably worth reporting, that works very smoothly on mobile for me. The grab bars are A++)

@cantrip
Apologies for the ping if you didn't want it, but mobile site mirrors aren't really a thing afaik*. From professional and personal experience, it's just some extra CSS that detects the screen size and rearranges/adapts the layout. The majority of the changes needed are neither particularly complex nor specialist to implement, they're just likely to take a fair bit of tweaking to get looking nice on mobile.

Take https://reskin.vendrus.teamfrag.net/ for example - if you make the window super narrow, it drops the dragon image underneath and changes from a top nav bar to a hamburger menu. Not as complex a site as FR to be sure, but that was also about 30 lines of CSS and could almost certainly have been done in less.

EDIT: The dragon image moving wasn't even extra CSS! Just the default behaviour for the inbuilt flexbox containers.

EDIT EDIT: *The closest thing to a mobile site mirror is an 'adaptive' website, which serves different elements to the webpage depending on screen size. The other type is a 'responsive' site, which shuffles parts of the page around automatically depending on available size. It's common to do both - particularly making layout elements like top and sidebar elements adaptive but the main content reactive.