Flash Hiccups and API Issues

Lately, the API is working only half the time for me and I encounter hiccups in games all the time. A hiccup is a temporary and brief freeze where everything in the game pauses (it doesn’t skip but stop) for a moment, including music and sounds. A hiccup lasting 1 second happens every 20 seconds without fail, I actually counted those seconds with my computer clock. It doesn’t matter what game I play or which quality is set, it happens every single times and it’s really getting on my nerves.

Since I’m suffering from hiccups, the API hasn’t been working properly. Half the time, it doesn’t record my progress and badges aren’t given. I constantly have to use the report missing achievement button. The plug is green by the way. I could be playing a first game and the API wouldn’t be working then start playing a second one and it’ll start working, then a third one and it stops again and finally go back to the first game I played and it miraculously works. There’s no pattern to it, I just never know when it’s going to work or not.

I haven’t changed my browsing habits since these problems started. My Flash Player works fine, I never have any problem playing games locally, watching videos and playing games on other websites; it only happens here on Kongregate. I’m using the latest Flash Player version and the same applies to the browser I’m using, Firefox. I’m also using add-ons but they didn’t pose any problem in the past. I’m using AdBlock Plus to clean off the ads and all Facebook buttons when possible. I also have Greasemonkey but it’s usually deactivated, Stylish that is only activated for a few websites and this one isn’t one of them, and AutoPager which is only active on certain pages and never when playing a game. I do have more add-ons but they’re not the kind for causing issues. for example DownloadHelper and BabelFish.

I thank you for taking the time to read this and I thank you even more if you can help me.

It may be a problem caused by AdBlock. Can you try disabling it and see if it makes any difference?

Also, are your flash storage settings set to unlimited?

I already tried disabling all add-ons once and it didn’t fix the problem. My flash storage settings are always set to unlimited by default. The problems seem to have changed recently though. Instead of being consistent, it’s now random. Sometimes there are no problems at all and other times it’s even worse. For example of a very bad situation, a game was lagging so much that the multicolored spiral of doom (that’s how I like calling the equivalent of the hourglass on Mac) shows up and freezes applications for a moment that can range from 2 to 30 seconds. Did Kongregate recently receive a major update in the past three days?

We had a minor update not too long ago, but it doesn’t seem to be a widespread error. Do you know if this happens on other web browsers as well, or just Firefox?

I’ve been having these same issues starting about 2 weeks ago just before I got Iexplorer 9 (from 7) and updated all my adobe products.(this issue prompted me upgrading/updating)
Same problem of games just starting to randomly freeze.. sometimes clicking the mouse in the flash area will step it forward a few frames and eventually past the problem and then sometimes it will just completely freeze.

I’m not running adblocker and have only 2 toolbars. Also I’ve double checked that I have the same permissions allowed that I did in the old Ie7 browser.

Same problem here.

I’m using Internet Explorer without addons.

Flash player has unlimited space on my computer and I have severe lags in most of the games, sometimes they’re not working at all.

Some people have issues with the new Flash Player (particularly in Firefox). They added a feature called “Protected Mode,” which supposedly sandboxes Flash to protect you from malicious Flash code. The problem is, it also tends to crash Firefox and/or Flash itself, and even when it doesn’t, it often slows Flash a lot. Try disabling Protected Mode and see if that solves your problems:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1018071

Thanks for the update, Aarwyn. If that works for others, I can add it to the FAQ. :)

Protected Mode is for Windows only so my problem can’t be related to it. As for trying other browsers, it seemed to work fine with Safari but I stopped using that browser because it would often crash, especially when surfing on websites with tons of elements to load like Wikia. Anyway, I never used it for Kongregate because it lacked an ad blocker, which makes playing games much more smoother, faster and much less annoying. I’m sorry to tell you this but if it wasn’t for AdBlock Plus, I wouldn’t be using this website because the ads are unbearable and they worsen after each major updates. I’ve never seen another website with so much irritating ads.

If you come across advertisements that are malicious/invasive, you can report them to us and we can see about getting them removed.

As for your API problems, please check this link:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html

Search for chat.kongregate.com. Is the storage set to unlimited?

After painfully scrolling down a list of hundreds of websites (damn you Adobe for not giving us a search bar!) and finally arriving at chat.kongregate.com which was frustratingly the third to last in the list, I discovered that it was already set to unlimited, all of this for nothing!

By irritating ads, I didn’t mean that the ads themselves were malicious but that there were way too many of them. Navigating on this website without an ad blocker is masochistic. They’re distracting, take a lot of space on your screen, slow down games and make you wait to play.

The problem has returned to its former “version” but doubled. Hiccups no longer stop the background music but they happen every 10 seconds and last for 2 seconds. There’s also a minor hiccup happening every 5 seconds (between major ones) that lasts for 250 milliseconds. If this keeps up, Kongregate will become a Game & Watch.

Interestingly, I’ve left a game open on another tab while making this message and every hiccups also freeze this one. In other words, scrolling and typing stop when the flash game is interrupted. When there’s a hiccup, Firefox in all its entirety freezes, links aren’t working (can’t click on them and the underlined animation when cursor hovers over them freezes), you can’t type or scroll, you can’t change tabs, you can’t click on buttons (refresh, close window, etc), etc. There’s no exception to this rule, all of Firefox stops working when there’s a hiccup, it doesn’t matter if I’m on another window and a different website.

I think I’ll use another browser for this website, one consecrated solely for Kongregate, like how Firefox used to have that role before replacing Safari as the main browser when I was getting tired of the latter’s frequent crashes. I did some research and it appears that there are ad blockers for every browsers I know. I didn’t know there was one for Safari, if only I had known before… I might give it a chance again, it’s not like it crashed on every websites, only on ones with a lot of elements to load (best example being Wikia). With an ad blocker, it won’t have to load as much (I not only block ads but also useless banners and stuff) and it will probably stop crashing.