YouTube brings ads and pauses to iRok2!

Ok, so maybe we’re not super excited about this. YouTube recently enabled ads in their player which means some videos will show ad overlays at the bottom. We knew ads were coming and didn’t think it would be a big deal. Visually, it doesn’t take much away from the video or the iRok2 game experience. However, performance wise we are seeing a measurable impact on Adobe’s Flash Player (which runs the game and displays the video).

Ads are only shown on some videos, but when they pop-up they tend to momentarily pause the track on slower computers. It’s especially noticeable when the ad keeps changing throughout the game as it briefly pauses the track each time it switches. Unfortunately there’s not a lot we can do about this directly as YouTube doesn’t allow us to alter the video or the ads, and we can’t modify the Flash player itself. If you are seeing a noticeable pause when ads appear you have a couple options: 

1. Turn off the ads. YouTube allows you to turn off ads on the video you’re watching by clicking the “X” in the upper right corner of the ad overlay (which pops up from the bottom of the video). This works the same whether you are on youtube.com or in the game. YouTube only shows ads the first time you watch the video - so another way to turn them off is to wait until the ad shows (around 12 seconds into the video), activate the Pause menu and Select Restart. The ad should no longer appear.


2. Get more speed. There are a number of ways to make the pauses less noticeable: get a faster computer, install the latest version of Flash, run a different browser, try a smaller game window size, etc. Our development computers, for example, are fast enough that we don’t see the ad stutter at all in the office. This link has other suggestions for making iRok2 run faster.

If you find a really laggy ad-enabled video that you want to play you could also consider creating a new track based on a different video of the same song. There are other issues that can cause lag in the game as well. For example, playing high quality videos or loading more players in the rank meter can introduce game pauses. You can be sure we will do everything we can to minimize these game stutters as development progresses.

How do you feel about the YouTube ads? Have you been experiencing slight pauses in the game as the ads change? Let us know in the comments!