Oh wow. This explains a lot of the things I've been hearing from people on phones and lower end systems. This should definitely be one of the back end things that gets prioritized ASAP. The fantastic writeup & people's anecdotal additions speak for themselves, lol.
I know this is not exactly a viable way to redo things Now since it's Already a Website but honestly I would not be against future online pet games just... having at least an option to run as a program from a launcher for better optimization [how say discord can work in-browser but is more convenient as a program] because web is just kind of
not that good a format with something with too many moving parts in a post-flash environment.
HTML5 can be optimized to run better than utilized here but it's not made with a lot of the functionality codified in the flash era making a lot of the things easily done in flash really slow in HTML5. Sadly, a lot of upcoming petsites running about as good as neopets did in the 90s is kind of the consequence of that.
Event the more polished sites aren't immune [FR is Wholly Unplayable for me rn since where I live apparently has Unfortunate Highly Specific Routing Issues on the way to their servers and Boy do I get to realize Exactly How Image Heavy petsites are and my pc is, while not 100% up to date, is good enough for 3d work]
If at all possible I would really love to run pet games like this as proper computer games that don't have to rely on suboptimal tools for the job as you can't really take the image heavy out of the pet game.
And honestly? Much luck to JimJim with the coding as there isn't exactly... a codified tried and true method to building a petsite in the post-flash era, and even the most successful and polished ones have a notable level of jank Somewhere
Any improvements on this front would be incredible. My computer (nothing top of the line but it's a recent iMac) restarted itself after freezing a couple nights ago because firefox, running LR and nothing else too strenuous, was using almost 19GB of system memory. Ouch.
