I just made an account recently, and I was trying to play on my iPad, but whenever I click the play button on a puzzle, I just get a blank white screen that doesn’t do anything. Does anyone know if there is a way to play on my iPad, or is it just not possible?
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Currently. the game is in Flash, which is not available on iOS. There is discussion of moving to a native HTML/JS solution, allowing for any device with a browser to use it, but development resources are pretty low so it’s on the back burner as far as I know.
Thanks for the help! I hope they do that sometime soon because the strongest computer in my house is my iPad. My desktop is somewhere around ten years old and last time I checked it had like three Trojans or something. I don’t have many other options.
The app is a waste of time Go to eternagame,org
Our initial version of the app only supported the tutorials - we have an update to the app in progress that will add the additional puzzles and labs. 
Me too and there are still glitches I can’t get past
What glitches are you encountering?
Here is what the player reported in chat:
I can’t do the Liquid Robotics tutorial because there is no alt key on iPads. I can’t use asterisks instead because the screen covers the display so I can’t access the molecule.
Now I can’t do the codon puzzles in the Covid section because the sequences are written overlaying the chart so you can’t read any of it. There are smaller things like not having any controls until you turn on talk. Sometimes the controls are below the visible screen.
The app is even worse. There are no temperatures in the loops, just the total temp. There are still sometimes blank unresponsive screens. Sometimes you are restarted at the first puzzle, every level you have finished gone.
To be perfectly clear, we’re not “pretending” to support mobile - we fully intend for it to be fully usable - in fact it’s been a recent priority. That said, it’s required a lot of effort to bring full feature parity as Eterna was not historically designed for it, and there have been a number of nontrivial, difficult to reproduce issues on specific platforms. On top of this, realize that the amount of development resources we have available for the entire project is relatively limited right now. It may be slow going, but we are definitely working on improving this. It’s also important for us to actually know what issues people are running into, so please just tell us! While some issues are known and fixes are planned, we often aren’t aware of issues unless people notify us.
I can’t do the Liquid Robotics tutorial because there is no alt key on iPads. I can’t use asterisks instead because the screen covers the display so I can’t access the molecule.
Puzzles that require this functionality (“magic glue”) should have a button in the toolbar (with the icon of a glue bottle) which functions the same way. I’m not sure what you mean by “asterisks” or what screen is covering your display.
Now I can’t do the codon puzzles in the Covid section because the sequences are written overlaying the chart so you can’t read any of it. There are smaller things like not having any controls until you turn on talk. Sometimes the controls are below the visible screen.
The functionality for the OpenVaccine puzzles was built in a rush, and was before we even supported much of the key mobile functionality. We have designed mobile friendly versions of this functionality, but since we’re not doing any more OpenVaccine labs, the priority of this has gone down significantly. If you’re running into controls issues on other puzzles, that may be specific to using the web version on mobile - I haven’t been able to get the page to scale to the size of the screen properly without causing significant bugs in some browsers. I do definitely need to revisit that.
There are no temperatures in the loops, just the total temp
You can always turn this on in the settings - there is nothing different in this regard vs the website.
There are still sometimes blank unresponsive screens
I have not encountered this before or heard about it from anyone else, if you have any additional information, particularly a way to reproduce it, I’d appreciate it. One thing I’ll note is that you need to make sure you have functional internet at all times - our app does not function properly offline (I’d like to support this in the future, and at the very least we should have some sort of indicator of why things aren’t working when we detect you’re offline, but we haven’t had the resources to do this).
Sometimes you are restarted at the first puzzle, every level you have finished gone.
How recently have you had this issue? We’ve been fighting with this on and off for quite a while, but we were pretty confident we’d fixed it in the most recent version of the app. If not, again if you have any additional information or reliable reproduction that would help tremendously. Also note that this almost certainly should not happen if you’re logged in.
Your comments were very helpful, thanks
So I have 5th Gen iPad, recently iOS 15 with no apparent disasters
We have robust service, and if there is a glitch in this pgm, others are ok
Liquid Robotics, I found the glue this time and it works, altho most of label obscured
Anyway, this was the big thing so great
Codons charts and sequences are overwritten. I can write them out but that is sort of lame
This is all from eternagame.org
I never found a way to turn on temps for individual loops
But way worse, when I started the blank navy blue screens, and not just me. I switched to webpage and saw in chat someone asking for help. I was really new, but when nobody answered, I did and told him not to use app, but I guess he was gone by then. I don’t know how many potential users may have done that
I went back at one point to see if app had way to deal with LR alt issue, but still wound up with a blank blé screen and couldn’t go to other apps, had to power off
I hope some of this is helpful
I think the basic idea of this project is great
I could give you a screnshot of a Covid puzzle with table of codons overlaid on another table making them both partially illegible. I also got an email from you wanting a picture of me. I used to have an ITjob as a systems designer and never once asked for a picture of the people I interacted with. Also, I never would have passed anything with two overlaid tables.
I could give you a screnshot of a Covid puzzle with table of codons overlaid on another table making them both partially illegible.
As I mentioned before, the OpenVaccine puzzles were not designed with mobile in mind as at that point we barely supported mobile at all. Eventually the functionality will be rewritten, but it is not a priority as we are moving on to other types of labs.
I also got an email from you wanting a picture of me.
No one on our staff would have sent any such thing - if you got such a message, it didn’t come from us. If you would like me to look into it, please forward the email to support@eternagame.org and I’ll take a look.
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Again, I can’t do a lab puzzle because the switch function is overlaid by the title and every t8mevi try to access it, the title turns it off
Also I always have to turn chat on to access the buttons and arrows
Thanks for the feedback, it’s very helpful! Were you using the iOS app or accessing our website through Safari on your iPad when you encountered these problems? To make sure we are understanding correctly, you were unable to change between states 1 and 2 on a switch, and you had to open the chat box to access the main toolbar in puzzles?
I use Safari, although I suppose the app has become more useful.
There is a recurring problem with parts of the screen having more than one thing in the same location. There are switch puzzles where the title overlays the switches and prevents access to them, for one example. A quick look at the screen would show this.
Also I learned that I had to turn on chat for the controls to appear. I can turn chat off after that, and the controls stay functional.
And I still sometimes get the starting puzzle. I keep a copy of an unsolved puzzle page, so I can go through that and not lose all of progress. But I can’t see why this problem should ever occur.
I hope this is helpful. I could take screenshots, but I think there are probably other screens with the same issues that I haven’t opened yet.
I have been doing Best Lab puzzles and I noticed one where Eli Fisher was apologizing because the format he created it in was not the same as in practice, where controls were overlaid. This is the problem I have had so much. It particularly happens with screens with very long titles, which is very frustrating because when titles overlay controls there is no way to do them.