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Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

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Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#71

Post by swilliamsio »

MengerSponge wrote: post #48

People's use of the internet has changed, but the fact that there is not a new Homestar Runner or NewGrounds is telling. How much does a weird high school/college art nerd need to know about the tech stack to get their vision online? I'm old enough that HSR is still part of my lexicon. Kids just think I'm weird, which is fine.

itch.io is massive for games if you want a new Newgrounds. The tech stack has moved on from Flash to use Unity or GameMaker or Godot or Construct. It's feasible for someone not knowing how to code to use most game engines to create something - not uncommon in Game Jams to see teams like that.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#72

Post by nicoburns »

skytreader wrote: post #29

A lot of answers already boil down to, basically, superior developer experience. But there's an aspect of this that I want to highlight: resource efficiency. Around the latter half of the 00s, I had a Windows XP machine with 256MB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor, with a matching spinning metal-disk hard drive. I could make decent Flash animations and games with it. I could view entire websites in Flash with Internet…

> mostly because I'm too cheap to upgrade to an SSD

Wow, that is cheap. We’re talking, what, $40? Basically everything these days assumes fast random disk IO, and will be slow if you don’t have it. If you’ve upgraded your computer at all in the last 10 years then you probably have been better off keeping the old one and getting an SSD.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#73

Post by ajsnigrutin »

I miss flash games... and there were A LOT of good flash games.

I know that they can be remade with other technologies, but except for some clones remade to be a pay-to-win mobile apps, a lot of those games are just gone now.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#74

Post by lucumo »

MengerSponge wrote: post #48

People's use of the internet has changed, but the fact that there is not a new Homestar Runner or NewGrounds is telling. How much does a weird high school/college art nerd need to know about the tech stack to get their vision online? I'm old enough that HSR is still part of my lexicon. Kids just think I'm weird, which is fine.

> but the fact that there is not a new Homestar Runner or NewGrounds is telling.

I think that niche is now filled by the app stores. A lot of little games can be installed on your phone.

The monetization of those games has made them less fun, in my opinion, but that's more on the evolution of game makers, and not really on the development technology.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#75

Post by speedgoose »

skytreader wrote: post #29

A lot of answers already boil down to, basically, superior developer experience. But there's an aspect of this that I want to highlight: resource efficiency. Around the latter half of the 00s, I had a Windows XP machine with 256MB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor, with a matching spinning metal-disk hard drive. I could make decent Flash animations and games with it. I could view entire websites in Flash with Internet…

Please get a SSD today. You stress me!

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#76

Post by ciroduran »

I read somewhere that if a tool allows a massive amount of people to churn out mediocre stuff, your tool is an absolute success. I think that Flash was that success.

Even if web standards have caught up with what Adobe Flash used to do a full decade ago, writing games for the browser became a lot more difficult to do.

Barring Adobe killing Flash by disappearing it from the internet, I can run anything I wrote in 2004 on Flash Player in 2022. This level of compatibility is only surpassed by Windows programs. In today's web, I not only need to be careful of supporting 3 major browser vendors, but also support any breaking changes that any of these make, which means I might need to recompile my project long after I have archived it.

The closest thing that has allowed me to make stuff easily for a web browser is PICO-8. A fantasy console, with very limited resolution and capabilities, but all its dev tools integrated, that allows you to quickly export to HTML5 and optionally upload it to its BBS (the website). PICO-8 has made amateur gamedev fun for me again.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#77

Post by hackshack »

irrational wrote: post #25

Maybe there is a vector animation tool that is as easy to use as Flash was, but that fact that we rarely see vector animations like we did back in the day makes me think not. I used to work with a group that created training materials using Flash. We had a bunch of animators that knew nothing about coding, but they could produce all of these amazing animated videos using Flash. They could also produce interactive ani…

About once a month, I dwell on this. Modern web pages can easily be 20MB. You can do a lot in 20 megs.

Re-reading Apple’s “Thoughts on Flash” tonight, I was surprised at how many times Apple mentioned vendor lock-in. JavaScript is definitely here to stay. Ten years later, though, I wonder if we have ended up in nearly the same place we strived to avoid - high power consumption - but with worse authoring tools. But with at least open standards, which are good.

I figure the magic moment will occur when some tiny startup builds friendly authoring tools on top of a tight runtime à la Decker. Like HyperCard/Director/Flash it’ll only get you 66% there, but that will be enough for many folks. Hackers. Hobbyists. Students. Tiny companies, and guerrilla departments.

The challenges will be preventing feature-itis, keeping it embeddable / avoiding JS library dependencies, and making it at least free-as-in-beer with an open format. I know there’s space for such a thing. My money’s on some lean 5-person startup with strong opinions.

Decker: https://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#78

Post by rcarmo »

Cloudef wrote: post #65
rcarmo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also a cloud-based service that artificially limits what you can do for pricing, not a standalone desktop app. No thanks, I will resist buying into those for as long as I can.

Be it web or offline, does not really change as both flash and rive are proprietary software. I think rive is still better as its runtimes are open source and the export format is documented https://help.rive.app/runtimes/advanced_topics/format so technically you could make your own editor.

That’s what I call the “infinite monkeys” argument. I could theoretically do _anything_, but it is actually impractical.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#79

Post by BoppreH »

As a refugee from the collapse of Flash myself, about once a year I'll check what's the state of similar tools and be disappointed.

This year the situation is a little better. There's gdevelop, Rive, ct.js, Godot, Construct 3, and Wick Editor. None of them feel as friendly as Flash (except maybe Wick), or as efficient (I just played a small Rive game that made 500+ network requests to load assets). But they come with their upsides, like better game frameworks, better addons, better 3D support, etc.

So I wonder why we're still not seeing small free games. Are the tools not good enough? Packaging is too hard? Lack of good portals, à la Miniclip/Newgrounds/Kongregate? Or has internet culture simply moved away from interactivity to catchy videos?

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#80

Post by jhoelzel »

It was not flash that we were fighting. it was adobe and their proriarity and thought process in keeping flash to themselfs.

If adobe would have not been the way they were, they would now dominate the animation scene too.

Instead, inadvertetly because of patents, we dont have anything cool to show for.

All this minimalism everywhere is disgusting. And they never get it right anyway because you have to put hightower ads everywhere you can.

While it still was macromedia calling the shots, people had trust in flash

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