431–440 of 508 posts
I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized. There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and g…
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God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so long. Just needed to say that.
When Typescript came, I was like. Yay! Someone made JS become AS3 like. That's when I seriously got into javascript. Flash could do some amazing things back in the day, They had GPU accelerated graphics, microphone, image manipulation, video, and a whole host of other things that HTML didn't have. I think Flash inspired browsers to do better. Now it can die happily.
His languages are the most logical and elegant I have used, all truly pleasant to work with. Building a decent language that compiles down so cleanly to Javascript is a minor miracle.
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Stardew Valley is the kind of game where you can go "hrm, I'll play for a couple minutes before work" and then go "hey, where did the sun go?!" Of course, so is Factorio...
I can no longer play Factorio. It is completely impossible for me to play without getting sucked in and wasting hours. The worst part is that I feel productive while playing it. It's so close to the satisfaction I get from actually building something that it's just too dangerous for me to play these days :)
Peaker satistfaction: Using mods to up the complexity and difficulty, and using all of AAI + all of Bob's + all of Angel's. New ores, vastly more complex refining, and you don't start with shit (literally makes like 2-3 hours to catch up to where you normally start tech wise on vanilla).
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I wish we could take the best of AS3, ESNext, and TypeScript, and make it into one WebAssembled language... Well okay. That's insane. But there's a part of me that wants to know how far it would go.
Isnt JS/ES approaching this? + the native stuff
End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.
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Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform. BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg a…
God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so long. Just needed to say that.
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Do exactly the same animation with js or even css as you did with flash, and it will use more battery. Disabling flash turned off the animations, so obviously it saved on battery, but the reason for flash being a battery hog was how it was used, not an innate aspect of the technology. Jobs' proposed alternative to flash, html5, did not solve the battery hogging problem, just made it move over to html5. If anything, i…
Citation please? This is the first time I've ever heard anyone claim that flash uses less battery than html5 and I'm extremely skeptical.
Of course your MBP would spin its fan and drain battery when playing a flash game. But it would do the same, and faster, when playing the same game implemented in Javascript, even more so at the time.
End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.
It was good for the time. So were java applets... but, as they say, to everything there is a season, and the sun is season is changing in the web media space..
It's really not comparable. Flash + AS was a RAD environment, many a game developer got their start (and even built full-fledged games[0]) through it. I'd argue that its biggest contributions were not web-bound[1], and I don't know of any other environment which is both as easy to get started with and as flexible.
[0] it's famously the primary expressive environment of Edmund McMillen: Gish, Aether and Binding of Isaac are all Flash though the later got rewritten natively in Rebirth, Super Meat Boy is the native successor to the Flash Meat Boy, The End is Nigh may well be his first game which did not start in Flash (and even that's unclear as it grew from a 2-weeks game jam)
[1] except insofar as they were being embedded/distributed through it e.g. newsgrounds or armorgames
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Yup https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. "
That's... interesting, and it also smacks of quite a bit of PR to me. If an app causes your OS to crash, and that problem persists for several years, you can no longer blame that squarely on the app. Your OS should not allow an app to crash it. It happens anyways, and that means you have a bug in your OS at best (and possibly an exploit). All this means is that Apple was unable to figure out how to keep their OS from…