I had the impression it was dead for years now.
I know a few freelancers who made a living doing Flash stuff and they stopped right after Apple said it wouldn't be a thing on iOS, because their project requests dropped dramatically.
The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
121–130 of 203 posts
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#122So why doesn't Adobe just open source flash?
Few remember, but Adobe tried to submit a variant of ActionScript 3 as an ECMAScript candidate but the open web folks were dubious and it went nowhere. That's not the same thing as open-sourcing the Flash authoring tool, but they still sell the modern variant Animate. They could open source the player, but why bother -- the browser vendors have basically shut the gates. The swf file spec is pretty well documented but…
It wasn't the open web people, it was the other companies like Microsoft who killed ECMA 4 as they saw the massive lead Adobe had in corporate Rich Internet Applications and needed to block them.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you miss the point of systems like Haxe.
The point of systems like Haxe is "write once, run anywhere". You don't need to mimic the standard OS interface style to do so, especially not with games (as it's more important that the style of the interface suits the game).
That's great as long as you don't care about reusing your code. It's not just biz logic, services, utils, etc either, I'm talking about the fact that people put UIViews over SpriteKit games all the time and you can't rightly say that doesn't exist just because you get to downvote me.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#124> rewriting the entire codebase in ActionScript first to take full advantage of GPU acceleration, before porting it into Haxe So let me get this straight. It was already written in ActionScript. They re-wrote the ActionScript. All of it, then ported it to the Haxe language. So the purpose of the first "re-write" was... refactoring it to use GPU acceleration in ActionScript? I guess they just hadn't gotten around to t…
I'd guess that, along with converting all of their artwork to bitmaps, this was needed because Haxe+OpenFL didn't support what they were doing before. If they were going to have to change it anyway better to make that change before the port so you don't mix up two sets of bugs.
This makes a lot of sense. Doing a major refactoring while migrating to a new language/platform is much harder than refactoring a codebase so that it more closely mimics a line by line translation to a new language, and then doing the line by line translation. It may look like more work, especially since you are almost guaranteed to touch the same code twice, but the the cognitive load is so much lower each time, that the extra effort will make it all so much easier.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#125Adobe recently confirmed the suspicion held by many in the games industry that Flash is a dying platform. I looked at the date of publication thinking maybe this was written in 2013 or 2014, but it was not the case!
Yes, I thought so too.
All Flash devs I knew stopped doing this years ago, because they didn't find jobs anymore.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#126I remember thinking, wait, Javascript will catch up eventually then why would anyone use flash? At the same time, we probably owe a lot to flash existing (especially WebRTC). Flash helped us get browsers to this point faster both through it's tech and increasing consumer awareness/demand for media.
> I remember thinking, wait, Javascript will catch up eventually then why would anyone use flash? At the same time, we probably owe a lot to flash existing (especially WebRTC). Flash helped us get browsers to this point faster both through it's tech and increasing consumer awareness/demand for media. i don't think most people remember how bad Javascript was, how limited web API were, and how different browsers implem…
I had the impression that the Web got significantly better after it was released from the Flash lock-in.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#127If you go to one of the referenced sites: http://www.vegasworld.com . It asks you to enable flash first then will fall back to the html5 site. I wonder why that fallback is configured.
Doesn't sound that mysterious to me. By the sounds of it, Flash is still their main platform (for performance reasons perhaps), and HTML5 is provided for those who don't have Flash installed. Haxe can target both Flash and HTML5, so this doesn't contradict the article.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Adobe Flash authoring environment has been rebranded as Adobe Animate now that it can output html/js/canvas content. It’s closed source of course. Long before that, however, the fairly simple to understand Actionscript 2 was replaced by the more powerful but much more complicated Actionscript 3 and it became a lot less friendly to a new programmer.
ActionScript 3 was definitely not less friendly, it just wasn't ActionScript 2. One of the most unfriendly things about ActionScript 2 was that it was just so different from other programming languages, and not in a good way. I actually was taking programming classes at the time, and they were all in Java. Almost every concept translated directly from Java to AS3. In fact, AS3 is actually a sister language to modern…
I always found AS3 to be a hell of a lot more verbose than AS2.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#129Does anyone else have the feeling that there has been a move away from the kinds of tools that make it very easy for beginners to get started? I'm thinking of things like Hypercard, Flash or VisualBasic classic (VisualBasic in the 1990s). Simple tools that made it fun for non-programmers to learn the basics of computer programming? Even simple HTML/CSS has lost importance, and writing simple Web sites is how I got st…
I totally agree. There are tools for beginners but those are just for beginners -- you have to transition to something else to do real work. Development is so complex right now but I suspect most programmers in their 20's have no idea how easy it used to be. Now certainly some tasks themselves (like cross-platform development) were near impossible in those times but that's somewhat orthogonal to the point.
They had Flex, which looked really good.
But somehow it didn't catch on.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only to roughly the same degree that it's possible to decompile x86/64 binaries to C or C++. It depends heavily on the specific optimizations and obfuscations used, whether or not debugging information was left in, etc. There's a reason the GPL has a "preferred form for editing" clause.
It's better than that: http://webassembly.org/docs/faq/#will-webassembly-support-vi...
Yeah, but is that actually required? I don't know much about this, but I'd guess 90% of websites will strip this just like debug info in most proprietary software, 9% don't know about this or forget to remove it, if it's included by default and 1% consciously decides to ship it for transparency.