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Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

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Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#241

Post by zanny »

kizer wrote: post #196
TomGullen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t a big Flash user back in the day but I think our product Construct 3 ( https://www.construct.net ) can do just about everything Flash did, especially with the addition of the Timeline editor and scripting we’ve just added. I’m a little hesitant to overtly market Construct as the “next flash” as that I think would receive a mixed reception depending on your experiences with it! Tom Fulp from Newgrounds has ni…

It needs to be able to name a platform, media type, IDE, all at once. E.g., "I'm going to use Flash", "It's a Flash game", "Hold on, let me animate it in Flash". The name should be able to go in domain names; e.g., "superfunflashgames.com". Basically, it has to have a name amiable to becoming an umbrella term. That gave Flash such a "universal" connotation. I hope this makes sense - trying to convey the _peculiaritie…

Flash was fundamentally just a file format. You made the format using the program in the same way you make a Photoshop file in Photoshop. It was a noun and a verb because you make thing and both the part that makes and the part made are called the same.

Due to the nature of present browser APIs you cannot name your editor WebGL or something that produces WebGL. But if you made an editor called Sparkle or something that produced .sparkle files that had native browser support you would have the same nomenclature going on. But native browser integration and containerized file formats with external editors aren't a well made match.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#242

Post by j45 »

scarface74 wrote: post #76
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #47

I really think from a business perspective Adobe bungled just about everything with Flash. When the tide was turning against them with the rise of iOS, they should have full open sourced Flash player and made the authoring tools free to use, and encourage competing authoring tools. Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers. Adobe's authoring tools would l…

Well, Adobe claimed that Apple was stopping them from supporting Flash on the original iPhone. When Adobe did finally get Flash (barely) running on Android. It required 1GB of RAM and 1Ghz CPU. The original iPhone had a 400Mhz CPU and 128Mb of RAM. Adobe was late shipping Flash for the Motorola Xoom. Motorola touted being able to use Flash as a feature over the iPad. Leaving it in the unfortunate situation that you c…

In addition to the above, iirc, there was a variant of Flash called Flash lite that ran the UI of many feature phones for quite a while. It wasn't full flash, though.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#243

Post by j45 »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #19
buboard wrote: post #2

You can set up a video chat lecture with text chat and pretty good video with the free red5 java server and something like Avchat.com . That's 20 year old tech and works today, but will be removed from the net in a year. There is no HTML5 alternative. Why? I think Tech took a weird turn somewhere around 2010. Things became more homogeneous, designes became bland without rough edges, literally with rounded corners. Op…

I'm not familiar with red5 but it seems that webRTC does a decent job on video and text chat with the browser doing the heavy lifting in terms of encryption and permissions. Am I missing something?

WebRTC seems to have less than consistent performance/experience. Red5 shouldn't be able to be on par or out-do it.

Zoom has done some nice stuff in bypassing webrtc and instead using a webassembly connector to move video and audio.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#244

Post by cortesoft »

valtism wrote: post #227
notatoad wrote: post #226

Flash was a perfect example of "this is why we can't have nice things". As a platform for web mini-games or self-contained interactive animations, it remains unparalleled. As a tool for building whole websites meant to convey information, it was always shit. If lazy web developers hadn't collectively abused flash to make annoying websites and dumb ads, perhaps we could still have fun flash games on the web today.

It was not discontinued because people were making annoying websites with it, it was discontinued because it was a nightmare for security.

Yeah, I thought security was where they were going with the "can't have nice things" comment

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#245

Post by cookie_monsta »

buboard wrote: post #160
cookie_monsta wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not asking what webRTC does worse - obviously it's going to improve over time, I'm asking what it can't do that flash can.

that misses the point. If its slow and laggy, user is not going to use it and laptops are going to become portable heaters. This is exactly what webRTC does > obviously it's going to improve over time When? webrtc is like 10 years old. How long we have to wait to go back to 1999?

> When? webrtc is like 10 years old.

Well, 8 from initial release. 18 months from first stable release.

Far as I understand it, lag and overheating are hardware/network problems. Considering the amount of development going into both of them, that situation is only going to improve but of course I don't have a roadmap.

FWIW I haven't noticed problems with either and I don't have a mind blowing setup.

I look at what browsers are doing now compared to 1999, there's no way I'd want to go back

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#246

Post by zanny »

buboard wrote: post #156
ehsankia wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, the issue isn't the lack of tools. It's the lack of interest. Making games is easier than ever with Unity, yet people don't spend all day playing random small Unity games. We have limited time, and as the types of entertainment increase, we have less and less to spend on small silly things like Flash games. Back then, a Flash game was the epitome of web entertainment. Now, we have thousands of amazing Youtube…

Unity is not a particularly lightweight thing, and flash wasn't just for games. Its main use was animations / banners and video . > If you were to give people the same flash games now, they'd find them ridiculously lame. Some of the most popular social games are like farmville, or some poker games. those are really equivalent of flash

Unity also does animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8NeB10INDo

But it gets really pedantic arguing the semantics of web flash - fundamentally it was only showing on a web page because you installed the browser plugin or it. Today browsers might have stopped supporting arbitrary library plugins like that but now you can write them in webassembly for the same ends. Its just that nobody has actually gone and done it yet.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#247

Post by JordanFarmer »

Flash died because Steve Jobs knew that it would cost Apple much money since the to grossing App Store items have always been games and Flash was what most of the web based games were programmed in. He couldn't cash in on that market plus it was a direct competitor. He had the leverage and opportunity to do so... so he defamed and killed it. Jobs was all about innovation... as long as it was coming out of Apple.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#248

Post by zanny »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #73
doctorpangloss wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity WebGL is definitely close to where Flash was. If anything WASM adoption is growing, it’s a respected standard. Once there is multi threading, heap expansion and streaming instanciation in iOS ... I’m going to guess 15, or 4 years from now, it’ll be the true spirit of Flash. I’m not sure about a “dumber” design discipline though. Really it’s Windows developers being left behind, for a while now.

Sounds about right. Modern technology: working hard to replicate what we had 20+ years ago.

What we had 20 years ago was an insecurable proprietary plugin for web browsers. It wasn't standard, nobody could audit it, it was just a corporate product.

And where we are at now, where Macromedia got bought and Adobe slowly drained its lifeblood and killed its products, is what happens when you try to build systems on top of holistically proprietary foundations. Nobody owes you their enduring survival and you are totally dependent on whoever owns the platform to give you their blessing.

Its a lesson Apple developers often love waxing poetic all over the front page of HN about on the regular.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#249

Post by zanny »

someexgamedev wrote: post #74

I made games in flash for over a decade and miss the ease of dropping an experimental game idea onto the web where everyone could enjoy it. If you had a free weekend, you could release a game to 99% of the internet. JavaScript game libs simply aren't as featureful, even the ones promising the scenegraph API. They don't work as well cross platform (by the end of that decade I had one codebase which could deploy to web…

You can make a game today in Godot / Unity, export to HTML5, and drop it on itch.io to play in browser in minutes.
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