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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

#271

Post by woutr_be »

hunterloftis wrote: post #240
woutr_be wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually quite liked the changes in AS3, and it being more programatic, I think it paved the way for what I do now. After AS3, I remember switching to Flex, and basically using it like any current language. Although I absolutely hated the MXML syntax. I was pretty sad at the time, since AS3 was my main language, but looking back at it now, I think it was for the better.

I was a front-end developer during the AS2 -> AS3 -> Flex era. These days, I've been messing with Web Components (via LitElement) and the similarities with Flex/MXML are uncanny.

You're right, and it feels very similar to what we have in Vue/React these days. How are you liking Web Components?

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

#273

Post by greggman2 »

zanny wrote: post #249
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.

also thousands of games made with pico8 on the net live. Sure pico-8 is not a replacement for flash but people are posting live games and they are making them quickly. Celeste, one of the top 10 games last year on many lists, started as a pico8 prototype live on the web.

Also flash never worked cross platform in the modern sense (phones + tablets + desktop). It's a very hard problem and no system I know of handles it automatically for anything more than simple HTML text forms

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

#274

Post by nojvek »

pippy wrote: post #4

Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…

Adobe did open the swf spec in later versions. Swf was compressed bytecode. Still a lot more efficient than the way we send js.

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil...

There were a number of tools that compiled to swf.

It sucks that Adobe never opened the Flash Player. That was it’s death nail. They had little to gain from it. It was free. The money maker was Flash Studio and other Macromedia tools.

If Adobe had opened Flash and had a sane security Sandbox it would have survived iOS. Adobe was like the old Microsoft though. They just didn’t get the power of Open Source.

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

#279

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

koreth1 wrote: post #252
mntmoss wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the essential thing about this era is a gradual cultural rediscovery of ownership. We've just been through a very lengthy race to the bottom for all sorts of information - pretty much anything ephemeral and disposable is free or extremely cheap, and then heavily locked down to protect property rights. And it's built a kind of event horizon to culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital univ…

> you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever. Isn't that true of all one-time events, not just digital ones? I'll never be able to attend a Beatles concert or see "The Empire Strikes Back" on opening night or be celebrating on the streets of New York City on V-E Day.

It’s more that only a few years ago, the same experience could have been revisited - the technology and the means exist - but business reasons say otherwise.

In this case, it’s the Fortnite world.

If Fortnite were a game in the 1990s-2000s, the data (map, world, characters) would be on a CD or DVD and the multiplayer server would also be included on the CD: the community runs its own servers. If the developers release a huge new update - including over digital distribution - users still have the original discs and server software, thus if they want to relive “Fortnite 1997, v1.0’ they can - just reinstall it from the original media.

With the iOS App Store we used to be able to make versioned backups of the IPA files and restore them using desktop iTunes so if an over-the-air update for... say, Angry Birds, added an obnoxious amount of pay-to-win functionality then we had the choice to downgrade before things went to shit.

Now, we can’t do that. This is why I don’t buy mobile games anymore: I have no guarantees about my ability to keep what I paid for.

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

#280

Post by pjmlp »

exikyut wrote: post #230
heavyset_go wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all of the areas where there is legitimate gatekeeping, like with the AMA and residency limits, software is one of the worst examples you could have picked. Software is one of those spaces where there is an incredible amount of capital invested in making things easy for the lowest common denominator. There are so many resources for people of any age and background to learn practical skills in this field. There are…

But Flash died :(

On the contrary, it lives on as Animate.
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