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Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

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Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#211

I'm glad to see a working proof of concept of Flash emulation in the browser. What's sad is Google and Mozilla could have easily implemented such a thing themselves to make a painless transition away from the plugin years ago. Maybe there was some legal issue but I bet they simply found it more convenient to wipe their hands of it.

Could have? They actually did - they were abandoned for various technical and marketing reasons. The only legal issue I could foresee is the questions of law raised in Oracle v. Google, which won't be decided until February... and even then, I wouldn't be surprised if SCOTUS rules narrowly on that case.

Google had Swiffy, an online service that took your SWF and repackaged it in a non-Flash form. It was primarily intended for advertisers but it eventually had AVM1 and 2 support. It's discontinued because advertisers moved away from Flash faster than expected (and Adobe Animate got some amount of HTML5 export capability). I'm also not sure how well it handled some of Flash's trickier to emulate behaviors.

Mozilla had Shumway, a browser extension that runs SWF files in JavaScript. According to another comment in this particular thread, Shumway was discontinued when Mozilla started bumping up against large compatibility problems. I can hazard a guess as to why: AVM1 in particular is a garbage fire of poorly-specified behaviors and execution order. Macromedia provided no runtime error behavior and had extreme deference to backwards compatibility. Movies are versioned and things like whether or not variables are case-sensitive change based on what SWF version it was compiled for. Furthermore, this VM was originally not intended to run an ECMAScript-like language, you originally put together AVM1 opcodes by hand, so a lot of opcodes are far more tolerant of programmer error than they have any right to be.

As an example of this, ActionGetVariable and ActionSetVariable (the thing that handles statements like "child_clip.var") aren't just limited to taking an object and a property name string, because that's not how they were originally intended to be used. Originally, those actions would take a whole path to the variable, and it was in slash-path syntax, e.g. "\child_clip:var". You could also chain paths in one op, and the implementation would dutifully parse the path out and traverse it to get the variable. This means that there are movies that will issue opcodes like "ActionGetVariable this '\level.Alien\bullet:speed'" and we have to support any combination of slashes, colons, and dots or SWFs will break.

AVM1 is a bottomless pit of those kinds of odd exceptions, and you have to support them all in order to get good compatibility with games. This is the sort of thing that only makes sense for an entity like Ruffle funded entirely by people who want to make old games work. It does not make financial or any other kind of sense to sink many hours of development time into an old-and-busted proprietary animation platform other than on the basis of preservation.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#212
This is great! It's been well over a decade but I used to reverse-engineer flash games so that I could run my own high score servers.

It was a fun and challenging way to expand my programming knowledge as a teenager. Will definitely look into setting up some classic games again using this.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#213
post #83

Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. However, it's preservation to be able to run & archiving of flash media are an absolute cornerstone of any attempt to archive the 2000s internet. Flash introduced & inspired countless people who have no doubt gone on to build amazing things in other technologies. I love flash. I'm glad it's not used anymore, but I truly love the content it p…

> Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create. Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opp…

There are actually a large number of apps that did launch on Flash and were on iOS and Android. Adobe had app exporter functionality for Flash back in 2010. There's even drama surrounding it. If you remember Steve Jobs' famous "Thoughts on Flash" - that wasn't a mea culpa for not supporting browser plugins. Apple was seriously considering banning all third-party development tools to stop Adobe from getting Flash games on iOS, and "Thoughts on Flash" was written and published to justify that ban. The FTC threatened to sue and Apple backed down a few months later.

I should also point out that you seem to be remembering the days of Flash 5-8 where development was primarily on the timeline and AS2 classes were fancy new tech. By the time Adobe and Apple were feuding over Flash, most developers were using AS3, which was a lot more like modern JavaScript development. Hell, Adobe was specifically pushing to make AS3 the next version of JavaScript. You could still develop AS3 on the timeline, but it was less powerful than AS1/2 and most developer resources assumed all your code lived in separate files using Adobe's APIs to interact with the display list directly.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#214
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is the fatal reason Flash is stopped. Flash is only forbidden in mobile web browsers. Flash is mainly self-cancelled by Adobe itself. It looks they couldn't get expected revenue from this product. However, I think they are short-sighted at this point.

It was also disallowed from publishing flash apps in the app store. Once the developers left it was as good as dead IMHO and all that kind of content moved to mobile.

Definitely. I remember at the time Adobe Air was still recently new and there was some buzz around in the tech scenes because everyone like Balsamiq Mockups, which originally was only in available in Adobe Air.

Then Apple announced they weren't going to support flash and overnight everyone realized flash was dead, and Air and Silverlight were both a dead end.

I was working on a Silverlight product at the time and it got canned soon after too, with Microsoft soon losing enthusiasm for it too.

Some oldies from here:

2007 - Steve Jobs saying Flash is bad for video:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130496

2008 - John Gruber being prescient about Apple banning flash compiler:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320431

2010 - Apple bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler (2nd comment thread is pg saying he's against it ideologically):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250799

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#215
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is the fatal reason Flash is stopped. Flash is only forbidden in mobile web browsers. Flash is mainly self-cancelled by Adobe itself. It looks they couldn't get expected revenue from this product. However, I think they are short-sighted at this point.

It was also disallowed from publishing flash apps in the app store. Once the developers left it was as good as dead IMHO and all that kind of content moved to mobile.

This is untrue. Apple attempted to ban all third-party development tools, but never actually enforced the rule due to the threat of a lawsuit from the FTC. They dropped the rule about three months after Jobs' famous "Thoughts on Flash", but the fact that developers still remember the ban is probably a good chunk of why people forgot about the exporter.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#216
I learned to program making games with AS3. When I applied for an internship at Google, apparently I was one of the only candidates in their internship database that listed AS3 as a preferred programming language. That got me an internship on the YouTube player team (the main player was still Flash!).

This is just one example of how important Flash has been to my career.

(When I interned there, the team that sat next to us was working on the HTML5 player. Everyone knew Flash's days were numbered.)

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#217
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing the creativity of youngsters doing voice-overs in TikTok to that of early 2000's teenagers creating full-fledged games and entire films with Flash is... I don't know. As you said in your last paragraph, Flash _raised up_ a generation of engineers by _lowering_ the entry barriers to a minimum. TikTok is just a showcase for attw's.

Don't be an old curmudgeon. :) There were a couple of absolute gems in the Flash era but there was an absolute boatload of crap as well. The most creative TikTok-ers are absolutely innovating storytelling and filmography just as the most creative Flash creators were innovating in their own medium. It's just that when we look back we remember the gems but not the river of crap, but when we look at the present we see t…

Where was the majority of user and creator attention dedicated to on the 2 platforms though?

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#218
post #183
post #51

I'm glad to see The Internet Archive doing this. There's a flash animation I used to enjoy back around 2000 and I have been looking for it for almost as long. It was basically a showcase animation sequence done by what I think was a Japanese designer. I don't remember the full sequence but it was an anime style animation and at the end was a girl standing on a cliff with her hair blowing in the wind. I'm really hopin…

Was it "Yukino" perhaps? https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm31167703 That is the one that I still remembered so vividly that this post motivated me to download a Flash player and look through my folder of SWF files for the first time in probably at least 15 years.

Unfortunately, no. That one is quite nice as well, though.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#219
post #140
post #51

I'm glad to see The Internet Archive doing this. There's a flash animation I used to enjoy back around 2000 and I have been looking for it for almost as long. It was basically a showcase animation sequence done by what I think was a Japanese designer. I don't remember the full sequence but it was an anime style animation and at the end was a girl standing on a cliff with her hair blowing in the wind. I'm really hopin…

If it was reasonably popular, you could try asking https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/

I've tried but haven't had any luck. I think my memory of the animation just isn't enough to be able to provide enough detail other than a girl standing on a cliff with the wind blowing her hair. I feel like flower pedals were blowing around too but at this point it's been 15-20 years since I've seen it so who knows what is accurate about that memory?
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