Live data from Hacker News

Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

ruffle.rs

21–30 of 94 posts

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#22

At what point does a flash player emulator just become a flash player?

When they can be used as drop-in replacement to play actual flash content on websites.

Which may be possible to do as a browser extension..

ruffle does have a web version but it requires the website owner to explicitly include it.

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#23
post #5

Those sample files.. bring back memories. I think we took a step backwards in serving vector art/animation on the web. When YouTube replaced Flash, we've probably wasted petabytes of bandwidth serving rasterized content when Flash or a similar format would have been much more effective.

A standard at least for encoding vector animation would be nice. Also needs to be not as bulky as having svg frame per frame, etc...

I have a similar problem in mind, it could be an SVG served in a web browser, and then instead of frames you would have an event series of updates, kind of like MIDI does for music: turns certain notes on and off at certain times. So I could have a timestamped list of updates to apply to the SVG (move to x / y coordinate, apply this filter, append these childNodes) -- just use CSS transition to interpolate the movement from one coordinate to the next. You could stream these updates from the server at very low bandwidth.

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#24
post #22

At what point does a flash player emulator just become a flash player?

When they can be used as drop-in replacement to play actual flash content on websites. Which may be possible to do as a browser extension.. ruffle does have a web version but it requires the website owner to explicitly include it.

[deleted]

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#25

I spent today hacking on it! Trying to get all the Homestuck movies to work. The codebase seems pretty accessible so far. Fixed one bug where it couldn't render shapes with >65535 vertices. It's really rewarding watching movies light up as you fix things.

Back when Shumway was under development I remember using the first big Homestuck walkaround flash (https://www.homestuck.com/story/1358?fl=1) to put it through its paces and found it to be unbearably slow to the point of unplayability. If Ruffle is capable of running those at any reasonable speed then that would demonstrate real progress over what Shumway achieved.

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#26
post #5

Those sample files.. bring back memories. I think we took a step backwards in serving vector art/animation on the web. When YouTube replaced Flash, we've probably wasted petabytes of bandwidth serving rasterized content when Flash or a similar format would have been much more effective.

A standard at least for encoding vector animation would be nice. Also needs to be not as bulky as having svg frame per frame, etc...

Not sure if this went far enough (even before it was deprecated), but SMIL was a standard for vector animation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animati...

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#28
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A standard at least for encoding vector animation would be nice. Also needs to be not as bulky as having svg frame per frame, etc...

Not sure if this went far enough (even before it was deprecated), but SMIL was a standard for vector animation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animati...

Though as noted there, Chrome recanted on its 2015 attempt at killing SMIL—and it was only ever Chrome that were labelling SMIL as deprecated, no one else does so. Four years after that, I haven’t heard any more talk about killing it. Notwithstanding that, CSS is now able to cover a lot more of the SMIL use cases than it was then.

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#30
Wow. Might be enterprise opportunities for all those Flex based apps buried the the hell of past broken promises from Adobe :-) I developed an ERP with a flex client back when Adobe and Apple went to war... I’ve been warning the client for years that flash will sunset...
Post reply on HN