Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#31

Post by _Microft » Sun, Nov 29, 2020, 10:42 AM UTC

If you need a Flash file to try this with, here you go. At least on Windows, you can paste the URL directly into the file name field of the "Open local file" on the demo page.

https://github.com/claus/as3swf/blob/master/examples/dumps/A...

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#32

Post by mnahkies » Sun, Nov 29, 2020, 10:48 AM UTC

This is great for preserving all the old content. It'd be cool to see a follow up project for an ide to author new stuff - as a kid the timeline system made producing 2d games accessible in a way that I haven't seen with JavaScript engines on the modern web. Being able to just draw and animate then slap some scripts on it was a really interactive way to learn

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#33

Post by apignotti » Sun, Nov 29, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

A FOSS Flash Player implementation has certainly value, and I hope to have contributed to the cause by starting the Lightspark project years ago. The sad reality is that the Flash runtime is massive and under-documented. The best approach for Flash preservation in the medium term is using _actual emulation_ to run the binary player itself.

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#34

Post by zo1 » Sun, Nov 29, 2020, 11:02 AM UTC

appstorelottery wrote: post #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...

You're not the only one, there are some really big companies out there that rely on Flash and Flex.

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/221408-sars-efiling-...

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#35

Post by sterlind » Sun, Nov 29, 2020, 11:09 AM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #25

sterlind wrote: post #15

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.

Looking at the code, Shumway seems amazingly complete vs. Ruffle. Ruffle has only a tiny skeleton of AS3 support (only the VM opcodes and some of the MovieClip class), while Shumway seems to implement a huge chunk of the library classes.

Maybe using wasm Rust with WebGPU acceleration will make it faster than Shumway. Remarkable to me how much effort must have been put into Shumway, though..

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#36

Post by q3k » Sun, Nov 29, 2020, 11:20 AM UTC

apignotti wrote: post #33

A FOSS Flash Player implementation has certainly value, and I hope to have contributed to the cause by starting the Lightspark project years ago. The sad reality is that the Flash runtime is massive and under-documented. The best approach for Flash preservation in the medium term is using _actual emulation_ to run the binary player itself. Further reading: https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with.…

So, to archive/preserve content that was lost because it relied on a proprietary closed-source technology we should be relying on _your_ proprietary closed-source technology?

Please. I understand you're trying to make a living here, but being able to use F/LOSS software is absolutely critical for the preservation movement.

“Not-for-profit, charitable and educational organisations can benefit from discounted rates.”. Yeah, no, thank you.

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#37

Post by throwaway189262 » Sun, Nov 29, 2020, 11:22 AM UTC

srgpqt wrote: post #22

swinglock wrote: post #18

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.

With Rust, you could re-implement 99% of flash player in WASM with some JS shims

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#38

Post by shubhamjain » Sun, Nov 29, 2020, 11:24 AM UTC

I have unfinished project to revive the Flash Games I played as a kid using Ruffle JS. Make them accessible through a simple website. Games like Eggs[1] used to be my favorite pastimes. Of course, we have moved on to better entertainment, but there's still value in these short games, something you can just play for five minutes to take a break from work.

I would love to play these games, not just for the nostalgia but being quick, small, and not too addictive. Hopefully, I am not alone.

I think, HTML5 would have done the same job, but the number of HTML5 games is surprisingly low in comparison and wesbites are generally ad-infested.

[1]: http://www.vagenisonline.com/flash/eggs.html

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#39

Post by SXX » Sun, Nov 29, 2020, 11:25 AM UTC

apignotti wrote: post #33

A FOSS Flash Player implementation has certainly value, and I hope to have contributed to the cause by starting the Lightspark project years ago. The sad reality is that the Flash runtime is massive and under-documented. The best approach for Flash preservation in the medium term is using _actual emulation_ to run the binary player itself. Further reading: https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with.…

I just curious couldn't someone just write down missing part of documentstion looking at something like Scaleform source code? So someone else can make clean room implementation using the doc.

Scaleform impplementation of Flash player always looked really decent to me.

Re: Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#40

Post by grishka » Sun, Nov 29, 2020, 11:32 AM UTC

apignotti wrote: post #33

A FOSS Flash Player implementation has certainly value, and I hope to have contributed to the cause by starting the Lightspark project years ago. The sad reality is that the Flash runtime is massive and under-documented. The best approach for Flash preservation in the medium term is using _actual emulation_ to run the binary player itself. Further reading: https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with.…

I see you over and over again in Flash Player threads. Your approach isn't good because it requires someone else's, namely Adobe's, cooperation, and even then, you still end up with a black box inside another black box. Doesn't feel sustainable.