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HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

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Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#151

Post by dimmke »

SimianLogic wrote: post #140
dimmke wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird contrarian "actually Flash was good" takes I've been seeing all over today is absolutely bonkers. It's like these people think we weren't around when Flash was a thing or they just have rose colored nostalgia glasses on. Flash was absolutely horrendous. Also, people keep talking about how easy it was to create stuff in it and how JS/HTML involves too much coding. This is more revisionist history - Flash had…

Actually Flash was fantastic (for games). AS3 is one of my favorite programming languages I've ever worked with, but Flash wasn't just a programming language. The display tree (put simply: game engine) was baked into the runtime, which made it very very easy to make games. The tight coupling between art (movieclips created in Flash the program) and code (AS3 written in FlashDevelop or notepad) made for very fast iter…

It might have been fun/easy to use for some people and encouraged game development that would have otherwise been too complex/too high of a learning curve. But browser games is a niche thing and really only a part of Flash's legacy.

Flash also got used for a lot of other things and in a lot of cases it was basically to add in functionality that wasn't supported by native web standards yet. This was why entire websites were built in flash. Because it gave you the freedom to do things that you just couldn't do with regular HTML/JS.

If the point the author wants to make is that creating games in HTML/JS is more cumbersome because there isn't one authoring tool that is used by everybody and has a comprehensive toolset, maybe that's true I don't know. But I definitely prefer this reality to a reality where Flash is still being used in 2020.

When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now.

And because HTML/JS are open and not proprietary, the people whining about it are free to take a shot at creating their own authoring software for games without having to worry about getting anybody's permission or getting sued by a company that owns the rights to JavaScript.

I will say, I think the niche of browser games played by kids is now taken up by phone games from a consumer perspective. I'm not sure even if an easy way to create them existed that they'd be nearly as popular.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#152

Post by jakelazaroff »

dimmke wrote: post #132
olyjohn wrote: post #11

The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…

The weird contrarian "actually Flash was good" takes I've been seeing all over today is absolutely bonkers. It's like these people think we weren't around when Flash was a thing or they just have rose colored nostalgia glasses on. Flash was absolutely horrendous. Also, people keep talking about how easy it was to create stuff in it and how JS/HTML involves too much coding. This is more revisionist history - Flash had…

Where are all the new games and animations, then? They used to be everywhere. People stopped making them because the tooling went away.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#153

Post by claytongulick »

danShumway wrote: post #71
larsiusprime wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really good point. It PAINS me that when somebody wants to upload a friggin' cartoon on the internet they have to render it out to 100X the native size and introduce compression artifacts. We were more sophisticated than this in 1999!

I mean, it's kind of crazy to think about, but forget distribution and even games entirely for a sec. What is the current standard for making vector animations, just in general? There isn't one. Why ? Flash clearly showed that people like to make animations with vector art. It compresses well, you can do nice things with scaling. And independent of everything else, there just isn't a clear best tool for that today. I…

We have a good standard, SVG. It's just that the implementation has been slow and buggy, and the animation stuff may never be implemented.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#154

Post by imbnwa »

daveoc64 wrote: post #114
imbnwa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on porting a company's Flash library to Canvas, Animate is not that helpful here, it spits out an IIFE that calls into their CreateJs library but you just can't fire and forget because Canvas demands a lot of hand-tuning if you're doing anything other than banner ads to get the same performance profile and Animate won't help you do that work. This is particularly a problem with static images, text, opacity I…

There is no end of life date for IE11 next year. Internet Explorer is supported for as long as the OS is, and as such, will see support until at least 2029 on Windows Server 2019. It wouldn't surprise me if the next version of Windows (desktop or server) also includes IE, fully supported for its 10 year lifecycle. There were a lot of clickbait articles in the past year about various Microsoft services dropping suppor…

Thanks for the correction, no blend mode ever it is

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#155

Post by selfhoster11 »

danShumway wrote: post #39
olyjohn wrote: post #11

The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…

Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do.…

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored

This is my view as well. Windows on x86 was the golden child. Linux was the hated bastard at best (anyone remember switching between OSS, ALSA and PulseAudio to eke any sound out of the plugin?).

And even that only on x86. ARM? What, you mean that's a processor architecture? That's not even going into the utter dead silence when it came to supporting other Adobe plugins outside of Windows. Adobe Air? Shockwave? I can still easily feel my blood boiling at the absence of these plugins, after so so many years.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#156

Post by selfhoster11 »

larsiusprime wrote: post #86
danShumway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do.…

> no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. C'mon I never emailed people SWF's, seriously. We uploaded them to flash portals and sent links to our friends. The single-file aspect was important because it made it easy to share (for both you and the flash portal). Also crucially it made it easy for competing flash portals to "steal" your game and spread it even further. > as someone who uses Linux…

I did just that, emailed SWFs mostly to myself, and a couple of times to my more savvy classmates who knew how to use them.

I also recall having a stash of standalone SWF gamęs on my shared network drive at school, because all EXEs were restricted and SWF files could be opened by drag-and-drop on the Internet Explorer window.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#157

Post by SimianLogic2 »

dimmke wrote: post #151
SimianLogic wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Flash was fantastic (for games). AS3 is one of my favorite programming languages I've ever worked with, but Flash wasn't just a programming language. The display tree (put simply: game engine) was baked into the runtime, which made it very very easy to make games. The tight coupling between art (movieclips created in Flash the program) and code (AS3 written in FlashDevelop or notepad) made for very fast iter…

It might have been fun/easy to use for some people and encouraged game development that would have otherwise been too complex/too high of a learning curve. But browser games is a niche thing and really only a part of Flash's legacy. Flash also got used for a lot of other things and in a lot of cases it was basically to add in functionality that wasn't supported by native web standards yet. This was why entire website…

I said much the same in another comment -- my kids (5 & 8) play a bunch of browser games, but eventually they'll have their own phones and steam accounts (and credit cards) and stop playing free stuff in the browser.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#158

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

ryandrake wrote: post #116
mgkimsal wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows "Cross platform" to many meant Windows 98, XP, 2000 and NT5. You could work across that, you had the 'enterprise' market apps people using 2000 and NT which could then also be used by employees at home using Win XP. What more could you want? I'm guess I'm being only half-sarcastic here.

Reminds me of a conversation with a coworker in around 1999: Me: “I wish [our product] was cross platform. It would be more enjoyable to develop.” Him (without a shred of sarcasm): “It IS cross platform! It runs on NT and 95!”

> It would be more enjoyable to develop

In my experience, cross-platform is less enjoyable to develop. Yes, it might be more valuable to users for a program to be cross-platform, but it is definitely more enjoyable to develop something that just has to run on a single platform.

For cross-platform work, you have to use languages, runtimes, and libraries that are supported across multiple platforms.

When you are doing single platform work, you can use all the cross-platform languages and libraries and tools, plus all the other languages, libraries and tools that are on the single platform.

I suspect the difference was even more stark in 1999 because Windows was even more dominant than it is now.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#159

Post by dimmke »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #152
dimmke wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird contrarian "actually Flash was good" takes I've been seeing all over today is absolutely bonkers. It's like these people think we weren't around when Flash was a thing or they just have rose colored nostalgia glasses on. Flash was absolutely horrendous. Also, people keep talking about how easy it was to create stuff in it and how JS/HTML involves too much coding. This is more revisionist history - Flash had…

Where are all the new games and animations, then? They used to be everywhere . People stopped making them because the tooling went away.

I think that stuff was on its way out before Flash's general demise. I think people (let's be honest, mostly kids) seeking that sort of content now will download games on their phone and watch YouTube/TikTok. They're probably on a phone/tablet instead of sitting at a desktop anyways.

It could be a combination of both - the tooling for creating that stuff with just JS/HTML is not as good and the diminished demand prevents the creation of such a product.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#160

Post by shepardrtc »

acid__ wrote: post #46

Anyone have a good explanation for why someone hasn’t built a true replacement? e.g. a good, widely used flash-like tool that compiled down to a HTML5 bundle of assets?

You should check out https://www.ceros.com/

That's actually exactly what we do.

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