251–260 of 372 posts
I love me some Flash games, and sad to see Flash go. I must disagree on one point here: accessibility. In HTML, accessibility is built in, and you have to do some stupid shit to break it, e.g. using divs and spans combined with CSS for fake "links". Many succeed, even Google has some on their search results pages, but it's not the default state. In Flash, accessibility is barely an afterthought by default, and if you…
WebGL/GPU + WebAssembly
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I do agree with everything you're saying about what's been lost, and I feel that loss because I went through that same loss. I'm not commenting from the sidelines, I lost Flash as a development platform too. I think my big frustration is that there's this tone that often comes up underneath threads like this that's, "look what the web took away from us", and I just think that's really harmful and inaccurate. All of t…
There are two prongs to the problem. Web standards evolve slowly and compatibility is often even slower. Developers still can’t target WebGL2 on iOS for example and only just got it for desktop Safari. We’re basically getting to the point where the web is a viable platform for games although there are still significant performance differences between browsers. No one’s going to seriously build tools for a platform th…
To be fair to the original thread, Apple has always tried to protray that it's doing something brave or prescient by dropping technologies or introducing proprietary standards, and it's pretty clear that they were not actually interested in the Open web when they dropped Flash. I do think Flash was dropped in a clumsy way, and I would try to separate Apple's clear push to try and monopolize the mobile games market and kill web games from the actual push for the Open web as an application platform.
I think Apple has made it pretty clear on iOS that they don't care about the web as an application platform.
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> In the broader scheme of things I think the next couple of years are going to be really interesting for web games in general.
I... hope so. What bothers me about the long-term future is that I'm now seeing less investment on the web side of things on APIs that I think are going to be essential to pushing web games forward in new ways. Even simple stuff like web audio, good controller layout support (also, controller rumble support please), better timing for fixed game intervals. I think the web could easily replace Flash, but there are definitely more APIs I want in general for games.
My worry is that it takes so long for the tooling in those areas to catch up that the actual APIs start to lag behind because there's not enough pressure on browser manufacturers to care about them. We already kind of saw this with Chrome breaking audio on tons of web games because they just didn't think to test them.
Best of luck to anything you're working on, I'm rooting for you.
I don't agree that sharing links to Flash content was a walk in the park though. I remember spending a lot of time updating Flash player and restarting my computer and then something going wrong and doing it again. Plus Flash was always trash on Mac and Linux, HTML5 works great on those platforms.
So I don't really miss Flash the technology but I miss the wacky internet that existed around Flash content.
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.…
This lead to my boycott of flash. Sorry flash websites!
Flash was an interesting experiment, as you said, important at the time, however I started distrusting websites, that used it, heavily and avoided them.
The flash editor was indeed a user friendly and nice tool to get into vector animations though, for anything else HTML/js already does a much better job than flash in my opinion.
One thing i'll never get is why adobe didn't open source flash player instead of killing it. The money was in the editor, not the player. Open sourcing it might have changed its fate.
The difference in authoring tool is the big one here. Flash let artists and even kids (like myself aged 12) start making really fun interactive websites that could be hosted very very simply. But I lay the blame for that with Adobe. Why didn’t they just adapt the Flash application to output html and JavaScript? If you can compile modern JS to old with babbel I don’t see why they couldn’t have an interpreter to turn a…
As I recall, it tries to naively export your Flash graphics as HTML5 Canvas drawing commands, but they come out all glitchy because Flash's renderer just uses a fundamentally different model (planar maps vs. stacked rendering).
This probably is fixable, but I sincerely wonder whether Adobe still has the engineering skills to solve new problems like this. They've subisted for so long now by just adding new layers of janky, slow, webview-powered cloud-enhanced e-commerce integration to their existing products, that I wouldn't be surprised if most of the serious engineering talent has left.
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My mom was on windows, using an old version of IE. Never had any problems. Flash player compat wasn't perfect but it was more than enough to create vibrant scenes like Kongregate, Newgrounds, and ArmorGames. Anecdotal sure, but it was good enough for the scene to exist. The main thing about the single-file thing is that it afforded the flash portal ecosystem. It was really easy to share your work as a creator without…
> Yeah but the problem is creating that canvas-based animation is insane, so there aren't any canvas-based animations, compared to the output of flash cartoons. I think we might be arguing past each other. I fully, 100% agree with this point. I just don't think it has anything to do with the web. When people brought up replacing the Flash runtime with the web, there were two things being claimed: A) that the platform…
I'm curious about this turn of phrase that I hadn't heard before, "put for the codswallop". I can find "put in for" used or explained on the internets, but not "put for" (and "put in for" doesn't seems to be relevant).
Could someone explain? What does "put for" mean, where does it come from and how or where is it used?
Why didn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR take off as successor to Flash? It is available for all platforms, runs ActionScript.
>> To this day, I am super mad at all the people who put for the codswallop that HTML5 was this perfect replacement for Flash. I'm curious about this turn of phrase that I hadn't heard before, "put for the codswallop". I can find "put in for" used or explained on the internets, but not "put for" (and "put in for" doesn't seems to be relevant). Could someone explain? What does "put for" mean, where does it come from a…
To put forth means "to offer an opinion; to argue for something". Codswallop is a rare, somewhat archaic slang term meaning, basically, "bullshit". Thus "to put forth codswallop" means "to argue for bullshit".