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A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

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101–110 of 135 posts

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#101
post #4

I'm excited for this; flash is still wholly unmatched as an artistic expression tool. HTML5 and WebAssembly can, obviously, provide the technical chops; but we've never recovered the experience of a novice Flash user who, with no prior domain experience, could realize an inspired prototype game or entertaining animation in less than an hour. The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good.

I haven't used Unity, but I'm often surprised that it hasn't taken this niche.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#102
post #99
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of unsafe usage in this codebase ( https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/search?q=unsafe returns 5 screenfuls) - though I don't know enough about Rust to tell how risky these are.

In this context any usage of `unsafe` in Rust is probably irrelevant to the safety of the resulting program, because AFAIK the WASM sandbox doesn't trust programs enough to actually allow them to do anything that could potentially violate memory safety.

Yep, in a lot of use cases the wasm version probably is fine with the browser sandbox. But according to the readme this also targets the desktop. I would imagine the desktop mode is native code + wgpu, as there seems to be a wgpu directory under renderer/ .

There are some scenarios when vulnerabilities in a wasm compiled program can be harmful too though. For example the web page embedding the emulated flash applet doesn't necessarily intend to give that app full access to that origin's context. For example it could exfiltrate some api keys or other security tokens of the logged in user of the containing page.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#103
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s ok to separate the art from the artist, so to speak. The original site is indeed interesting and a nice example of Flash web design from the era, the Twitter acct doesn’t change this

I'm sorry. I looked at this website, and he explicitly blames me and my people for controlling and destroying the country (and the World Trade Center) and wants me destroyed. I can't look away from that. It's sad that that's OK on Y Combinator's Hacker News, but at least I know what I'm dealing with here.

He's clearly an insane person. There's no use getting worked up about what some digital hobo is screaming.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not being downvoted because you point out logical flaws, you are being downvoted because you don’t contribute to the topic. Are you not aware of the discussion about HTML5 versus Flash, or do you just disagree with using HTML5 as an umbrella term here? Even the Wikipedia article [0] about HTML5 has a section on Flash, discussing features such as sound, video, graphics and interactive elements. With "HTML5 bei…

I have never heard anyone use HTML5 as an "umbrella term" for meaning HTML5 + JS + CSS(3). Why would anyone do that? It is kind of silly to do that. That changes the whole meaning of the OP. Yes, I heavily disagree with such imprecise usage of terms, that changes the whole meaning. In that case my criticism would have been that the OP is not very clear / ambiguous.

I have heard several people use it for that umbrella term, particularly back in the days when I lurked around following the WHATWG and CSS mailing lists.

Consider that much of what is new in HTML5 vis-à-vis HTML4 is in the changes to its JS APIs (e.g., is all about the JS API), and its requirement that browsers support other standards such as SVG. Actually distinguishing which component of the web stack actually has a particular improvement that you seek to use doesn't provide all that much value... what does it matter if it's really the WHATWG HTML spec that mandated it or it's the ES5 spec?

Instead, you can just call it all "HTML5" and understand that it's using newer technologies that won't work on legacy browsers, although we're now so far deep into the era that we don't have a terminology for what requires a 2020 browser versus a 2015 browser.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#105
post #47

Ok, funny story about ruffle: Years ago in 2012 some co-workers stumbled on the greatest website ever: http://www.novalight.net/NOVALIGHT.html (takes a while to load now) To prove that HTML5/CSS3 was finally ready, I started a side project to recreate it in JS: https://github.com/jtwaleson/NovaLight-Challenge . I never got far and I don't know if that means I never finish side projects or if Flash is officially super…

I googled Peter K Joneleit after your description of him in the README and I was curious if you were just having a bit of fun or if he was involved in defining these web standards. Hooooo boy I was not prepared for his Twitter, it is wild

Link: https://twitter.com/godsend14

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#106
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow you're not wrong about his Twitter, that was an adventure. It's so over the top I actually can't tell if it's meant to be satire.

Probably just a hacked account

I don't think so. The "SOL" link on his page leads to even worse stuff.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#107
post #21
post #4

I'm excited for this; flash is still wholly unmatched as an artistic expression tool. HTML5 and WebAssembly can, obviously, provide the technical chops; but we've never recovered the experience of a novice Flash user who, with no prior domain experience, could realize an inspired prototype game or entertaining animation in less than an hour. The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good.

> The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good. The tool is exactly the same and it outputs html\js now.

Not quite. Animate exists, but acquiring it is prohibitively expensive. Flash was popular in no small part because it was easily pirated, and so cheap as free. Animate requires a prohibitively expensive yearly subscription fee.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#109

>Ruffle is in the proof-of-concept stage and can currently run early Flash animations and games. Yeah. Just like the 10,000 other Flash implementations. The problem is that SWF is very complex format and relies on proprietary codecs. Also, there are multiple runtimes to support. Like all attempts before it, simple cases will be covered but anything slightly more complicated will never work.

Given the folks sponsoring the project, I have higher hopes for this than you do.

I've seen this before, going all the way back to Gnu Gnash all the way up to Shumway (which was functional in the same way all the others were). The simple parts, typically the things from the AS1/AS2 world, are simple. As you get into the AS3 world there's a drop-off. I don't see anything in this project that hasn't been done before.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#110
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s ok to separate the art from the artist, so to speak. The original site is indeed interesting and a nice example of Flash web design from the era, the Twitter acct doesn’t change this

I'm sorry. I looked at this website, and he explicitly blames me and my people for controlling and destroying the country (and the World Trade Center) and wants me destroyed. I can't look away from that. It's sad that that's OK on Y Combinator's Hacker News, but at least I know what I'm dealing with here.

If you interpreted this thread as an endorsement of anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists then I think you ought to re-read it. To restate in case it is unclear: the original author of the page turned out to have hateful views, but it needn’t reflect at all on the homage that jtwaleson made and they shouldn’t feel bad about it.
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