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A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

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Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#111

Post by syspec »

danShumway wrote: post #32
jayd16 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats missing from modern tools?

It's a combination of a lot of things. In theory, Adobe Animate still exists today, but it's wildly inaccessible both because of cost and its proprietary nature. There's also complications based on how PWA get deployed to mobile, etc... But ignoring all of that, here's a quick list of (some) categories of things I still miss from Flash: - nested animations/clips: The recursive nature of Flash made making animations v…

Are you the author of another flash shim named shumway?

What is the status of that project, is it still active? What do you think of this project?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Sh...

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#112

Post by smcl »

anamexis wrote: post #105
smcl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I deliberately did not include it as it has some pretty awful stuff

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#113

Post by danShumway »

syspec wrote: post #111
danShumway wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a combination of a lot of things. In theory, Adobe Animate still exists today, but it's wildly inaccessible both because of cost and its proprietary nature. There's also complications based on how PWA get deployed to mobile, etc... But ignoring all of that, here's a quick list of (some) categories of things I still miss from Flash: - nested animations/clips: The recursive nature of Flash made making animations v…

Are you the author of another flash shim named shumway? What is the status of that project, is it still active? What do you think of this project? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Sh...

Hah! You're not the first person to refer me to that.

It's entirely coincidental, but I love that I share the same name. For purely selfish ego reasons I wish it had succeeded.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#114

Post by MattRix »

salamanderman wrote: post #101
dleslie wrote: 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.

This really isn’t what Unity does. Unity is mostly just the engine and level editor. The thing that made Flash special was that it was a complete vector animation authoring tool first, before you get to all the scripting etc.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#115

Post by steveklabnik »

macspoofing wrote: post #109
steveklabnik wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not aware of the folks behind Gnash, and Mozilla obviously cares about the web, but I don't think either of those organizations have the dedication to Flash that Newgrounds, or even the NYT, have.

Time will tell I guess.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#116

Post by macspoofing »

steveklabnik wrote: post #115
macspoofing wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not aware of the folks behind Gnash, and Mozilla obviously cares about the web, but I don't think either of those organizations have the dedication to Flash that Newgrounds, or even the NYT, have. Time will tell I guess.

Indeed. I was tracking a lot of these projects a few years ago because we had a Flex/AS3 RIA (remember that term?) so I was hoping we'd get a freebie port to HTML/JS.

In the end, we ended up writing our own AS3->JavaScript transpiler[1]. The Apache Flex project has since done something similar, though by the time that was done, we were done. So my skepticism stemmed from just seeing these projects come out, get some quick wins from implementing a simple subset of swf, and then just go nowhere.

But I wish them well. I hope it works out.

[1]Well, not totally ours. We used the existing Falcon compiler front-end and we wrote the emitter to transpile to TypeScript (after implementing a subset of Flash SDK that we needed).

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#117

Post by macspoofing »

vfclists wrote: post #61

People think of it as being for games, but high quality applications used it as UI, a lot still do. Flash was banned to protect the Google, Apple, Microsoft ap ecosystems. Todays mobile CPUs are an order of magnitude way more powerful than those of 10 years ago. The performance issue doesn't apply now. As for bugs, they can be fixed and they could have been fixed with the passage of time. The whole agenda of aiming t…

>Flash was banned to protect the Google, Apple, Microsoft ap ecosystems.

No. There was always a lot of Flash hate around, but it was tolerated because prior to HTML5 set of standards and the massive investment in JS performance, there was no way to do certain things in HTML/JS, so there was space for Flash. Post 2010 it became hard to justify Flash because you could now replicate everything Flash could do (though maybe in a more clunky way).

>10 years on now and still nowhere near what was available 10 years ago.

I wouldn't say that. There is no good reason for Flash to exist anymore. The culture also changed. The younguns who were writing browser-based Flash games in 2004, are writing mobile games today, and the browser is not a popular gaming target anymore (with some exceptions here and there).

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#118

Post by steveklabnik »

macspoofing wrote: post #116
steveklabnik wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not aware of the folks behind Gnash, and Mozilla obviously cares about the web, but I don't think either of those organizations have the dedication to Flash that Newgrounds, or even the NYT, have. Time will tell I guess.

Indeed. I was tracking a lot of these projects a few years ago because we had a Flex/AS3 RIA (remember that term?) so I was hoping we'd get a freebie port to HTML/JS. In the end, we ended up writing our own AS3->JavaScript transpiler[1]. The Apache Flex project has since done something similar, though by the time that was done, we were done. So my skepticism stemmed from just seeing these projects come out, get some…

Oh wow, RIA, yeah, takes me back :)

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#119

Post by Arainach »

coldtea wrote: post #38
danbolt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anything feature-wise is missing on the runtime side, but Flash’s keyframe/editor setup just let people make the most amazing things.

Isn't Adobe Animate the same thing, keyframes and everything, just with html output?

Animate is only available as part of a $236/yr subscription and can't be purchased. Flash was far more attainable.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#120

Post by brundolf »

danShumway wrote: post #32
jayd16 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats missing from modern tools?

It's a combination of a lot of things. In theory, Adobe Animate still exists today, but it's wildly inaccessible both because of cost and its proprietary nature. There's also complications based on how PWA get deployed to mobile, etc... But ignoring all of that, here's a quick list of (some) categories of things I still miss from Flash: - nested animations/clips: The recursive nature of Flash made making animations v…

PICO-8 seems adjacent, at least. It's generally more programming-oriented, but it includes tools for editing sprites and music and code and bundles everything together under a single editor/runtime, which can target desktop or web or even be distributed in the form of an image file.
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