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A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

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Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#121
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, mostly piracy. So it doesn't matter.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#122

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…

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.

PICO-8 is fantastic, but ultimately way less flexible and powerful than Flash.

That's not a dig at PICO-8, it's limited on purpose. But the strength of Flash was that it was extremely flexible and exposed an architectural style that lent itself very well to prototyping. PICO-8 does have all of its tools built into the same app, but it doesn't have anything at all like a movie clip system, it doesn't even have events or a timeline. I think it just has very different goals, it's a philosophy built around having a small, self-contained, understandable system -- not around having a unique workflow.

The closest programming/architecture analogy I draw to PICO-8 isn't Flash, it's the TI-83 graphing calculator. That platform also had a lot of influence over how I learned to program, and it had similar strengths to PICO-8 in how limited it was and how that forced you to get creative and allowed you to really deeply understand what was going on in your program.

Where I do see PICO-8 getting adjacent to Flash is in the community. I think when some people say they miss Flash, what they really miss is sites like Newgrounds and the surrounding indie scene. PICO-8 does capture some of that, it's a great environment to learn to code in, and it's a fun environment to work in. I just don't think it captures any of the tooling. When I say I miss Flash, I kind of miss the indie scene, but I miss the tooling more.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PICO-8 is fantastic, but ultimately way less flexible and powerful than Flash. That's not a dig at PICO-8, it's limited on purpose. But the strength of Flash was that it was extremely flexible and exposed an architectural style that lent itself very well to prototyping. PICO-8 does have all of its tools built into the same app, but it doesn't have anything at all like a movie clip system, it doesn't even have events…

That makes sense

I'm honestly tempted to take a swing at the "open replacement" that you described in your original post..... Though I never actually used Flash back in the day, so I'd need to do some research

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PICO-8 is fantastic, but ultimately way less flexible and powerful than Flash. That's not a dig at PICO-8, it's limited on purpose. But the strength of Flash was that it was extremely flexible and exposed an architectural style that lent itself very well to prototyping. PICO-8 does have all of its tools built into the same app, but it doesn't have anything at all like a movie clip system, it doesn't even have events…

That makes sense I'm honestly tempted to take a swing at the "open replacement" that you described in your original post..... Though I never actually used Flash back in the day, so I'd need to do some research

It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Not necessary to try and make something myself, but just... what would a modern Flash look like if it wasn't just a clone, but it was people actually thinking about what made Flash attractive and really trying to figure out how to replicate its strengths and address its weaknesses?

An interesting point here is that Adobe Animate still exists, which (in theory, I haven't used it) still has a lot of these features. But nobody uses it for game prototyping that I'm aware of -- and not just because it's expensive or (in my case) because people refuse to use subscription software. I've seen gamedevs do their animation in Animate CC, and then export it out to Unity. So there's something going on there.

I wonder if I went back and reinstalled Flash 8, if there are parts of it I would notice that didn't age well, or paradigms that needed to be rethought. But I still feel like that kind of workflow is something we could have again, and with enough thought put into it, it could be even better. I would welcome more people thinking about this kind of stuff or trying their hand at prototyping game engines that were designed around novel workflows.

There's fertile ground in this area if someone wanted to explore it and dig into it.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense I'm honestly tempted to take a swing at the "open replacement" that you described in your original post..... Though I never actually used Flash back in the day, so I'd need to do some research

It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Not necessary to try and make something myself, but just... what would a modern Flash look like if it wasn't just a clone, but it was people actually thinking about what made Flash attractive and really trying to figure out how to replicate its strengths and address its weaknesses? An interesting point here is that Adobe Animate still exists, which (in theory, I h…

I think you really hit on something with the integration between code and animation and vector art creation. That's not something you really see anywhere else and it instantly made me understand what was compelling about Flash.

If you want to discuss this further, my email is in my bio!

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eccentric like the late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS creator

Lets call a spade a spade. Its not "Eccentric", he either has serious mental health issues or is an American far right conspiracy theorist. And don't you go implying that all American far right conspiracy theorists have mental health issues, that is not proven or even logical in many ways.

The man's talking about prophecies, comets and reptilians.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#128

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…

So wait, you tried to rebuild a flash website in javascript for the purpose of drawing conclusions about HTML5? How does that work? I mean, Flash and HTML5 are made for different purposes and use cases and HTML5 is not JavaScript.

Saying HTML5 is ready to replace Flash was one of Steve Jobs' justifications for sentencing Flash to death.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#129
post #38
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?

I talked to several people who used to make Flash animations and games, and none of them had even heard of Animate -- they were under the impression that Flash was dead and there was nothing like it anymore. (Turns out it's literally the same thing with an uglier splash screen and includes the HTML5 plugin by default.)

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#130
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets call a spade a spade. Its not "Eccentric", he either has serious mental health issues or is an American far right conspiracy theorist. And don't you go implying that all American far right conspiracy theorists have mental health issues, that is not proven or even logical in many ways.

The man's talking about prophecies, comets and reptilians.

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