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The history of Flash games in China

chaoyang.substack.com

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Re: The history of Flash games in China

#21

Post by lostgame »

JoeyJoJoJr wrote: post #19
philliphaydon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if Adobe has any regrets.

So much progress was made with Flash by Macromedia, then Adobe bought it and dropped the ball literally after a single version. The software quality degraded almost instantly and new features took way too long to release and came buggy, or conflicted with existing features. Animate CC is by far the buggiest software I use, so much so that it continually saves annoying recovery versions of your documents because crash…

Couldn’t agree more. Flash with Macromedia felt like a real piece of software that passion and care went into. It was a joy to use. As soon as Adobe grabbed it, it just became a shell of what it had been. Honestly sad to see. :(

Re: The history of Flash games in China

#22

Post by userbinator »

password4321 wrote: post #15
tomnipotent wrote: post #7

So fun to see Gold Miner mentioned! I built the GameRival.com site where it and many other flash games were hosted. The game was so popular it led to an integer overflow in the (unsigned) int32 primary key column of our logging table (SQL Server). I didn't realize how insanely popular the game was until I was in Las Vegas about five years ago, and a Gold Miner rip-off game was available while drinking at the bar. Fun…

I don't know if I'm being purposely nerd sniped or not, but SQL Server doesn't support any unsigned data types. This caught my eye because so few start their IDENTITY columns at the lowest possible negative value, thus missing out on half the possible values.

but SQL Server doesn't support any unsigned data types.

...except tinyint. (Sorry. That was definitely a nerdsnipe.)

Re: The history of Flash games in China

#24

Post by angarg12 »

A few years back I made a small web game, and then found out it had been ripped and posted in a Chinese website (translated to Chinese). Far from pissing me off, I'm flattered anyone bothered doing that. Up to this day this is my biggest source of traffic.

Re: The history of Flash games in China

#25

Post by ylee »

marcodiego wrote: post #10
boibombeiro wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF only became open in 2008 and its doing pretty well.

There was interest, or it was simple enough to allow open source implementation to flourish. Even in 2008 there was plenty highly FLOSS to create and view PDF. Flash, OTOH, was a mess. Also, PDF specification was available since 1993: https://web.archive.org/web/20150617123515/http://acroeng.ad...

>There was interest, or it was simple enough to allow open source implementation to flourish.

I used Applix Word to produce my résumé in PDF format when applying to jobs during senior year of college, 1998-1999. I don't remember if Applix itself generated the PDF from its .aw format, or if I used some other tool, but either way I had no trouble doing so from Linux.

Re: The history of Flash games in China

#26

Post by jan_Inkepa »

monocasa wrote: post #6
marcodiego wrote: post #3

Had adobe freed and invested in standardizing flash, the web could be a very different place today.

From what I heard, Adobe couldn't even standardize Flash internally. Flash player was apparently internally a dozen or so Flash runtimes that everyone was afraid to touch except to cut a new version on top of the others.

On the plus side, it was the most stable web technology out there for over a decade.(with regards to backwards compatibility)

Re: The history of Flash games in China

#27

Post by JoeyJoJoJr »

lostgame wrote: post #21
JoeyJoJoJr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much progress was made with Flash by Macromedia, then Adobe bought it and dropped the ball literally after a single version. The software quality degraded almost instantly and new features took way too long to release and came buggy, or conflicted with existing features. Animate CC is by far the buggiest software I use, so much so that it continually saves annoying recovery versions of your documents because crash…

Couldn’t agree more. Flash with Macromedia felt like a real piece of software that passion and care went into. It was a joy to use. As soon as Adobe grabbed it, it just became a shell of what it had been. Honestly sad to see. :(

I’ve got my whole career to thank Flash for. I discovered it when I was 14 and it absolutely blew my mind. I didn’t know what variables, loops, or functions were, but still somehow figured out how to “program” games. Animate CC is still extremely capable animation software for games purposes. I wish Adobe would just sell it to some other company who could actually leverage its authoring capabilities.

Re: The history of Flash games in China

#28

Post by mejutoco »

JoeyJoJoJr wrote: post #19
philliphaydon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if Adobe has any regrets.

So much progress was made with Flash by Macromedia, then Adobe bought it and dropped the ball literally after a single version. The software quality degraded almost instantly and new features took way too long to release and came buggy, or conflicted with existing features. Animate CC is by far the buggiest software I use, so much so that it continually saves annoying recovery versions of your documents because crash…

Definitely. And Director, which extended to 3d! At the time it was more for interactive cds, but the potential for a Unity-like experience was there.

Re: The history of Flash games in China

#30

Post by rvieira »

marcodiego wrote: post #3

Had adobe freed and invested in standardizing flash, the web could be a very different place today.

I never worked with Flash/AS, but I remember some tools targeting SWF (OpenLaszlo, Haxe).

Did they reverse-engineered the spec? Or was there some sort of Flash specification available in some form?

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