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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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21–30 of 408 posts

Re: I still use Flash

#21

Post by AshleysBrain »

d0100 wrote: post #5

I still haven't seen anything beat Flash with its sweet 1-2 combo of vector drawing, animation and programming tool Or maybe it's just me reminiscing

It might not yet do everything, but we're having a go at a modern web-based animation tool with Construct Animate, currently in open beta: https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/construct-official-blog-1...

It can export videos, GIFs, image sequences, can use modern JavaScript coding, and has a surprisingly strong block-based visual alternative to coding.

Re: I still use Flash

#22

Post by moolcool »

Flash is fantastic and I wish it got the respect it deserves from tech circles. It got an entire generation into animation and software engineering, and had really robust and approachable tooling which is yet to be replicated. I think back to the gaming experiences made in Flash and Shockwave as far back as the mid 90s, and nothing today even comes close. Back then, you could load up a webpage on a Pentium II and play a really robust game made by a teenager in their spare time, and that game will be stable and display extremely good performance. Compare that with the complexity and barriers that come with mobile game development today, or the jank and poor performance of JS based games.

TL;DR: It's been decades and there's still no suitable replacement for Flash, and the web is poorer for it.

Re: I still use Flash

#23

Post by makach »

Wow! Talk about a love letter at the end of 2022! The dev has identified a gap and applies time and effort to solve it through building it.

Halfway, the dev complains about the orignal devs using XML, because it is not efficient "Hey, I'm not complaining, it makes my job easier."

Well sounds like the original developers of Flash made a good decision. If it makes it easier to parse the content at a later stage, I'm willing to call it a win!

Re: I still use Flash

#24

Post by BulgarianIdiot »

moolcool wrote: post #22

Flash is fantastic and I wish it got the respect it deserves from tech circles. It got an entire generation into animation and software engineering, and had really robust and approachable tooling which is yet to be replicated. I think back to the gaming experiences made in Flash and Shockwave as far back as the mid 90s, and nothing today even comes close. Back then, you could load up a webpage on a Pentium II and pla…

Flash was conceptually fantastic, and today we can do everything Flash did, and more, with HTML, and WebGL. Unfortunately we don't have the authoring tool to do so. Flash IDE became Adobe Animate, but it has relatively restricted output and capabilities, compared to Flash before.

Unfortunately also Flash was full of bugs, FULL. I mean the player, the IDE, everything. And Macromedia and consequently Adobe were increasingly desperate in monetizing the player by attaching downloads to it, like Adobe Reader or anti-virus software. Or adding nonsense features like half-baked 3D gaming to it.

Re: I still use Flash

#25

Post by gibspaulding »

I was expecting "Attempt 3" to involve Bluemaxima's Flashpoint, and was surprised not to see it mentioned. Does anyone know why that wouldn't have been an option, or is this essentially what Attempt 1 would have involved?

For anyone not familiar with Flashpoint, it's a project to preserve old flash games and animations and keep them playable on modern platforms. It's open source and includes a huge library (including it looks like Hapland 1-3).

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

Edit: Reading a bit further down the article, it looks like they were able to make some big improvements by building their own engine like supporting wide screen and higher FPS so that sort of answers my question!

Re: I still use Flash

#26

Post by HanClinto »

rogual wrote: post #2

Hey HN, I haven't done a lot of technical postmortem blogpost-style writing so I'd welcome any feedback or tips on how to improve. Is it too long, too short, too technical, not technical enough? Boring? Interesting? Is it enlightening or does it just come off like content marketing? I literally have no idea how good I am at this.

I really enjoyed it! It didn't come off as content marketing at all. Well done!!

Re: I still use Flash

#27

Post by andai »

You mention that while using Flash you found it missing basic features, could you give some examples?

One of my long-term projects is to build a Flash clone (Flash-the-authoring-tool). So I'd love to hear from people who are still using Flash, to see what features / pain points are most important.

Re: I still use Flash

#29

Post by amne »

I would invest more time into a tool that ports your game to Unity. You already have "code" attached to "sprites" with "actions" happening based on some triggers and entity states.

From this far away it looks like it could work.

Re: I still use Flash

#30

Post by ZiiS »

bugmen0t wrote: post #28

Surprising there is no mention of the wasm/rust-implemented flash player https://ruffle.rs/ in the article.

"oldest ones, including the original Haplands, are AS2 Flash, which runs pretty well thanks to Ruffle."
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