OMG, was a huge fan of the Hapland series during middle school. Definetly gonna buy such a lovely crafted remaster.
Also happy to see all the libraries I love to work with pop up here and there.
I still use Flash
51–60 of 408 posts
Re: I still use Flash
#52Hey 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.
It was great, loved the concise writing style, and it was a cool story.
Re: I still use Flash
#53I wish Flash would just be fully open-sourced for niche users to maintain and use it AS IS. I know it supposedly has a lot of vulnerabilities but there are use cases where the pros matter more and this con doesn't matter too much.
The Flash Player had a bunch of licensed 3rd Party software in it so very hard to open source it.
The AS3 VM at its heart however was open sourced.
Re: I still use Flash
#54> I like to use binary formats where possible for end-user software; I don't believe in making customers' computers chew through reams of XML.
I feel an urge to object here! This is a false dichotomy; there are efficient middle-ground solutions between XML and custom binary formats e.g. Protobuf and Cap'n proto.
Having said that, I loved the trick of using an assembler to write it.
Re: I still use Flash
#55Hey 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.
It was a pretty insightful article, I didn't know how a flash game worked internally and how it could be reimplemented! I think it is also relevant for those migrating their projects to newer technologies, I always found this process fun(except there is a deadline) :)
(Edit: I love your games and used to play a lot when I was a kid)
Re: I still use Flash
#56IIRC many 2D animators considered the old Adobe Flash Professional to be one of the best 2D animation tools ever made.
Fun fact: An animated TV series that ran from 2010 to 2019 developed by Lauren Faust, was animated in Adobe Flash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_...
Actually, there were quite a few animated TV series that were animated in Flash (And later Adobe Animate).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...
Re: I still use Flash
#57C'mon, Adobe. Open source it.
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Re: I still use Flash
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did mention it. They use it for some of their older games but it seems like Ruffle isn't yet feature-complete with Action Script 3 and thus cannot be used to run their newer games
It sounds like adding those features to ruffle would have been three order of magnitudes easier than writing a flash player from scratch I understand contributing to OSS is a pain (I often end up with half implemented features in my own branch and never manage to merge them upstream) but he could have saved himself some trouble.
Ruffle plays compiled Flash swf files
The tool that the author made reads Flash fla files and exports data from that.
Swf files contain binary data. The ActionScript code has been compiled into bytecode. The vector data is probably also represented in binary format.
Fla files, as pointed out in the OP blog post, contain XML data.
It sounds like OP is doing something quite different from what Ruffle does.
Ruffle tries to be a player for swf files.
OP wanted to export data from Fla XML to other formats, so that he could build executable games.
Re: I still use Flash
#59Hey 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 don't think anyone here is going to complain about a post where you make a game work by reverse engineering Bezier splines encoded in XML by Adobe Flash. If that's not "Hacker" News, what is?
Indeed! ;-)
However I wonder why the OP didn't try to keep vector graphics and use to SVG for instance? That would allow for infinite scalability. It is mentioned that "GPUs don't like vectors" but if the game doesn't change too often it should not make a lot of difference?
Re: I still use Flash
#60Hey 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.
It's interesting for sure, I'm left wondering if it was less work to make flash continue to work somehow instead of re-authoring the original games.
I mean you've probably learned a lot, but you could have learned to author games using a more modern tool than flash instead and that would have been useful in the future, right?