Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I still use Flash

foon.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 408 posts

Re: I still use Flash

#61

Post by dusted »

BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #24
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 increas…

slowly lowers flamethrower indeed, you're right, HTML and WebGL with JavaScript or webasm can do anything flash can..

They can't do it in the cycle-count that flash could (I remember seeing 3D vector demos running in 640x480 pixels on my 133 mhz pentium), but they will do it, and probably look almost identical across two different versions of the same brand of browser..

But the real point is the authoring tools, and there simply aren't any.. We're stuck in the early 80s with a f*cking text-editor for GUI work..

Geez, there were authoring tools for making nice GUI applications in the Windows 3.11 era.. But modern web development has yet to reach that level of maturity.

Re: I still use Flash

#62

Post by replwoacause »

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 thought it was great, and I have no interest in games or game development, but I read the whole thing top to bottom and came away thoroughly impressed. Excellent post and work!

Re: I still use Flash

#63

Post by alxlaz »

> The vintage Flash UI is great. Buttons have edges. Icons look like things. Space is well-used. It's amazing! Using old UIs makes me feel like an archaeologist discovering some sort of forgotten Roman technology. The lost art of UI design. It's neat.

This was one my favourites parts in the article. An the real piece of the pie comes right after it: there's a screenshot with like thirty icons and they're different enough that you can tell one from the other.

Re: I still use Flash

#64

Post by moolcool »

dusted wrote: post #61
BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 increas…

slowly lowers flamethrower indeed, you're right, HTML and WebGL with JavaScript or webasm can do anything flash can.. They can't do it in the cycle-count that flash could (I remember seeing 3D vector demos running in 640x480 pixels on my 133 mhz pentium), but they will do it, and probably look almost identical across two different versions of the same brand of browser.. But the real point is the authoring tools, and…

This is admittedly a few years ago, and the scene has evolved _a bit_ since then, but I remember seeing really simple JS games (think tetris, or a very simple sidescroller) being heartily applauded on sites like reddit and HN. We're unironically cheering approaching parity with a toolset from almost 20 years ago! Things could be so much better.

Re: I still use Flash

#65

Post by ilyt »

alxlaz wrote: post #63

> The vintage Flash UI is great. Buttons have edges. Icons look like things. Space is well-used. It's amazing! Using old UIs makes me feel like an archaeologist discovering some sort of forgotten Roman technology. The lost art of UI design. It's neat. This was one my favourites parts in the article. An the real piece of the pie comes right after it: there's a screenshot with like thirty icons and they're different en…

It's like entire industry at one point decide to optimize UIs for the first 30 minutes of usage and not the years of users using apps once they get familiar with them.

"oooh let's not put too many buttons to scare users away", "they got 22 inch screens, let's just waste space for no good reason, it looks modern and airy"

Re: I still use Flash

#66

Post by adrian17 »

zulu-inuoe wrote: post #37
bugmen0t wrote: post #28

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

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

While Ruffle's AS3 support is still lacking a lot of features, since a couple months ago it's been able to play some simple games that require it. The build used on author's site is from 2021, and I just checked that the latest build is able to play several more AS3 games hosted there.

(note: I'm a Ruffle dev)

Re: I still use Flash

#67

Post by roywiggins »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #47
zulu-inuoe wrote: post #37

Earlier 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.

It seems to me like a very different skillset required to reimplement a runtime like the SWF player vs hacking together an alternative FLA compiler that's just good enough to work on your own games.

Ruffle still doesn't support Actionscript 3.0, I suspect the task is not that straightforward.

Re: I still use Flash

#68

Post by tetris11 »

codetrotter wrote: post #48
keewee7 wrote: post #41

IIRC 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_...

Many Adult Swim shows too: Harvey Birdman and Metalocalypse come to mind

Re: I still use Flash

#69

Post by tetris11 »

numair wrote: post #36

Really great writeup. So people stop asking the obvious question, here is the GitHub issue that clearly shows Ruffle doesn’t support ActionScript 3: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/1368 I recently picked up a copy of Flash MX to use on an old PowerBook, highly recommend others do the same. As many have commented, today’s authoring tools are poor substitutes (someone should do a list of the superior abandon…

It looks like its 99% there though in terms of support

Re: I still use Flash

#70

Post by numpad0 »

syntaxfree wrote: post #13
worldsavior wrote: post #3

[flagged]

Creatives: look at this beautiful chalice made of Roman dichroic glass. Security people: %drops it on the ground and it shatters% yes but glass is terribly insecure, why not redo it with PVC and LEF strip Christmas lights.

More like "yeah but not RoHS2 compliant and fabrication involves mercury"
Post reply on HN