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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#71

Post by mFixman »

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…

> today we can do everything Flash did, and more, with HTML, and WebGL.

There's one big piece missing: we don't have an animation/gaming interface that's as easy and intuitive as Flash.

Flash didn't become ubiquitous because it was powerful, but because it was easy for any 13 year old to pick up and do something nice in a couple of days without reading any documentation or doing any course. Good luck getting anything to work in WebGL without any web programming experience.

Re: I still use Flash

#72

Post by _joel »

jraph wrote: post #10
nonethewiser wrote: post #8

So he created his own flash player. Couldnt someone use WASM to run a flash player in the browser? Without the original flash security risks.

That's what Shumway did (it's now unmaintained), and what Ruffle does. https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://ruffle.rs/

Ruffle's neat! Never seen that before

Re: I still use Flash

#73

Post by dontwearitout »

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.

Flash was my 2nd programming language (after VB6) back when it was still Macromedia. I had a lot of fun making really crappy minigames and learning the basics of coding. This article brought some good nostalgia and plenty of astonishment at the lengths you went to.

Your writing itself is great. A lot of writing linked by HN seems too verbose because people try to sound smart. Yours is succinct while engaging. Right length, just technical enough, and interesting. I really enjoyed this, thanks for writing it!

Also:

> Object-orientation is not fashionable right now in gamedev circles

Can you elaborate on this?

Re: I still use Flash

#74

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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…

Adobe never cared about Flash beyond it being the webs video player.

Honestly the whole thing just began to rot from a tool perspective since their purchase.

Their management is too PDF-brained to think of investing in quality work in their tools as insane as it sounds they seem to consider their creative tools an afterthought and B2B PDF solutions their main business. I can’t find any other way to explain their actions.

Re: I still use Flash

#75

Post by deltarholamda »

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

Flash was actually pretty great. The big problem with it was the "oh, that thing? it's still around?" attitude of Adobe, which led to massive security problems.

Actionscript was a pretty good language, certainly around the level of what Javascript has become. It was poor-mouthed for the same reasons Javascript was (is?), but now we use Javascript to run 90% of the Web.

I remember back in the early 00s playing with the PHP Flash module. It was a really interesting environment that had a lot of promise. But, alas, it was doomed.

Re: I still use Flash

#76

Post by fallat »

ilyt wrote: post #65
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"

Yes. What we see in UI design today is a consequence of game theory at work. It's to optimize business. In fairness you don't want to scare users away. I think though many people equated it all to "clean looking", without realizing removing micro-interactions is a net negative....

Re: I still use Flash

#77

Post by squarefoot »

ilyt wrote: post #65
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"

Spot on. And I would add "let's make every GUI either web based or mobile based just to further annoy PC users".

Re: I still use Flash

#78

Post by ezfe »

pmarreck wrote: post #39

> Although I developed the game mostly on my Mac, during development Apple invented this thing called “Notarization” where if you run any app on a new version of MacOS, it'll make a network request to Apple to ask if the app's developer pays Apple a yearly fee. If the developer does not pay Apple a yearly fee, MacOS will pop up a dialog strongly implying the app is a virus and refuse to start it. > For this reason, W…

Also the fact that macOS doesn't actually block unnotarized software...Many programs are un-notarized and just need to give the user the 1 step instruction to bypass it

Re: I still use Flash

#79

Post by dncornholio »

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

I still use it to introduce students to coding.. ActionScript is amazing for this

Re: I still use Flash

#80

Post by LoveMortuus »

adrian17 wrote: post #66
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

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)

I'm waiting for it to develop further, I'm very excited, especially because I still play Crystal Saga everyday, I don't know why, but it's got something that I haven't been able to find in any other games.

But sadly, I haven't been able to make Crystal Saga work using Ruffle

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