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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#121

Post by BlueTemplar »

dontwearitout wrote: post #73
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 l…

Probably how OO teachers and mentors failed horribly (AFAIK we still don't warn new students about the pitfalls of inheritance ?), so ECS got popular as a better alternative to shitty OOP code ?

https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265481-oop-is-dead-long...

Re: I still use Flash

#122

Post by iKlsR »

ddulaney wrote: post #108
iKlsR wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the better years of my life a little over a decade ago were spent on mofunzone playing the stick figure fights with friends. I remember bullet time fighting (matrix clone with swords, guns, slow motion) and there was also an amazing action narrative series called Ray with Southpark themed characters and one of the craziest platformers I ever played called N. I managed to snag some of these a while back and pr…

N is one of my favorite platformers of all time. Happily, it's still around and doesn't require any Flash hacks! https://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html Do you know if there's been any progress on preserving the older Macromedia games? I remember those starting to get flaky even in the Flash heyday.

Not to my knowledge, I only got introduced to flash ~2007, I've mostly been going by stuff I can recall and hunting for them on wayback machine.

Re: I still use Flash

#123

Post by dkarl »

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"

That's the discipline of data-driven business. If 20 people use your app and despise it and are depressed by it, that's better than 19 people using it and loving it. No sentimentality allowed.

Re: I still use Flash

#124

Post by mejutoco »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #96

I remember creating a simple "catch the falling X" game in Flash 20 years ago. It was basic, but had everything you'd expect in a beginner project: points, multiple game states/screens, a victory condition, basic story (which was just a screen at the beginning, like NES). The thing is, I was a literal child and I also had no clue how to code -- I did everything by following tutorials and gluing together code I copy&p…

This brings so many memories. One could use decompilers to see how other games were made. It was fantastic for learning.

I am surprised Adobe did not manage to get Flash / Adobe Animate adapted to html5/js without people jumping ship.

Re: I still use Flash

#125

Post by iKnowKungFoo »

LoveMortuus wrote: post #83

Anyone knows of a modern browser that still supports flash? I'm stuck having to use old browsers, which I'm not very happy about. Ruffle doesn't work the for game that I play (Crystal Saga).

Flash was shuttered due to being a constant, huge security risk. So no modern browsers support it and there aren't any plugins for it other than Ruffle.

Re: I still use Flash

#126

Post by rogual »

bjackman wrote: post #52
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.

It was great, loved the concise writing style, and it was a cool story.

Thanks! It's actually great to hear you describe it as concise, I was worried it was a bit waffly to be honest.

Re: I still use Flash

#127

Post by junkieradio »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #96

I remember creating a simple "catch the falling X" game in Flash 20 years ago. It was basic, but had everything you'd expect in a beginner project: points, multiple game states/screens, a victory condition, basic story (which was just a screen at the beginning, like NES). The thing is, I was a literal child and I also had no clue how to code -- I did everything by following tutorials and gluing together code I copy&p…

Wick editor is the closest modern thing to traditional flash ie. Flash 8.

I've made a fully animated pixel platformer tech demo type thing in it, it's somewhat capable.

Re: I still use Flash

#128

Post by CharlesW »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #96

I remember creating a simple "catch the falling X" game in Flash 20 years ago. It was basic, but had everything you'd expect in a beginner project: points, multiple game states/screens, a victory condition, basic story (which was just a screen at the beginning, like NES). The thing is, I was a literal child and I also had no clue how to code -- I did everything by following tutorials and gluing together code I copy&p…

> It blows my mind that no one has made a tool like that in so long. […] Why has the pinnacle of ease of use in game creation been achieved and never replicated since?

FWIW it never went away¹ and targets standards-based runtimes these days. I'm sure there are many kids every month having the same kind of epiphanies with it!

That being said, because Adobe Animate is marketed as a tool for professionals rather than kids/enthusiasts, orders of magnitude more kids are having the kind of experience you had with Minecraft and Roblox instead.

¹ https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

Re: I still use Flash

#129

Post by rogual »

Nuthen wrote: post #116

Great article, thank you for sharing this experience. The part I found most interesting is the section about the aspect ratio and interpolating between the 16:9 and 16:10 views relative to the original, although I'm having some trouble fully understanding the implementation. Why is the game interpolating between them based on the games aspect ratio?

I can't know ahead of time the exact aspect ratio the player will run the game at. 16:9 and 16:10 are the most common on today's monitors, but the game might be running in a window, or fullscreen on an unusual monitor.

If I just made the game at a fixed 16:9 ratio, it'd leave empty space at the edges of any window that isn't exactly 16:9. Same if I chose 16:10 or any fixed aspect ratio.

By supporting a range of ratios between 16:9 and 16:10, I maximize the number of window sizes that the game will display nicely in without any empty space (black bars) at the sides.

The best way, I thought, to support a range of aspect ratios was to define two rectangles in the scene, having the minimum and maximum ratios supported, and interpolate the camera rectangle between them.

Hope that makes sense!

Re: I still use Flash

#130

Post by ho_schi »

Interesting read. And it doesn't end up with Electron, which is "Flash for the Desktop".

Notarization

Why I don't wonder? I come from Linux and the weird rules for App Bundles and Notarization on Mac are pain. And badly documented. And the tools suck! Which entitlements my app needs? How to change libraries paths? Compiling applications on Mac is easy (with Hombrew), shipping to ordinary users as App Bundles is complex and difficult. If you're not a MacOS-Developer using XCode?

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