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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#191

Post by shlubbert »

dwild wrote: post #167
ecshafer wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a small but major difference with Flash vs Minecraft and Roblox. Flash let you create something from scratch (or close to it). You aren't just modding a game, you are making a game or a cartoon. It was fantastic. Minecraft you are limited to the world of minecraft.

The amount of commercial games that used (and still does actually) Flash is much higher than many could believe. Jackbox is probably one that many here have played in the past few years. Some games used it only for UI, like Borderlands.

For context, most of these games use(d) a Flash derivative called Scaleform for their GUIs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx — it's discontinued now but was indeed hugely popular.

A lot of games today use an HTML-powered UI library from Coherent Labs which can still be authored using Adobe Animate (i.e. what the Flash editor turned into): https://coherent-labs.com/

Re: I still use Flash

#192

Post by warent »

No way! This is the creator of Hapland... As a kid playing flash games on websites all day like Addicting Games, Armor Games, etc. you don't really think much about the people behind these projects. Then time goes on and they cement themselves in your mind as a myth.

The fact that I now get to read and understand articles by this legend, and work in the same industry vertical him... what a privilege!

Thanks for your work. Hugely inspirational to my career.

Re: I still use Flash

#193

Post by TylerGlaiel »

Flash is great and tons of devs still use flash. I also use flash in my custom game engine (the one powering The End is Nigh and the upcoming Mewgenics), a different approach to what the dev in this article did (seeing as these are new games and not ports of existing flash games), my approach is to load SWF files as the resource files for art and animation in my game, and render them as vector. Flash puts a lot of information in those files, and I parse just enough actionscript bytecode that I hook and trigger C++ functions from my actionscript parser. This lets us use flash almost exactly the way we used it for making flash games back in the mid 2000s, with all of the interesting workflow tricks and hacks that made it so nice, while being able to write all the actual gameplay code in a real language and render it with openGL so its actually fast.

Re: I still use Flash

#194

Post by vkazanov »

texuf wrote: post #190
vkazanov wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World of tanks used Flash-based tech for game UIs as well. PS At least that was the case 9-10 years ago when I was involved.

Scaleform - it came with the big world engine

Did it? I remember it was something Adobe, suspected Adobe Air.

Anyways, the client ui team definitely used Actionscript, which I had to read from time to time as a server-side dev.

Re: I still use Flash

#195

Post by TylerGlaiel »

gibspaulding wrote: post #25

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…

flashpoint is not a flash emulator, its a preservation effort that has archived tons of flash content from the web

Ruffle is the flash emulator https://ruffle.rs/

Re: I still use Flash

#196

Post by zamadatix »

strix_varius wrote: post #168
AshleysBrain wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sorry this isn't super actionable, but in case it's a helpful data point, I tried to check this out and wasn't able to. To repro: 1. Clicked on your link 2. Moused over "Construct 3" in the header, clicked "Showcase." 3. Clicked on a game in the showcase at random ("Bunnicula in Rescuing Harold"). 4. Page loaded with a graphic & a play button. 5. I tried clicking play & nothing happened. 6. Shortly after, Brave (…

Similar experience with using the showcase "AsteroidX" albeit no "unresponsive" dialog though just wouldn't load. It looks like the root of that issue is it requires 3rd party cookies to load but modern browsers block that by default and the error isn't bubbled up to the user. https://www.construct.net/en/free-online-games/asteroidx-650...

Re: I still use Flash

#197

Post by zamadatix »

AshleysBrain wrote: post #21
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.

If only web games were this smooth during my childhood :). Great stuff!

Re: I still use Flash

#199

Post by RulerOf »

rogual wrote: post #129
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 ratio…

I really appreciated the visualization you provided for that.
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