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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#201

Post by AndrewSwift »

hutzlibu wrote: post #136
CharlesW wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ki…

"FWIW it never went away¹ and targets standards-based runtimes these days. " I just tried Adobe Animate recently and nothing worked out of the box or like flash used to. I basically had to tinker, until even basic animations somewhat worked. And I even have quite some experience with EaselJS, the target framework, but that didn't helped much. The power of flash was the ease of use - that is gone.

You might like Svija — you can easily animate SVGs using Illustrator. It's not as powerful yet as Flash, but that's our goal. Disclaimer, I made it ;-)

Re: I still use Flash

#202

Post by leetrout »

I know it is not the same thing but Godot is close for being able to get something working in 2D as fast as you could in Flash.

I am optimistic we will see a Flash alternative popup as WASM and WebGPU continue to grow.

Re: I still use Flash

#203

Post by tinco »

usui wrote: post #50

> The way forward was obvious; I'd have to make my own Flash player. Uhhhhhhh, hold on a second, wait a second... this is not readily apparent nor obvious as a course of action at all!! I would rather have gathered the raw assets and tried recoding the game using the same game logic on a better platform...

Would it have been less work? I wouldn't be so sure, given that the author was actually successful.

Re: I still use Flash

#204

Post by leetrout »

zackmorris wrote: post #172
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…

That's how I feel about HyperCard. Some apps were so ahead of their time that when they were axed, nothing comparable replaced them. I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to the…

"but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent"

THIS.

I am so sick of the competition in most tech jobs / companies to climb the stupid ladder. Everyone just wants more more more and our society reinforces that. I _REALLY_ miss working on teams that didn't have that amount of competition causing mild dysfunction.

Re: I still use Flash

#205

Post by japhib »

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…

Object-orientation is kind of the old-school way of doing things, these days it's all about ECS - entity component system. This is a more data-oriented approach that has the potential for much higher performance when you have thousands of objects that need updating in your game. It's similar to how OO languages like Java/C# are going out of style and more (nominally, at least) data-oriented languages such as Go or Rust are in style.

Re: I still use Flash

#206

Post by bottlepalm »

clarge1120 wrote: post #163
kitd wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add Visual Basic to your "glue bits together" list. After working on C++ & FORTRAN professionally, Visual Basic was like a breath of fresh air. I remember thinking "how could programming be this simple". It felt like cheating. Ofc, there's an evil undercurrent to the "any non-technical person can use it". We ended up having to support a tool that some "business analyst" had written. My eyes bled.

The redpill in me says MSFT created dotnet to kill VB6. That tool made it too easy (and cheap) to create value through automation.

To be fair, WinForms is the spiritual successor to VB6, a lot more powerful, and just as productive.

Re: I still use Flash

#207

Post by marcosdumay »

kome wrote: post #174
clarge1120 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The redpill in me says MSFT created dotnet to kill VB6. That tool made it too easy (and cheap) to create value through automation.

it's a generalized trend. Python is the new BASIC, but Python is SO much more complicated than BASIC. Web development was easy, now it's impossibly complicated, etc etc... Rebol, Red, tcl/tk are good and easy programming languages, but kinda niche and obscure. I have no idea why computing is getting more complicated instead of easier.

I only disagree on web development. It was never easy. The web always always a mess, and nothing really worked. Today it's a mess, but you can make it work if you know what you are doing.

But yes, looks like the web was a trendsetter that pushed things into becoming harder without any good reason. Or maybe the web was just following the trend of the toolmakers all going out business at the early 00's (thanks a lot to Microsoft).

Re: I still use Flash

#208

Post by rhn_mk1 »

hansworst wrote: post #118
zozbot234 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think touch screens are a bigger factor. You can't have small buttons in a touch-screen UI, because they must be targets for your finger. (OTOH, swipes in a touch UI are a lot easier than mouse drag-and-drop. So the optimal touch UX probably has lots of drag-activated pie menus. And confirmation flows for potentially destructive actions, to cope with the lower accuracy of touch interactions.)

Yeah, if my memory serves a lot of UI design started to get more airy around the time smartphones became more popular. Even on desktops, which I think may just be because large buttons and text became trendy and although some may deny it, I think a lot of ui design is just following trends. It takes a good designer to not just blindly copy things because they look cool.

Large buttons and text were trendy already in the 20th century. There's only so small you can go on an 800x600 14' screen.

The crucial difference between then and now is the amount of whitespace.

Re: I still use Flash

#209

Post by dandigangi »

thedragonline wrote: post #151
dandigangi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had an awesome experience learning programming on AS also! Simple projects/games but great language to learn. Can involve so many key concepts.

I miss AS. I used it to build a gis engine that packed 5D into what superficially looked like 2D - item renderers helped make that happen. It is aggravating to no end to watch people pile on Flash for its faults - they either don't understand what was lost or just don't want to understand the loss. Steve Jobs is in this group.

Flash really was great. Its unfortunate that they killed it. The Mini Clip and animated shorts days were awesome. Used to love finding cool animations in Deviant Art.

Re: I still use Flash

#210

Post by romwell »

CharlesW wrote: post #161
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.

> There is a small but major difference with Flash vs Minecraft and Roblox. Flash let you create something from scratch (or close to it). […] It was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic, yes! Roblox does allow you to make a game from scratch — even though the primitives are generally less primitive and the constraints much different — but my point is just that if you're wondering where the spirit of dj_mc_merlin's experie…

>Roblox does allow you to make a game from scratch

...with the caveat that once Roblox (the company) folds, all the games will be gone.

...and that since Roblox changes the code all the time, you have no idea whether your game will look the same in a year. Or even run.

So yes, while I understand what you mean by the spiritual successor.. Roblox takes everything that made Flash bad (i.e. dependence on a clunky binary that one day may not be supported), and makes it worse.

Source: worked in Roblox when a new shiny material pack was rolled out, which replaced existing materials in existing games, messing up the look of games where materials were used creatively.

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