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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#371

Post by jimnotgym »

int_19h wrote: post #317
jimnotgym wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lost count of the number of 'I miss VB6/Flash/Delphi, they were so much more productive' threads on hn! Yet in this community of all the people who could make it happen, we can't make it happen! What are we missing? Time? Money? Co-ordination?

The problem is that the approach itself is kinda flawed. The moment you have to support high-DPI or translate the app to a different language (with text labels of different size), that whole trick of just WYSIWYG dragging and dropping widgets in a visual designer breaks down.

It isn't just the WYSIWYG element though, developing the UI elements in code is not that hard.

But imagine in Tkinter and Python, probably the least steps to get a basic UI, there is so much to manage.

In vb you double clicked a button in the designer and got a place to type code. All the stuff about event loops, and not blocking the thread was dealt with for you. In Python if you try the same thing the app freezes continuously. Then you want to do simple everyday things like a date picker, or progress bar, and find you need to implement it yourself????

Then having built your app in Tkinter and Python, you want to share it with some colleagues...so where is the 'compile button'?

It is easier to implement a machine learning model in Python than it is to make it into a standalone app with a file importer and a 'go' button!

Re: I still use Flash

#372

Post by lewispollard »

pjmlp wrote: post #366
whostolemyhat wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity's been working on an ECS option for a while now

Written in C#.

Yeah, "OO is going out of fashion" is a common phrase in gamedev, but what's actually meant is "deep class hierarchies defining the behaviour of game objects is going out of fashion". Most ECS code is still written in OO languages and makes heavy use of OO features.

Re: I still use Flash

#373

Post by optionalsquid »

adnzzzzZ wrote: post #362
wackget wrote: post #332

> Uploading achievements to Steam is a pain. You can't just define a list and give it to their command-line tools; you have to laboriously click through the slow, confusing miasma of PHP sadness that is the Steam partner site and add them one by one. > I think if you're a big important game studio you don't have to stand for that and they give you a bulk upload tool, but I'm not one of those so I looked at the HTTP c…

>No way. Fucking hell, Valve. Sort your shit out. How many thousands of hours have been wasted because of this? This is to prevent abuse. Some games will have 1000s of achievements as a feature, because gamers like games with lots of achievements (and because Valve kinda encourages that with some of their store features), so forcing people to do it manually is a way to decrease that kind of activity somewhat.

Valve already capped the number of achievements to 100 because of that kind of abuse, so I'm not sure it justifies having poor UX:

> By default, games are limited to 100 achievements at first. Reach out to us via the "Support" option at the top of this page if you have questions about this.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/achievements

Re: I still use Flash

#374

Post by noema »

adnzzzzZ wrote: post #362
wackget wrote: post #332

> Uploading achievements to Steam is a pain. You can't just define a list and give it to their command-line tools; you have to laboriously click through the slow, confusing miasma of PHP sadness that is the Steam partner site and add them one by one. > I think if you're a big important game studio you don't have to stand for that and they give you a bulk upload tool, but I'm not one of those so I looked at the HTTP c…

>No way. Fucking hell, Valve. Sort your shit out. How many thousands of hours have been wasted because of this? This is to prevent abuse. Some games will have 1000s of achievements as a feature, because gamers like games with lots of achievements (and because Valve kinda encourages that with some of their store features), so forcing people to do it manually is a way to decrease that kind of activity somewhat.

An easy solution to this is to give point-based weights to achievements and cap the max total "points" any given game can have, allowing a developer to have many small achievements for their game if they wish. But really, none of this matters because Steam achievements are easily auto-unlocked via SAM.

Re: I still use Flash

#375

Post by djmips »

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 might have missed this in the article but are you sharing any of your work? I know that a lot of the work was manual but some of your tooling might be useful for anyone else who want to go this craftsman route of converting a flash game.

Re: I still use Flash

#376

Post by acdha »

logotype wrote: post #245

Working with Flash was like working with future technologies, back in the day. You could build amazing things with it, things that was not possible using standard browser API’s. In fact, Flash led the way and was the prototype for what browsers can to today. If you cared about what you built, with clever hacks and bitwise performance tricks then the Flash runtime could run your code efficiently. I remember developing…

> That letter from Steve Jobs destroyed it all, many talented developers left the Flash world at that time. It was a bit depressing to see all the (unjustified) mainstream hate for the Flash platform that started to appear at that time,

You might not have seen it but the hate for Flash was well-established by then, solely due to Adobe’s gross mismanagement of their platform. Flash was what crashed and took out your entire browser session. Flash was what made drive-by compromises so easy and common. Flash was what popped up annoying “you should manually update” prompts because they sat out the automatic update trend for nearly two decades. Flash was also what made your entire computer visibly slow down because it was so inefficient - they weren’t an option on phones due to the UI differences but performance and memory alone would have ruled them out in any case.

Flash was also painful to develop for. Yes, you could do things which browsers couldn’t do back then but it came at the cost of having to pay Adobe thousands of dollars for shoddy, unsupported tools[1] and while there were a handful of ways where AS3 was ahead of JavaScript there many areas where it was behind and unlike browsers it stayed there, and it was really common to find bugs in Adobe’s libraries which meant you had to build a complete replacement or wait years to never for them to fix it.

People made cool things despite that but I attribute almost all of the blame for Flash’s demise to Adobe. They could have cut their executive bonus pool by 10% to hire a QA team and they’d have had a much better chance at long term success. Instead, they let the platform stagnate to the point where one of the early Chrome selling points was that when Flash crashed you’d only lose that page!

1. I bought a Flash license once. I naively filed bug reports for reproducible crashes in the player and IDE (the debugger was especially unstable), as well as compatibility and correctness issues with their various libraries. Each time, I got no reply before the next major release and then I got a generic “please pay $1,500 for the upgrade and let us know if we fixed it” message.

Re: I still use Flash

#377

Post by VadimPR »

barumrho wrote: post #338
wackget wrote: post #332

> Uploading achievements to Steam is a pain. You can't just define a list and give it to their command-line tools; you have to laboriously click through the slow, confusing miasma of PHP sadness that is the Steam partner site and add them one by one. > I think if you're a big important game studio you don't have to stand for that and they give you a bulk upload tool, but I'm not one of those so I looked at the HTTP c…

The bit about Apple Notarization is incorrect. You can do it with a free Apple Developer account. You only need to pay $99 if you want to distribute it through the App Store.

I don't believe you are correct I'm this. A paid account is necessary to obtain the signing cert.

Re: I still use Flash

#378

Post by chriskanan »

kitd wrote: post #140
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…

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.

I spent a huge amount of time coding in VB5 and VB6 in the 1990s and early 2000s during high school and my first years of college for hobby projects. Definitely felt like the most fun language and I was far more productive than in C/C++/Java/Pascal. With some work areas that needed to be optimized could be to be pretty fast when compiled. Everything was integrated and a good debugger.

I didn't get the hate. Maybe software engineering folks don't want coding to be fun and productive.

Re: I still use Flash

#379

Post by BulgarianIdiot »

dncornholio wrote: post #86
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…

> and today we can do everything Flash did, and more, with HTML, and WebGL This is a myth, theoretical true, but practically impossible. Flash was so much more than a browser plugin. With HTML5 it is so much harder to maintain a framerate, while in Flash you almost didn't need to care about that.

Flash did skip frames when it couldn't keep up, and this is what any animation framework would do as well for HTML5, or video in video players and so on.

We don't have a well established (in people's minds that is) framework and IDE for it that did all Flash did. But actually I do believe we have everything in place in terms of APIs and capabilities, and in fact even more, because... have you seen some of the WebGL animations? PixiJS? The others?

I doubt. WebGL + the rest of the web stack is way more powerful than Flash EVER was.

Mindshare matters. Without an established IDE and people knowing about it... it's not happening. Another issue is that Flash-like content was notoriously mobile-unfriendly. So we do less of those types of UIs now. Not that we can't... but it's harder.

Re: I still use Flash

#380

Post by throwaway2037 »

wackget wrote: post #332

> Uploading achievements to Steam is a pain. You can't just define a list and give it to their command-line tools; you have to laboriously click through the slow, confusing miasma of PHP sadness that is the Steam partner site and add them one by one. > I think if you're a big important game studio you don't have to stand for that and they give you a bulk upload tool, but I'm not one of those so I looked at the HTTP c…

>

Read question: Can this be automated with Selenium? For a long time I was using very low level Chrome DevTools libraries. Then I switched to Selenium. It is so impressive. It actually works, without weird 1-5% failures that you waste time chasing... then adding small sleeps to make it smooth and working.

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