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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#391

Post by pmontra »

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 is perfectly balanced. It can be read top to bottom in a few minutes. If you feel like to expand a part you can write a new post and link it from the original one.

Some other posts are born with all the tiny details, are too long to be read on one session and I end up missing even the key points because that second session never happens.

Re: I still use Flash

#392

Post by falcolas »

kortilla wrote: post #352
falcolas wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who would grow your food? >> There are exceptions of course. There are about 2M farmers and ranchers in the US. 22M health care professionals. 4M teachers. 2M truckers, 135k rail workers, 40k miners, etc. Even at our highest employment levels, under half of those in the US are employed. They're just not counted as unemployed because they're either children, in school, retired, or simply not seeking employment. Yes,…

That farmer count is only as small as it is because of the massive society they are built on that allows that to scale. You briefly scratched at with miners, but you forgot all of the machinery and auto manufacturers, the massive energy industry that powers all of it, etc. > Yes, I do believe that most jobs are superfluous I think you just don’t understand the purpose of many jobs. If the accountant for the local gro…

If your society focuses primarily on money, bad things.

If your society focuses on supporting a population's needs, not much.

Re: I still use Flash

#393

Post by int_19h »

fomine3 wrote: post #363
int_19h wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that on some platforms, text doesn't quite scale linearly as you increase the point size. Techniques like subpixel antialiasing with pixel-snapping produce shapes that are more readable on low-res screens, but it also causes distortion to letter shapes, and with multiple letters, depending on the exact text and its location, it can add up to amounts significant enough to cause overflow.

It's a problem on older GUI platform with HiDPI support, but new WYSIWYG GUI platform should be able to implement it correctly.

It's a problem on any platform that wants more readable text on low resolution. The only platform I know of that chose precise text layout over contrast regardless of the resolution is macOS. On Windows, ClearType still behaves as I described above. On Linux, it depends FreeType settings, which you don't know in advance, so you have to assume that it will happen.

Re: I still use Flash

#395

Post by andai »

andai wrote: post #357
cpeterso wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who worked on Macromedia’s and then Adobe’s Flash Player team, I thank you for sharing your experience preserving your Flash content! Did you investigate Haxe or OpenFL?

Can you comment on why Adobe let Flash die? Did it just become unprofitable compared to their other projects?

Or did Apple give them a nice deal in exchange? ;)

Re: I still use Flash

#396

Post by rogual »

JoeyJoJoJr wrote: post #263
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.

Great article! I also still use Flash by using a custom runtime that interprets the output of the “Export as texture atlas” feature. I was wondering if you had attempted to use this feature in order the rasterize the graphics? https://github.com/jackwlee01/animate_cc_runtime

Thanks!

Looks like that feature was added in Animate CC, which I don't use, so I haven't tried it.

Looking at the docs, it looks like something I would have at least tried. Might have saved me writing the rasterizer, though I'd still have wanted to atlas everything together into bigger atlases, and make binary animation files.

One downside vs the .fla parsing approach I went with is that even if you can script away the GUI clicking, you'd still have to have Flash open while the build script runs. I quite like having an exporter that is just a CLI program you can run without Flash, though it's not a massive deal.

I'd be interested to see what exactly Animate puts into the animation.json file it generates. The docs don't seem to mention it, and I couldn't find any example ones online.

Your tool looks great, by the way — have you made any games with it?

Re: I still use Flash

#399

Post by Airapport »

This is an excellent and very informative story! Special thanks for how the Beziers are encoded in XML - I needed this once, but gave up for alternative way.

I recall how I rasterized sprites in my Flash games, I just did it on-the-go right after the game was loaded. I created a Vector. which stored sprites’ frames, and then drew those BitmapData to the main BitmapData by copyPixels.

It’s interesting how far did you proceed with AIR way and what bugs did you encounter? It’s been nor Adobe but Harman AIR since 2019 and recently AIR50 is out. If you look for a Steam game named Shapik it’s a good example of a Flash game on Steam which was ported via AIR. I use AIR for my mobile Action Script 3 games as well, and now thinking about going to Steam

Re: I still use Flash

#400

Post by rogual »

eldenlad wrote: post #180
rogual wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! * You can't set keyboard shortcuts for some common actions like changing the brush mode between "paint behind", "paint inside", etc. You have to click the button every time. * No way to import or export any standard vector graphics formats. * No easy way to just add custom properties to objects on the stage. * No outliner. Unless you put exactly one object on each layer, it's very hard to find and select object…

Have you tried writing any custom plugins/editor panels to use in the editor? The process is pretty arcane at first, but eventually you are just writing html+javascript and have access to a very powerful editor API. When I was working with Animate a few years ago I wrote a plugin to navigate around the timeline to find tagged frames and export things.

Yes! In fact, out of those problems I listed, I always thought the timeline navigation (and maybe the outliner) would be good candidates for a .jsfl plugin, I just never got round to doing it. Good to hear it's doable!
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