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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#401

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…

Thanks! I had all of Hapland 1 (and possibly 2?) working in AIR before I ditched it. I can't remember an exact list of bugs, I think I was just getting graphical glitches and the normal timeline bugs you sometimes get in Flash. Sometimes the AIR tools would fail with Java tracebacks too. Performance was also not where I wanted it, and I wanted full control of the scene code for save states, so the reasons to switch were just mounting up.

Re: I still use Flash

#403
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess we will never know hehe

Adobe couldn’t figure out how to monetize Flash, other than selling the Flash authoring tool to Flash designers, a dying breed, for a few hundred bucks or bundled in Adobe’s Creative Suite. Adobe tried selling Flash video DRM, which got undercut by Google Widevine, and selling licenses to unlock Flash opcodes for advanced 3D and C++ cross compilation, which was undercut by web technologies like WebAssembly.

Also, I think Flash was more expensive to maintain than Adobe’s other design applications because the Flash Player needed constant security patches. Adobe was usually happy to milk cash cow products, such as Director and Shockwave, transferring maintenance to remote teams in India.

Re: I still use Flash

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash really was that easy for so many people. Why isn’t there a true replacement?

It is a funny thing. This was during the big push for everything Smart phones, apps and viable streaming changing tastes and the domination of social media. That combo simply knocked it off its pedestal in no time. The technical legacy of Flash made it a poor fit for touch screens. Apps filled that void with astounding speed. This part is just a vague opinion I am riffing with - With mass available video, a ocean of…

I mean what’s missing here is a 2D game maker / interactive app maker that anyone can use and trivially deploy to the web, no?

Re: I still use Flash

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but due to CPU caches and memory alignment issues, ECS have better performance than inheritance; also because most ECS systems ditch virtual function calls.

> ECS have better performance than inheritance Can have. Whether or not an ECS will actually be faster depends entirely on the type of game and access patterns of the inheritance structure. Further, it matters how you are doing inheritance (LTO can eliminate a lot of the pitfalls even if you use virtual function calls). This is nothing against ECS. I just find the current claims of performance dubious and potentially…

I believe claims of "compilers getting faster/bigger enough" are the exact reason we have ECS now. It surely depends of the kind of game, but games with any kind of entity which isn't unique should feel the performance improvements.

Ideally, compilers should be able to transform classes into ECS layout when generating code. Shouldn't be hard to have a pass before compilation, if we use clang.

Re: I still use Flash

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Proton is accepted as the solution to Linux gaming what is the reason for a developer to build for Linux over Windows? Funnily enough there are parallels with that to why Apple didn’t want Flash on iOS. If you could make it in Flash and ship to both why code an iOS app. Same thing, zero reason to make a native Linux build while that works fine.

Initially, Apple actually looked at an iOS version of Flash. This was around 2009/2010 IIRC. There were special dev iPhones that ran Flash. Adobe didn’t want to optimize it because they thought the iPhone would fail. Apple thought the performance was garbage and the communication mostly ended. I got to play with one for a few days and the performance was terrible. Even simple games lagged and the touch points were a…

I was heavy working in Flash around this time, I remember Apple saying the performance of Flash was too bad to consider using on iPhone and I remember around 3 months later the Mac version of Flash magically ran 4 times better when for years and years it always ran a lot slower than Windows and Adobe pretended there was nothing they could do about it.

Re: I still use Flash

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Python has potential to support some environment like Visual Basic. But there is no such project, as far as I know. All GUI frameworks are more complex, and there is no nice drag & drop GUI editor build into an easy Python IDE. At least I don't know it. Maybe if you use PyCharm, select some framework, find the right PyCharm plugins for it, you would have sth similar, but still much more difficult to use, and als…

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?

I'm in the process of making something like VB6 (yazz.com), but which is using Javascript instead of Basic for scripting. I would say that if you look at retool, bubble and many other low code tools then you will see that they are doing the same
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