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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#101

Post by Bakingpotato »

kmeisthax wrote: post #67
Bakingpotato wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby

The problem was that Flash Player needed significant rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at least, not without finding a way to get more money out of game developers for the privilege. The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is sp…

>adobe didn't want to pay for rewrites or bugfixes yeah, its a wonder they ever bought it to start with, then

you don't just buy someone's entire workflow and then not fix any of it. not at least, if you intend for people to believe you when you say you're the future.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#102

Post by Bakingpotato »

dylan604 wrote: post #81
Bakingpotato wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby

If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. The optics of history seem to be blurring how bad it was. Yes, you could do some cool and fun things at a very affordable way, but it was a security nightmare as people were trying to do much more complicated things that sprite animations. Rose tinted glasses of an old piece of tech than on…

less rose tinted glasses and more the insanity of people entrusting logins and security to flash player to start with, or even adobe for adding that in. Yknow. if it was riddled with bugs and all that, you might avoid such a thing, for say, a banking page. Macromedia designed flash to be a web based animation system, not a full web stack. The very fact that these things were attempted is insane enough, and whats worse is the people who were surprised when it came crashing down.

all this talk about security and flash's being bad at it, and you forget what flash really was for. It wasn't for blaring ads (you can do that without flash) and it wasn't for secure logins anyone who did use it for those was a money maker or a madman.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#103

Post by Bakingpotato »

jonplackett wrote: post #59

The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool. It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites. I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t. I wish Adobe had do…

nah, HTML5 was and still isn't good enough for a straight conversion, as years of flash ""alternatives"" have shown us.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#104

Post by mschuster91 »

dylan604 wrote: post #81
Bakingpotato wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby

If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. The optics of history seem to be blurring how bad it was. Yes, you could do some cool and fun things at a very affordable way, but it was a security nightmare as people were trying to do much more complicated things that sprite animations. Rose tinted glasses of an old piece of tech than on…

> If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell.

No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare throughout its existence, just as ActiveX and Java applets were.

The key thing is, these things were created in a time when there were far less bad actors on the Internet - not just because finding an actually working version of IDA was a challenge in itself but also because the financial aspect motivating bad actors these days (i.e. botnets, crypto malware) just wasn't existing or at least was sorta confined to nation-state actors. Plugin vendors could get away with an awful lot of utter bullshit back in the early '00s.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#105

Post by Bakingpotato »

j4ah4n wrote: post #66

They certainly were fun days back with Macromedia at the helm. Full suite of tools that worked extremely well together. I remember when Tim Burton put out various cartoons via Director (the same used for countless DVDs) that opened up more dramatic storytelling than the business “intros” offered at the time (I built these too mind you). I was even Flash AS3 certified at one point, something I was very proud of in my…

and then adobe spit on all of it. what a waste, and its all on adobe.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#106

Post by mschuster91 »

derefr wrote: post #32
TillE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just fine on YouTube. It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.

Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime . (You could still download them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1/RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire. It was no…

> Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway.

You still needed Flash as a player platform for many years afterward. IIRC, Apple were the ones to finally push people to use native HTML elements for that.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#107

Post by mschuster91 »

Bakingpotato wrote: post #49
bamfly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash is to web dev as Excel is to desktop applications: it "sucks" but is also arguably the single best tool the entire field has produced. The technologies that might replace Flash are "better" but also so much worse that they aren't even close to actually replacing it, years on—and, yeah, that's mostly about the authoring tools, which were not just excellent, but also de facto free for hobbyists (thanks, piracy) w…

not only that, the shovelware scene proved that it was piss easy to use, and powerful (especially in the later years) see as many html5 gaming webpages lately? yeah, no. the 'death' of flash killed the browser game and rapid prototyping that flash offered, and there is nothing on that level in this age. the problems that html5, css and javascript could in theory 'solve' are a moot point when the switch to those techn…

And so many of the Flash web games could be saved because they were completely self-contained units.

Today? Just forget about saving some web based game someone makes because it's probably streaming its assets from some dynamically computed URLs

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#108

Post by NovaDudely »

kmeisthax wrote: post #90
cubefox wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite get why the Flash plugins were do slow on mobile. On Windows desktop, Flash was much faster than other NPAPI plugins. Most other plugins froze the whole browser for a second or so (Java even longer), while Flash didn't do that. And at the time, early native "HTML5 replacements" for Flash ads/games were actually slower than Flash.

Flash was software rendered almost exclusively. It also had quality options that let you scale the software renderer down a whole lot. But it still required a beefy CPU to push all those pixels. On mobile, you don't get a fast CPU - you get hardware accelerated EVERYTHING. Everything has to be done on GPU. Hell, iPhones still have dedicated JPEG decoders in them. And vector rendering on GPUs is a pain to do, even mor…

I always remember Flash being really fast at the vector calculation but and absolute hog on output rendering. So higher screen resolution hammered the CPU even though everything was setup.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#109

Post by cyberax »

cubefox wrote: post #75
kmeisthax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was that Flash Player needed significant rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at least, not without finding a way to get more money out of game developers for the privilege. The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is sp…

I don't quite get why the Flash plugins were do slow on mobile. On Windows desktop, Flash was much faster than other NPAPI plugins. Most other plugins froze the whole browser for a second or so (Java even longer), while Flash didn't do that. And at the time, early native "HTML5 replacements" for Flash ads/games were actually slower than Flash.

Flash plugin was extremely well-optimized, it was one of the very few users of the original Pentium MMX extensions, and later SSE. That's also why they had such a difficult time porting it to 64 bits.

The Flash renderer was also state-of-the-art for the moment, with really awesome anti-aliasing and blending. All while using just fixed-point integer arithmetic.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#110

Post by lucgommans »

kmeisthax wrote: post #93
lucgommans wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did that work on the NYT site for you? Because for me it doesn't seem to, but then I figure you're just replying in general and not about this rock-paper-scissors AI

I did try on Ruffle, but it's a slightly older version, it's possible that either newer versions have a regression or you have a really old extension version.

Omg, it works! Why does this work? It doesn't work on Firefox ~4 on Windows XP with a real Flash player installed, nor does it work on MSIE8 on that system. I tried on the original site as well as on a custom file that embeds just that flash file, but no dice.

I suppose it's worth uploading the swf to archive.org and seeing if it will work there as well. Edit: https://archive.org/details/newyorktimes-2010-interactive-ro... says "failed to download game data" but I'm not seeing a failed request in the developer console. Not sure if that's a problem with my upload or if IA hasn't finished processing it or something. /edit

It's not fully functional by the way: the computer is not being animated at all, the text areas are too small, the score counter doesn't update... but it runs! Thank you :)

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