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Building a new Flash

bill.newgrounds.com

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Re: Building a new Flash

#111

Post by tombert »

idreyn wrote: post #102
moolcool wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.

Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.

Well said, and I completely agree.

Since Flash was an animation-first piece of software that still had a fairly robust scripting system, it was able to create very unique and interesting pieces of media that can kind of only exist as they are.

People aren't making full on TV cartoons in Construct or GameMaker. This isn't a dig at those tools, they're good software, but the animation parts of them are targeted much more towards "animation for games".

Re: Building a new Flash

#113

Post by Brajeshwar »

01100011 wrote: post #63

I know very little about this space, but wasn't Haxe( https://haxe.org/ ) supposed to be a sort of next-gen, modern Flash replacement?

Yes, not the Flash IDE per se, but an ActionScript Editor/Compiler. Nicolas from motiontwin.com released a tool called MTASC, which later gave birth to HAXE.

Re: Building a new Flash

#114

Post by tombert »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #104
tombert wrote: post #69

Heck yeah. I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made. Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedro…

I started my career as a Programmer and did a lot of programmatic designs. Unfortunately, I’m not artistic. So, my tools of choice for Design were Code and Mathematics. Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn’t notice anything that interested me. I don’t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called “ASfunction” inside Flash, “What? You ca…

Yeah, I actually got into Flash because I wanted to be an animator some day. I made some crappy cartoons but sadly my art skills never really improved, even with a fair amount of practice.

But in the process I learned about ActionScript and found I had a lot of fun coding things and playing with different programming constructs.

I keep meaning to try out haxe, it looks neat enough, but to me it's still kind of missing half of what I liked about Flash, which was the animation tooling.

Re: Building a new Flash

#115

Post by odo1242 »

tombert wrote: post #89
moolcool wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.

I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago. If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020. If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authorin…

There would still be the security issues, but yea this is still true

Re: Building a new Flash

#116

Post by socalgal2 »

I get that Flash hit a sweet spot. I'm not sure I get why nothing has really replaced it. There are other apps that give you animated vector graphics, in an IDE, with coding.

Here's 2?

https://rive.app/editor

https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/

I believe Unity doesn't do flash style vector animations. It will take in SVGs, turn them into meshes and apply skeletons. That said, it has replaced Flash in turns of the 1000s and 1000s of web games made with it.

https://poki.com/en/unity

https://itch.io/games/platform-web (majorty are Unity?)

Fun history: There was a flash like (vector animation program) for the Apple II called Fantavision.

https://youtu.be/8_Bm8bidrpE?t=40

It would export executables IIRC.

Re: Building a new Flash

#117

Post by notpushkin »

cableshaft wrote: post #7

I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even…

I feel we need a modular verdion of Flash: standalone editor that produces just the animations with Flash-like mechanics, SDKs for major OSS game frameworks, and possibly an editor component you can use in IDEs. You then drop in animation file(s) and track them in VCS like any other asset.

Edit: but of course, the standalone variant should work for non-game animations as well!

Re: Building a new Flash

#118

Post by fenomas »

random3 wrote: post #94
mmooss wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. What was the objective?

This was around when we were trying to get Flash to work on the first iPhone, so we had a hackathon for a week. Since I was a distributed systems "hacker", I ended up doing what was needed :) and there were lots of questions related to the sizing of flash on web pages and what not. That's what started it - I simple python script that I refined during the hackathon to get the embed parameters etc. But once I started p…

I remember using that tool internally! Personally I think I only used it to get stats of which features/APIs were popular. But I think other teams used it for QA/conformance, like finding content that occurred in the wild but wasn't covered by test cases.

Re: Building a new Flash

#119

Post by fenomas »

tombert wrote: post #89
moolcool wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.

I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago. If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020. If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authorin…

They would have if they could have - answered here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256093

Re: Building a new Flash

#120

Post by tombert »

odo1242 wrote: post #115
tombert wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago. If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020. If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authorin…

There would still be the security issues, but yea this is still true

Sure, maybe, but I think if it were FOSS'd back in ~2005, then these security issues could be addressed by a larger set of eyes, including the browser-makers themselves.

If this hypothetical universe happened, I think we'd have had something akin to WASM much earlier. Flash already had its own bytecode and VM, and even had something roughly like Emscripten [1] to compile existing C++ code to Flash.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossBridge

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