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Building a new Flash

bill.newgrounds.com

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Re: Building a new Flash

#121

Post by tombert »

fenomas wrote: post #61
alhazrod wrote: post #8

I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...

If it was possible they would have loved to - certainly by 2012 or so, and more likely by 2008-9. The reason I heard they couldn't is that by that time Flash Player was a massive 10+ year old codebase with lots of parts that were licensed or external, and nobody had ever tracked which parts would be to be relicensed or rewritten. Source: I worked there at the time and knew the relevant PMs.

That doesn't surprise me, honestly.

I wish they had been able to figure out how to do it, but licensing and patents and whatnot have held back lots of innovation.

Re: Building a new Flash

#122

Post by wesammikhail »

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…

God I love the look of those old school sites. Takes me back to a happier time. Whatever happened? :(

Re: Building a new Flash

#123

Post by emi2k01 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #116

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 an…

I tried Rive Editor and I could not export my animation unless I upgraded to a paid plan, not even to a proprietary format. The free plan is is just a demo with no real world usage, not even for hobby.

A bit mad because I spent more time playing with it than I would like to admit

Re: Building a new Flash

#125

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

egypturnash wrote: post #90
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents. I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.

There were zero open-source options at the time. Flash/Animate was the only digital ink-n-paint solution that was even vaguely affordable to the hobbyist or small studio for many years. Most studio-quality 2D programs were proprietary solutions developed in big studios like Disney. People started using Flash for professional work around 1995 . "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the nam…

> "Open source" barely existed as a concept then,

I was introduced to "free software" and the GPL in 1986, as a PhD student at the European Molecular Biology Lab (Heidelberg).

Your historical revisionism doesn't sit well. Yes, "open source" came later because some people didn't like the specifics of the GPL and wanted a term that could describe "source available" software under a variety of license. But by 1998, I'd already been contributing to GPL'ed projects for more than a decade.

I'm well aware of the lack of free/libre alternatives to Flash. But that wasn't my point at all. I'm not saying that people failed by choosing Flash over some (mythical) free/libre alternative. I'm saying they failed by choosing Flash, period.

Before proprietary software, there were almost no creative tools that were proprietary. Nobody bought proprietary paint, or proprietary paint brushes, or proprietary table saws, or propriety anything. The software showed up, and everyone was so gaga about what you could do with it that they just forget about the fact that XYZ Corp. controlled the tools 100%, and dived in. There were people warning them, but those people were ignored.

Re: Building a new Flash

#126

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

egypturnash wrote: post #86
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who has authored anything they actually cared about using Flash in the last 15 years? I don't know Animate - is it basically Flash Updated (I've read here that Adobe kept some elements of Flash in Animate, but it is unclear what). Also, there are non-Flash players for .fla files (not editors, however).

Animation studios. I know for a fact that Teen Titans was animated in Flash/Animate for its entire life, for instance; that’s directly from a former co-worker who was the animation director there. Lots of small productions, too. Animate is a lot cheaper than Toon Boom Harmony so tons of hobbyists use it. The only difference between Animate and Flash is that SWF export got dropped eventually. And a haphazard smatterin…

OK, my mistake on .fla vs. .swf ...

so the story is that Flash basically disappeared from the web, but evolved into a tool to do more general/extensive animation (Animate) that continues to be used today even though the output is (essentially) never .swf files? is that more or less correct?

Re: Building a new Flash

#128

Post by random3 »

fenomas wrote: post #118
random3 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hahaha. Always cool to find users of the tools/products you build, including the obscure ones, and on HN no less :))

Re: Building a new Flash

#129

Post by Dectanable »

This is exactly the Ardour model (and what Aseprite did before their license change). It's a highly viable way to sustain a niche FOSS desktop app in 2026. Make the repo open source, but put a price tag on the official, signed binaries on the main website. The professionals who need this to get work done will gladly pay a fee to avoid spending an afternoon fighting with Avalonia dependencies and build environments. The starving students and FOSS purists can clone the repo and run the build scripts themselves.

Re: Building a new Flash

#130

Post by qingcharles »

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…

Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?

I remember trying to produce a Flash renderer in C# when we wrote DudeFactory to render out the characters after you used the Flash app to put all their clothes and accessories on. I think we cheated in the end and pre-rendered large PNGs of them all and used .NET to just layer them all with instructions sent from Flash.

https://dudefactory.com/

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