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Building a new Flash

bill.newgrounds.com

231–240 of 247 posts

Re: Building a new Flash

#231
post #163

I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for. So my understanding is that most useful thing is probably the .fla importer. Wouldn't it make sense to focus on authoring-tooling (animator+developer coop) and the importer but "export" to standard web tech?

Often in these threads people say that thing does exist (Adobe Animate) and it's all fine, prblmslvd. Rarely are those people who themselves used Flash extensively (although some probably exist). There's something missing though, something went wrong in the transition from Flash to Animate. Part of the beauty of working with Flash, at least as a newcomer or someone who leaned more towards graphics/animation than code…

Flash was an onramp to UX engineering in a way that no current tool compares to.

You would start out drawing, get tired of the repetitive parts, and learn to automate them. Eventually, you end up with an FLA file that's just an asset library and a reference to a script.

Plus, it had the most intuitive vector editor I've ever used.

Re: Building a new Flash

#232
Would be kind of cool. Flash 2.0. Or 10.0.

One may say "but but but HTML5!" - but many games or applications that used to exist, are mostly gone (not all but many). Flash was creative. Joecartoon was fun back in those days; the HTML version is kind of ... lifeless compared to it. Granted, a lot of the "old" internet was also different so it is hard to compare.

Re: Building a new Flash

#233

It makes me so happy to see this. When I was in high school Flash was THE way that you could practice programming games with the instant feedback of graphics animation, key input, and playing sound. I enjoyed it so much that out of college I joined the Adobe Platform team right around 2008. I worked in the SF office which was formerly the Macromedia HQ before Adobe bought them out. There were some really cool Flash t…

The first time I saw Bret Victor speak was at a FlashCamp at that office! Went to some really cool talks there.

Also shipped my only Android game as an AIR app.

I will forever be one of Flash's defenders. Was the best digital creative tool I ever encountered.

Re: Building a new Flash

#234
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Yeah, there's two approaches to rendering Flash vector art. You can turn the curves into polygons, or render them to textures. Ruffle, I recall, makes everything polygons (so it's a little chunky if you zoom in?), and Super Meat Boy rendered everything to textures. I'm not sure what the actual flash player did, which seems to have pretty decent performance relative to Ruffle in my testing. Maybe they have some propri…

OpenVG is just an API by Kronos group, that was never implemented by hardware vendors on desktop graphic cards (it was specifically created for mobiles, as OpenGL|ES).

Btw, there exists several implementations, with pure CPU rendering (like AmanithVG SRE) and others with GPU backends.

Re: Building a new Flash

#235
There's much love given here to Flash as a creative tool and as an on-ramp for UX engineering. Both well-deserved, and both reason-enough to support Bill's project.

One aspect that Flash got uniquely right was the ability to push and pull on vectors like clay. It's the only vector editing tool I've ever used that didn't concern you with bezier abstractions and just let you directly manipulate them.

I don't know what algorithms were that enabled that, but I hope that's part of this tool too!

Curious if C# is the right language for an ActionScript revival. Feels like a strange choice considering ActionScript was the TypeScript of its day, but perhaps the prevalence of Unity now and the ability to share tech with the tool's C# codebase makes it a reasonable decision.

Re: Building a new Flash

#236
post #163

I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for. So my understanding is that most useful thing is probably the .fla importer. Wouldn't it make sense to focus on authoring-tooling (animator+developer coop) and the importer but "export" to standard web tech?

"I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for."

True, it can, BUT what's lacking in the total arena is actual authoring and development toolchains, which is what Flash packaged all in one single bundle.

I'm not trying to install 4 or 5 different things, along with all of their dependencies, just to make some 200MB thing that could have been done in 20MB and one program with Flash.

Re: Building a new Flash

#237
That's cool and all, but can we pass a law that this can ONLY be used for games? Because I remember the web when flash was everywhere. The games might have been fun, but everything else sucked humongous balls. Let's not get back to that.

Re: Building a new Flash

#239

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 f…

Every time I see SVG mentioned with Flash I just think it's immensely ignorant. No offense, but programmers love to think of "vectors" as SVG because it's all they know. For several years I kept hearing people say "we have HTML5 and SVG now, so we don't need Flash anymore." And with that Flash animations and games were lost forever and I'm still bitter about it.

For artists, SVG is probably the worst vector format imaginable. In fact, I'd say any project that uses SVG as backend is doomed to fail with artists. It's pretty much a red flag at this point that if "supports vector" means "support SVG" they're doing it wrong and just chose the easiest to implement vector graphics because you probably have a billion open source SVG libraries at this point instead of rolling their own proprietary vector rendering algorithm that actually improves the artists' workflow.

To answer your question, the important thing about Flash wasn't the vector rendering but the vector art authoring tools. You could make Inkscape work like Flash, but nobody has done that yet. All you need is a brush tool that automatically does union of shapes of same color and subtraction of shapes of different color so the whole layer is always "flattened" with no shapes overlapping. This is the sort of thing that made Flash exceedingly easy to use for artists. It was a vector art program that worked exactly the same way as a raster digital art program. It thought of vectors not as shapes that the program was going to render but as paint strokes on a canvas.

If you were building a vector art software today you probably would want all sorts of things that SVG doesn't provide, e.g. line art with varying thickness based on tablet pressure (although Flash didn't need this, since you could draw shapes instead of strokes). You might also want to take a look at OpenToonz' vector implementation, which has "fills" that automatically expand when you change the enclosing strokes and an indexed color palette system, and CSP's line art vectors that let you use textured raster brushes with settings like dab scattering in vector strokes.

By the way, I also believe the idea that HTML5 could replace Flash games was insanely stupid. Anyone could make a Flash game and deploy it to web browsers in one click. Do that in HTML? With Javascript? Which means you need to download all these images/audio from the Internet? You want to play it locally? CORS issues, baby! Now you need to turn this mess into an electron app or use the most disgusting build step imaginable to turn whole jpegs into a base64 strings so you can create a single HTML file that is several megabytes. How did the entire world convince themselves that this was an actual replacement of Flash's functionality is honestly beyond me. For Flash websites, sure, you have now, but for everything else that Flash provided there has never been a proper replacement (at least until Godot/Unity started WASM'ing, but that was a long time after).

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