The creativity and range of newgrounds content was mind blowing. The focus on fun as opposed to money making was really clear to me even as a kid. I've always had this little conspiracy theory that they killed flash because it was a threat, too easy for us to make our own culture and fun without a wealth extraction step in the middle. I know it's not true but it's just a weird little feeling I have.
Building a new Flash
151–160 of 247 posts
Re: Building a new Flash
#152Isn't that Flutter, i.e. an exotic language plus skipping DOM and drawing into a canvas?
Re: Building a new Flash
#153In 2012, I created IvanK.js - a Javascript library with the "Flash API" for quickly remaking ActionScript 3 games into the web environment. But it required WebGL, which as not very well supported back then. I could remake several of my flash games quickly into web. https://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=bitmaps
I used it, thanks for making it. (Did not released something with it, though)
I switched to EaselJS, as this was supposedly the official supported libary of Adobe Animate, but then later settled with pixijs.
Re: Building a new Flash
#154I 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? :(
newgrounds is still around though
Re: Building a new Flash
#155Heck 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 disagree with it being the most fun, because I would also consider TP/Delphi and C++ Builder. Now I do agree that even something like Unity or PlayCanvas fail short of Flash's game development experience, because the browser debugging for 2D and 3D development sucks.
I have heard lovely things about Delphi’s and C++ builder’s fun factor (maybe from you on this very forum actually :) ), but I have not used those so I cannot speak to it.
At least of the stuff I have used, Flash is the most fun. Admittedly I never really got into any other kind of graphics-first development like VisualBasic and the like. Flash just spoke to me for some reason.
Re: Building a new Flash
#156For someone like me who never got the opportunity to play with Flash, what are some modern equivalents? Is it Rive or Three.js? Or even Godot Web?
Rive is closest sonce they have scripring support.
Threejs is a 3D graphic libary, something different. And godot web I never used but know of as a game engine, not a scriptable animation tool.
Re: Building a new Flash
#157> .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them. The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new,…
AFAIK the .fla format was never fully documented or reverse engineered by anyone (FFDEC has an exporter, but not importer), so this alone would be a bold claim.
https://ruffle.rs/ is pretty solid
Re: Building a new Flash
#158Heck 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…
It's just selling a scam. I've never been impressed by a flash game, but I'm impressed by programs written in general languages daily and for longer than flash has existed. The worst thing about tech is people who don't know any better get advertised tools that aren't sustainable and aren't suited to the job. If someone sees a flash game and says "WOW! that's so cool I wanna do that", then I don't have problem with i…
That's absurd.
Re: Building a new Flash
#159This 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. T…
Isn't it dangerous to give up all the code of a commercial software in the age of LLM?
Competition can clone the project in another language and lipstick it to look different.
Re: Building a new Flash
#160I thought about doing this for a while, I was a Flash gamedev as an indie then professionally.
Back then, once Flash projects start to scale up to get more commercial/competitive, the flash editor is no longer as useful for development and transforms to an assets creation platform that outputs loadable SWF files.
The code moves to use Air/Flex SDKs which were more or less equivalent to the tooling we nowadays get with Go/dotnet etc.
So while Flash was an amazing expression tool for learners/hobbyists and is amazing for gamejams since assets creation is part of the workflow, it did hold devs back at higher levels of production.
Many Flash devs moved to Haxe to continue creating on that platform and it managed to survive and thrive.