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Building a new Flash

bill.newgrounds.com

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Re: Building a new Flash

#211

Post by KaiserPro »

qingcharles wrote: post #130
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 f…

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

probably not. The only difference is that it'd be build once display everywhere. Flash meant that everything looked the same regardless of browser or platform.

Its a lot better nowadays, but its not as easy as flash was.

The _key_ thing thats missing is the flash IDE/designer. There are no compelling editors/environments that allows both artists and coders to work in the same space.

Sure I can use Illustrator to make graphics, but there are no animation systems out there that allow me to animate well (I can render a unity app to HTML/JS but thats not quite the same)

Re: Building a new Flash

#212

Post by KaiserPro »

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.

From what I recall part of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386224/ was animated in flash, if not all.

Re: Building a new Flash

#213

Post by KaiserPro »

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…

It was a power play between apple and Adobe.

The iphone was underpowered, and apple decided that they could brazen their way out of not having flash support.

It turned into a movement, but that was never a given.

Re: Building a new Flash

#214

Post by WillAdams »

KaiserPro wrote: post #211
qingcharles wrote: post #130

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…

> Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS? probably not. The only difference is that it'd be build once display everywhere. Flash meant that everything looked the same regardless of browser or platform. Its a lot better nowadays, but its not as easy as flash was. The _key_ thing thats missing is the flash IDE/designer. There are no compelling editors/environments that…

Guaranteed deployment, and the lack of an IDE which works for both programmers and artists were definitely the two advantages Flash had.

I'd really like to find a replacement which clicks for me the way it did --- started out w/ its predecessor, Futurewave Smartsketch (used it on PenPoint, Mac and Windows, and for Windows, continued using through a succession of pen tablets, most notably my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 which I despair of replacing --- transflective displays went out of vogue).

Re: Building a new Flash

#215

Post by KaiserPro »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #208

I apologize, I have spent all of about one minute considering this—but I would think Flash for 2026 might simply be a wrapper for HTML5, Canvas. Likely there is already a Javascript library out there that closely fits the bill.

flash player, yeah.

the IDE, not really. IF it were that easy, someone would have done it, because the flash IDE was a bit like vim, but for a wierd mix of visual and coding.

Like action script was object object oriented, but also kinda graph based, with time.

Re: Building a new Flash

#216

Post by matula »

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…

> a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro...

This is an under-appreciated aspect of Flash's popularity, and probably a reason why Animate didn't have the same appeal. A kid could get a "free" cracked copy and make fun things.... and maybe not help Adobe/Macromedia's bottom-line, it DID help the general ecosystem.

Rive seems fine, but monthly subscriptions need to die in a fire. I'm not going to pay $10/month to allow me to build some stupid animation idea I have every few months. There are a few, like GameMaker, that do one-time pricing... but even that doesn't scratch the same itch Flash did for me.

Re: Building a new Flash

#217

Post by JKCalhoun »

KaiserPro wrote: post #215
JKCalhoun wrote: post #208

I apologize, I have spent all of about one minute considering this—but I would think Flash for 2026 might simply be a wrapper for HTML5, Canvas. Likely there is already a Javascript library out there that closely fits the bill.

flash player, yeah. the IDE, not really. IF it were that easy, someone would have done it, because the flash IDE was a bit like vim, but for a wierd mix of visual and coding. Like action script was object object oriented, but also kinda graph based, with time.

Thanks.

Re: Building a new Flash

#218

Post by Someone »

ecocentrik wrote: post #209
wongarsu wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SVG + CSS + JS was hailed as the Flash-killer. But authoring tools never materialized. The tech stack can render the same things, but the process of creating anything beyond a static image in SVG is night and day compared to making the same thing in Flash

Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS but it just took a knee because so many people hated flash for all of its warts by the time SVG and Canvas moved vector graphics rendering to the browser. Flash was a real pain the ass for most web users and Web 2.0 technologies did kill it.

> Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS

Didn’t it? IIRC, Adobe had such a tool at some moment, and part of it seems to (somewhat) live on [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Flex:

“Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. […] Adobe donated Flex to the Apache Software Foundation

[…]

In 2014, the Apache Software Foundation started a new project called FlexJS to cross-compile ActionScript 3 to JavaScript to enable it to run on browsers that do not support Adobe Flash Player and on devices that do not support the Adobe AIR runtime. In 2017, FlexJS was renamed to Apache Royale. The Apache Software Foundation describes the current iteration of Apache Royale as an open-source frontend technology that allows a developer to code in ActionScript 3 and MXML and target web, mobile devices and desktop devices on Apache Cordova all at once”

[1] I may be wrong though. It’s not easy figuring out what Flash code ended up in which of Adobe’s Flash-like products over time.

Re: Building a new Flash

#219

Post by kronks »

latexr wrote: post #57
roywiggins wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc. It's fine, it seems like a fun project to vibe code. Not sure about raising money on Patreon for it, but

> The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc. No, not “etc”. What else looks LLM-formatted about them? Because em-dashes are not enough to claim LLM. Look, I get that you don’t care about proper typographic characters. You don’t have to, that’s fine. But many of us humans do. https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo... And going from “LLM-formatted lists” (without any cer…

[dead]

Re: Building a new Flash

#220

Post by tombert »

DonHopkins wrote: post #169
tombert wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.wik…

ESR's "many eyes" quote in his "Linus's Law" is unmitigated bullshit. And Linux Torvalds should not be blamed for it, since it wasn't his law, ESR just named it after him to get attention. Hardly anyone actually reads code, and the few people actually qualified to find bugs by reading huge piles of buggy code dumped into the public domain when a company abandons it have much more important things to do with their tim…

Man you really took issue with a small part of what I said.

Writing forty paragraphs about your opinion of the “many eyes” thing is interesting enough, but I stand by what I said. If Flash player had been FOSS I think it could have been integrated into browser standards and you’d have browser makers able to fix things and integrate better sandboxing since it could be part of the standard.

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