with js canvas, i am surprised "flash" has not made a comeback ages ago. maybe it is not flash itself but the concept that it represents that we have passed over already.
Building a new Flash
221–230 of 247 posts
Re: Building a new Flash
#222Good luck with this project. Very exciting!
I used to teach high school computer science classes and we built web pages with this new thing called "CSS" (no more tables!) and games in Flash. Cutting edge work we did. Those were good times.
Re: Building a new Flash
#223I 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…
>Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
This has more or less been the line from the day Steve Jobs decided Flash would never be available on the iPhone. And it was readily apparent that no one who said that worked in the audio domain. Things are much, much better now, but I remember challenging myself by trying to build a drum machine in HTML, Javascript, and CSS (not wanting to muck about in Canvas at the time) and while I could make it look decent enough, there was no such thing as a solid, reliable clock in Javascript, for about a decade. Just the way you played audio files back varied from browser to browser on the same machine. It was absolute garbage.
In-browser capabilities have basically caught up or exceeded what Flash did - I don't keep up anymore - but to echo other replies, the authoring tools just aren't as accessible. Maybe vibe coding tools close that gap. But the forced sunsetting of Flash set online interactive multimedia back at least a decade. It was never my main career path, but I more or less abandoned that fun side quest, and as evidenced by my feeling the need to comment here, it still kind of bums me out.
Re: Building a new Flash
#224I 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…
> Code was inside MovieClips (in Flash [almost] everything was a MovieClip, basically a timeline of frames). Code was attached to frames.
It will be interesting to see if this project ends up working more like AS2 or AS3. AS2 gamedev was a real mess, but it sure was great for the simplest things.
Re: Building a new Flash
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Nor any semicolons. Also full of nonsense. SWF fundamentally runs action script. The idea that you are going to have a AS3 to C# transpiler and a C# scripting engine AND export SWFs is incongruous. Again, "C# code executed when the playhead enters a keyframe." Now I'd love the oppurinity to learn, but ctrl+f c# here [1] shows 0 results. Though I'm sure I'm just misunderstanding the meaning here ( ≖_≖). [1] https://op…
I'm skeptical about SWF export as well, but mostly because I'm not sure of the usecase for it in "flash if flash was built in 2026". I'd imagine even people opening old FLA files would rather have a modern non-plugin-requiring format (or a modern Projector equivalent) for output. Maybe for people still using Scaleform?
Re: Building a new Flash
#226Synfig though.
I know it doesn't export stuff or have interactive SWF things, but its whole 2D backbone is absolutely fantastic.
Re: Building a new Flash
#227replacing ActionScript with C# is a big win in my book, I will be watching this project with great interest.
Re: Building a new Flash
#228If this ships, it'll fulfill the "editor" piece of the flash equation. We're still missing the "runtime" though (if we want that old flash feeling). We'll probably need to strongarm Google into supporting it in Chrome, but that's not impossible (especially with AI-enabled coding eroding Google's moat).
He's promising both HTML5 and SWF export, I don't think we really need a new "runtime". Ruffle is pretty close to full AVM2 support.
Re: Building a new Flash
#229Isn't that Flutter, i.e. an exotic language plus skipping DOM and drawing into a canvas?
No, when people say they miss "Flash", they mostly mean the editor.
Re: Building a new Flash
#230Isn't that Flutter, i.e. an exotic language plus skipping DOM and drawing into a canvas?
Flutter's authoring environment is a text editor. This is rebuilding the Flash authoring environment. They are not the same.
Nobody would author a kid's TV show in Flutter.