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Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

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Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#41

Post by cableshaft »

I've been wanting to update my existing Flash games (I've released 7 games) to something more modern, like HTML5+JS or (maybe) Unity, but I don't want to spend a ton of time learning a new stack and getting things working, as I really don't have the free time I used to.

A few of the games have heavy use of graphics and animation also, that I don't really want to have to recreate manually. I've worked on games made with Unity and Cocos2d(ios) since then, but I'm really hoping there's some shortcut I'm not aware of.

There's a ton of JS frameworks out there and it's hard to evaluate which would be worth the time and effort.

Plus I really don't want to have to do this again in the future, so hopefully this can be something I do once and I'm good for the forseeable future (which is why I'm leaning towards HTML5 + JS). Some cross-platform capabilities would be nice too.

Example of the heavy art/animation: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#42

Post by sosuke »

sp332 wrote: post #8

You know Flash is dead when Homestar Runner says it's dead! http://www.homestarrunner.com/flashisdead.html For those who don't know, this site was a legit phenomenon in the early 2000's, and it has always been 100% flash-based. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner

Thanks I totally missed that, when did that get posted? Flash has a very important place still, and that is a great illustration of it. There was a lot of content being created in Flash that was beautiful. The video renderings just aren't the same. Old Metallicops was great, the Star Wars rap, good times..

Here is an example I can think of off the top of my head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2Z23SAFVA http://uploads.ungrounded.net/558000/558516_dotdotdot.swf?12...

I remember learning a lot of Flash and ActionScript using decompliers; you could see the code, assets, all sorts of fun stuff almost like view source in the web browser. Can't do that in video, thankfully we can in HTML5 but inspection of code isn't straight forward for more intense games yet.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#43

Post by shawkinaw »

I'm actually torn on this, because the fact is that Flash can do things that you realistically can't do any other way. In my case, I've written a couple of video conferencing apps that need web-web and web-Android connectivity, and Flash/AIR is still definitely the easiest way to do that sort of thing. WebRTC has promise, but it requires a reasonably recent browser (and not Safari), and until very recently it didn't work in WebViews on the Android side.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#44

Post by larsiusprime »

cableshaft wrote: post #41

I've been wanting to update my existing Flash games (I've released 7 games) to something more modern, like HTML5+JS or (maybe) Unity, but I don't want to spend a ton of time learning a new stack and getting things working, as I really don't have the free time I used to. A few of the games have heavy use of graphics and animation also, that I don't really want to have to recreate manually. I've worked on games made wi…

OpenFL!

http://www.openfl.org/learn/tutorials/using-swf-assets/

http://community.openfl.org/t/using-swf-assets-tutorial-feed...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE07Y9TUJU

That's as close as you get to keeping your existing workflow and maintaining your assets. It's really close IMHO and works well. Also there's some scripts that can translate As3->Haxe and take care of 95% of the work of porting the code, and then OpenFL has the same API as flash does so your API calls are all the same.

Alternatively FLUMP can be used if you just want to export assets and use a totally different framework: http://threerings.github.io/flump/

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#45

Post by sp332 »

sosuke wrote: post #42
sp332 wrote: post #8

You know Flash is dead when Homestar Runner says it's dead! http://www.homestarrunner.com/flashisdead.html For those who don't know, this site was a legit phenomenon in the early 2000's, and it has always been 100% flash-based. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner

Thanks I totally missed that, when did that get posted? Flash has a very important place still, and that is a great illustration of it. There was a lot of content being created in Flash that was beautiful. The video renderings just aren't the same. Old Metallicops was great, the Star Wars rap, good times.. Here is an example I can think of off the top of my head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2Z23SAFVA http://upl…

It was posted a few weeks ago. http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Flash_is_Dead

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#46

Post by zeveb »

deelowe wrote: post #24
zeveb wrote: post #19

I'm actually a bit conflicted about this. The nice thing about Flash-based media is that one can disable JavaScript (thus increasing one's privacy) and then enable Flash only to view a particular video (e.g. on Amazon Play); with JavaScript and HTML5, one generally has to enable JavaScript for the entire domain rather than a single video on a single page. Why would one want to disable JavaScript in the first place? P…

Flash has had vulerabilities and executes arbitrary code as well... What's the difference? At least with javascript, there's only one attack vector (the browser itself). Flash requires a plugin to work properly.

> Flash has had vulerabilities and executes arbitrary code as well... What's the difference?

It sure has! But it's nice to expose oneself to vulnerabilities only when absolutely necessary (e.g. to view a single video), rather than for every page currently loaded for a site.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#47

Post by chaostheory »

pki wrote: post #39
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #3

Cool. Now if only Amazon would eat its own dogfood. Their Prime Music/Cloud library music player still requires Flash in order to use.

Now if only the music licencing services backing Prime don't require flash and DRM ..

Does Netflix still require flash?

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#49

Post by stronglikedan »

larsiusprime wrote: post #4

If we want to speed up the demise of flash, there are several roots that need to be whacked simultaneously: 1. Tons of existing flash content people want to access 2. Give current flash devs a reasonable alternative The first one is a thorny problem and is somewhat solved by things like Shumway but still needs more work. As for the second, things like Unity and HTML5 have not covered all of flash dev's use cases, so…

> Tons of existing flash content people want to access

Plus some existing flash content people need to access, such as Flex apps developed for internal use by businesses that have no intention of shelling out the cash to replace them.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#50

Post by exodust »

I have Flash enabled all the time. No probs here. Smooth and efficient. I have no agenda or need to kill it.

So much viral hate. Plugins have a right to exist. You gonna declare war on all plugins or just Flash? HTML doesn't necessarily run its full suite of tricks on all browsers and platforms. And my iPad3 often slows to a crawl because of bloated well-known websites. Browser memory maxes out and I can't even switch tabs without full page reloading. Inefficiency follows poor technical design no matter what technology is used.

Is javascript next because of those trendy promo pops where they think you're leaving? Kill everything that sux, or whatever technology it comes from. Kill it all and dance on its grave like there's no tomorrow.

Tomorrow we'll retreat to our native apps with virtual coins and account validation. We'll share our contact lists without knowing that we did, and we won't be blocking ads because we can't.

Tried the Youtube HTML player once. That was one hell of a rough and buggy experience. Switched back to Flash.

Clicked a link to youtube in iOS Safari more than once, and got auto-switched to the youtube app rather than the video play in Safari. I don't know what or who to hate about that, I'm just tired.

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