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Building a new Flash

bill.newgrounds.com

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Re: Building a new Flash

#61

Post by fenomas »

alhazrod wrote: post #8

I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...

If it was possible they would have loved to - certainly by 2012 or so, and more likely by 2008-9. The reason I heard they couldn't is that by that time Flash Player was a massive 10+ year old codebase with lots of parts that were licensed or external, and nobody had ever tracked which parts would be to be relicensed or rewritten.

Source: I worked there at the time and knew the relevant PMs.

Re: Building a new Flash

#64

Post by GaggiX »

latexr wrote: post #58
GaggiX wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the parent comment but if you look at the images they posted you can see that the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM (the SVGs).

> the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM They just look like bad rushed placeholder icons. And why does that immediately scream vibe-coded?

They have the same same inconsistencies and incoherencies that I have encounter with LLMs creating SVG. Very different from what a human would have created (and I don't think you have to train your eyes to see it).

Re: Building a new Flash

#65

Post by [deleted] »

cube00 wrote: post #24
alhazrod wrote: post #8

I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...

They couldn't because it lives on in Adobe Animate which Disney as a customer among others.

[deleted]

Re: Building a new Flash

#67

Post by lelandfe »

egypturnash wrote: post #28
cube00 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They couldn't because it lives on in Adobe Animate which Disney as a customer among others.

Which they have recently said they will be dropping all support for: https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-... A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working…

If you follow their mea culpa link, it says they're keeping (a type of) support.

> Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers...

> Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features.

Of course, in my experience, such a lifeline never lasts much longer than the furor that earned it...

Re: Building a new Flash

#68

Post by pushedx »

Every so often over the past 15 years I've had this exact thought, "The world needs something which is exactly like flash. Not kind of like flash, exactly like flash."

A whole generation of people learned how to create art, games, music, animations, using flash, and the same kind of tool hasn't existed since then.

I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.

Re: Building a new Flash

#69

Post by tombert »

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 bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember).

Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did.

If we can have a new Flash, I will be very happy.

Re: Building a new Flash

#70

Post by mmooss »

random3 wrote: post #25

I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that. We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest…

Very interesting. What was the objective?
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