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Building a new Flash

bill.newgrounds.com

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Re: Building a new Flash

#71

Post by bouncyhat »

It makes me so happy to see this. When I was in high school Flash was THE way that you could practice programming games with the instant feedback of graphics animation, key input, and playing sound. I enjoyed it so much that out of college I joined the Adobe Platform team right around 2008. I worked in the SF office which was formerly the Macromedia HQ before Adobe bought them out.

There were some really cool Flash tools in the works around then. Some internal developers had gotten some version of Flash Alchemy to run Doom in the browser. There was a lot of work going on to add proper GPU integration into the platform. I got to see some cool prototypes. Ultimately though, my timing was poor. This was right around when Steve Jobs decided that the iPhone shouldn't run Flash. The internal lore/rumor mill was that some PM had missed Steve Jobs reporting crashes in Safari enough times that Jobs was just DONE with Flash and had decided to kill it on his platform. I have no idea how true that was.

There was a mad scramble at Adobe to try to figure out how to keep Flash running on the iPhone. The AIR team was actively looking into reverse engineering solutions so they could essentially deploy Flash apps that didn't look like they were written in Flash. They tried to rally the community with a "We There were a lot of reasons that Flash probably needed to go, but I wonder about what the web would have been if it hadn't been killed around that time. Regardless I hope this project succeeds. <3 Flash.

Re: Building a new Flash

#73

Post by gs17 »

01100011 wrote: post #63

I know very little about this space, but wasn't Haxe( https://haxe.org/ ) supposed to be a sort of next-gen, modern Flash replacement?

That's more of an ActionScript replacement if anything. What made Flash great to use was the combination of a good art/animation tool with scripting support in an easy to use package that exports to a format anyone can (well, could) run fairly consistently in their browser. I don't think a lot of people miss AS3 without the rest of the tooling.

Re: Building a new Flash

#74

Post by roywiggins »

sneak wrote: post #52
spondyl wrote: post #45

This post raises a few flags in my mind that it was at least partly generated by an LLM? That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful. The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spellin…

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LL...

> This document has been through ten editing passes and it still has tells in it.

The big one it missed: the headers are mostly "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]". LLMs (maybe just Claude?) love these. Every heading sounds like it could be a Robert Ludlum novel (The Listicle Instinct, The Empathy Performance, The Prometheus Deception).

Re: Building a new Flash

#75

Post by gs17 »

HanClinto wrote: post #5

> .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,…

I'm very curious if the "ActionScript-to-C# transpiler" will actually work as well as he's hoping.

Re: Building a new Flash

#77

Post by Retr0id »

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?

Humans tend to use free icon collections or search the web for suitable images, rather than hand-writing SVG markup.

Re: Building a new Flash

#78

Post by purplejacket »

Sorry, but can someone explain to me why Flash failed? Was it because Apple killed it, or other reasons? Because not open source? Too heavy? I never really got the story, or only got bits and pieces. I know a lot of people liked Flash.
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