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Building a new Flash

bill.newgrounds.com

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Re: Building a new Flash

#81

Post by Retr0id »

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…

This isn't just some em-dashes, it's 126 of them in a single announcement post.

Re: Building a new Flash

#82

Post by roywiggins »

Retr0id wrote: post #81
latexr wrote: post #57

Earlier 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…

This isn't just some em-dashes, it's 126 of them in a single announcement post.

And not a single colon! Well, outside the smiley in the opening paragraph.

Just read the first two paragraphs and there's a full stylistic whiplash. I'd bet $100 that the first paragraph was human-written and the rest were almost fully Claude.

It's kind of creepy, like a human rolling their eyes back partway through a paragraph and suddenly speaking like Microsoft Bob.

Re: Building a new Flash

#83

Post by tombert »

pushedx wrote: post #68

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.

I agree, I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer, and it's one of the few things I miss about moving to Linux away from Windows.

I can still run Flash MX 2004 via Wine and play with that there, so it's not "lost media" or anything, but what I want is something as close to Flash as possible, that runs on Linux, and gets regular updates, and that doesn't require I subscribe to it for forever.

I have a perpetual license to ToonBoom (that I bought when they were still doing perpetual licenses), and ToonBoom is very cool software, but it's purely an animation software. I also have a license to Scirra Construct 2, and that's pretty neat as well, but in my mind that's basically a game engine. Flash was this cool, weird hybrid of both a game engine and artistic software that I haven't found a good replacement for.

With Flash, you could make a cartoon without touching ActionScript. It was designed around animation. If you wanted to extend the cartoon you could then add code, piecemeal, and if you wanted to make a full game then you could make a full game. It was great.

Re: Building a new Flash

#84

Post by moolcool »

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…

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.

Re: Building a new Flash

#85

Post by phendrenad2 »

If 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).

Re: Building a new Flash

#86

Post by egypturnash »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #50
egypturnash wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Approximately a quarter century of editor UI muscle memory in everyone who's used Flash/Animate professionally. And a quarter century of people being used to the precise quirks of how Flash/Animate organizes the parts for a cartoon. And a quarter century of source files in a private format that can only be read and understood by Flash/Animate.

Who has authored anything they actually cared about using Flash in the last 15 years? I don't know Animate - is it basically Flash Updated (I've read here that Adobe kept some elements of Flash in Animate, but it is unclear what). Also, there are non-Flash players for .fla files (not editors, however).

Animation studios. I know for a fact that Teen Titans was animated in Flash/Animate for its entire life, for instance; that’s directly from a former co-worker who was the animation director there. Lots of small productions, too. Animate is a lot cheaper than Toon Boom Harmony so tons of hobbyists use it.

The only difference between Animate and Flash is that SWF export got dropped eventually. And a haphazard smattering of new features got added.

You don’t play FLAs. You load them into the editor and output SWFs. Or various video formats. There are reverse engineered SWF players, most prominently Ruffle, but this is the first I’ve heard of anyone parsing FLA files.

FLA is the source format, it is to a SWF (or other video file exported from the editor) as a PSD is to a JPEG, or a .c file to an executable program compiled with all debug info off.

Re: Building a new Flash

#87

Post by Dwedit »

fuzzy_biscuit wrote: post #55
nosrepa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used to be fun.

Strawberry Clock is our king!

I was in some instant-message conversations (Romhacking related I think) with CoolBoyMan before he told me that he was Strawberry Clock.

Re: Building a new Flash

#88

Post by casey2 »

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…

It's just selling a scam. I've never been impressed by a flash game, but I'm impressed by programs written in general languages daily and for longer than flash has existed.

The worst thing about tech is people who don't know any better get advertised tools that aren't sustainable and aren't suited to the job. If someone sees a flash game and says "WOW! that's so cool I wanna do that", then I don't have problem with it. But if people want to learn a language and are handed an SRS app, or want to make a unique game and are told to use an engine that's when it becomes harmful (and in many cases viral due to network effects)

Re: Building a new Flash

#89

Post by tombert »

moolcool wrote: post #84
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…

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-authoring tech.

Re: Building a new Flash

#90

Post by egypturnash »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #47
egypturnash wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents. I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.

There were zero open-source options at the time. Flash/Animate was the only digital ink-n-paint solution that was even vaguely affordable to the hobbyist or small studio for many years. Most studio-quality 2D programs were proprietary solutions developed in big studios like Disney.

People started using Flash for professional work around 1995. "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the name "open source" was coined in 1998 and it took a while before anyone but programmers gave even half a damn about it.

The first open-source studio-quality 2D animation package I know of was OpenToonz from 2016, which was a relicensing of a commercial package that dates back to the late eighties or the early nineties - Wikipedia just mentions v3 from 1993.

But anyway now there is a dude working on an open-source Flash clone that can read the editor source files, so all these people you have next to no sympathy for have something to celebrate.

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