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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#91

Post by indymike »

alxlaz wrote: post #63

> The vintage Flash UI is great. Buttons have edges. Icons look like things. Space is well-used. It's amazing! Using old UIs makes me feel like an archaeologist discovering some sort of forgotten Roman technology. The lost art of UI design. It's neat. This was one my favourites parts in the article. An the real piece of the pie comes right after it: there's a screenshot with like thirty icons and they're different en…

> The lost art of UI design.

This sounds like a great title for a really good book.

Re: I still use Flash

#92

Post by georgefrick »

Really awesome to see this. I've done some conversion work for Flash to PhaserJS for educational games. We had to just rewrite everything as we didn't even have the original source code. Luckily Phaser animations can get a lot of the "walk across and open a door" stuff done easily. I was also excited to see Hapland as I'd forgotten the name and so was never able to Google to find the games again!

Re: I still use Flash

#93

Post by rchaud »

d0100 wrote: post #5

I still haven't seen anything beat Flash with its sweet 1-2 combo of vector drawing, animation and programming tool Or maybe it's just me reminiscing

Flash could do 3D 20 years ago, before WebGL and threeJS, and you didn't have to be a Javascript (or ActionScript) expert to build them.

Nothing really exists that beats Flash, partially because the switch to mobile killed Flash's momentum. It also led to the switch in Internet content from Flash animations/toons/games to Youtube/Patreon/Twitch videos. It was easier to make money with weekly videos than trying to get Adsense bucks by making a game every few months.

Re: I still use Flash

#94

Post by theandrewbailey »

> GPUs don't really like drawing vector graphics. They like big batches of textured triangles. So, I needed to rasterize these vectors.

I don't follow. In my mind, triangles are natively defined in vector space. I didn't think it was impossible to convert vectors to GPU-friendly triangles. Rasterization is the easy way out and will (probably) help performance, but it will fall apart as screen resolutions increase.

Re: I still use Flash

#95

Post by mind-blight »

deltarholamda wrote: post #75
d0100 wrote: post #5

I still haven't seen anything beat Flash with its sweet 1-2 combo of vector drawing, animation and programming tool Or maybe it's just me reminiscing

Flash was actually pretty great. The big problem with it was the "oh, that thing? it's still around?" attitude of Adobe, which led to massive security problems. Actionscript was a pretty good language, certainly around the level of what Javascript has become. It was poor-mouthed for the same reasons Javascript was (is?), but now we use Javascript to run 90% of the Web. I remember back in the early 00s playing with th…

Action script 3 was actually pretty great. It was essentially a strongly typed JavaScript long before Typescript came out.

I was always surprised that it didn't get more traction. Though Typescript is leaps and bounds beyond where AS3 ever was

Re: I still use Flash

#96

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

I remember creating a simple "catch the falling X" game in Flash 20 years ago. It was basic, but had everything you'd expect in a beginner project: points, multiple game states/screens, a victory condition, basic story (which was just a screen at the beginning, like NES). The thing is, I was a literal child and I also had no clue how to code -- I did everything by following tutorials and gluing together code I copy&pasted&modified. And it worked! And people played it!

They all thought it was pretty shit, but to me it was more important that some random person across the globe genuinely picked up something I wrote, played it, and then wrote up a review of it.

I showed it to my parents and they immediately started pushing me to learn programming.. and well here I am now. Thanks Flash.

It blows my mind that no one has made a tool like that in so long. It had the same quality as Excel, where any non-technical person could just look up a tutorial, right click a bit, and make something usable. Why has the pinnacle of ease of use in game creation been achieved and never replicated since?

Re: I still use Flash

#97

Post by underdeserver »

Kinda click-baity because he doesn't use Flash - at least not Flash Player, which was my first association.

I think there's a very strong case for writing a clean-room Flash Player implementation.

Re: I still use Flash

#98

Post by zozbot234 »

fallat wrote: post #76
ilyt wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like entire industry at one point decide to optimize UIs for the first 30 minutes of usage and not the years of users using apps once they get familiar with them . "oooh let's not put too many buttons to scare users away", "they got 22 inch screens, let's just waste space for no good reason, it looks modern and airy"

Yes. What we see in UI design today is a consequence of game theory at work. It's to optimize business. In fairness you don't want to scare users away. I think though many people equated it all to "clean looking", without realizing removing micro-interactions is a net negative....

I think touch screens are a bigger factor. You can't have small buttons in a touch-screen UI, because they must be targets for your finger. (OTOH, swipes in a touch UI are a lot easier than mouse drag-and-drop. So the optimal touch UX probably has lots of drag-activated pie menus. And confirmation flows for potentially destructive actions, to cope with the lower accuracy of touch interactions.)

Re: I still use Flash

#99

Post by swayvil »

There are a million flash games. Treasures! Surely there is a good flash (p5js?) to JavaScript converter out there.

Also, is there a better way of doing it than converting flash to JavaScript?

Re: I still use Flash

#100

Post by pmarreck »

ezfe wrote: post #78
pmarreck wrote: post #39

> Although I developed the game mostly on my Mac, during development Apple invented this thing called “Notarization” where if you run any app on a new version of MacOS, it'll make a network request to Apple to ask if the app's developer pays Apple a yearly fee. If the developer does not pay Apple a yearly fee, MacOS will pop up a dialog strongly implying the app is a virus and refuse to start it. > For this reason, W…

Also the fact that macOS doesn't actually block unnotarized software...Many programs are un-notarized and just need to give the user the 1 step instruction to bypass it

Yes, and I also never felt the macOS warning about it "strongly suggested it was a virus." That was pretty much hyperbole. And I could also argue that Apple expecting devs to pay a nominal fee to get their app officially code-signed creates a barrier to entry for bad actors who are likely to not want (or be unable to afford) to pay such a fee, especially when that simultaneously gives control to Apple to block the malicious code en-masse once it is discovered.
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