91–100 of 101 posts
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Do you have to rewrite GLSL shaders when migrating a game from desktop to browser?
Browsers only support OpenGL ES so only if your shaders use any OpenGL specific features you have to rewrite. Otherwise, it's just plain simple to export to both desktop and browser targets.
> In the 2000's, politics interfered and browser vendors removed plug-in support, instead preferring their own walled gardens and restricted sandboxes That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users. It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insan…
A coworker of mine that worked at Adobe through the death of flash said a big reason for that death was Apple deciding the Ipod touch Safari would not support plugins. Adobe had big plans on the Ipod supporting Flash and that announcement all but killed their Flash division. Yes, Adobe supported Flash for years after that, but it was more of a life support thing and not active development. They saw the writing on the…
One of the first things I used to install on all my computers (laptops and desktops alike) was "block Flash until clicked" add-on.
The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time. I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM. I hear that no…
What the heck are you writing about, you clearly have no clue about last 2+ decades of Java or topic in general but felt the urgent need to emotionally vent off because... ?
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Exactly. Java was so buggy and had so many security issues about 20 years ago that my local authorities gave a security advisory to not install it at all in end user/home computers. That finally forced the hand of some banks to stop using it for online banking apps. Flash also had a long run of security issues.
> banks to stop using it for online banking apps I never understood why so many banks flocked to building their online banking in applets when it wasn't like you needed anything more advanced than HTML to view balances and make transactions.
It was a very reasonable bet at the time imo.
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Amusingly, we see the repeat of this in "desktop" apps that are just web technologies in a browser, wasting CPU time and RAM for "ease" of development. (I don't think it's easier at all - a mess of JS callbacks makes it difficult to see the initiator of anything).
> Amusingly, we see the repeat of this in "desktop" apps that are just web technologies in a browser, wasting CPU time and RAM for "ease" of development. Web is chosen because it is the fastest way to hit all platforms, not because it's a skill issue. > a mess of JS callbacks makes it difficult to see the initiator of anything Async/await is available in most browsers since 2017, what year are you from?
You are right about async/await. I am old! (But I still find the development of software in a large JS system unmanageable versus old C++ development approaches).
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It's good that we have the runtime to run old Flash games. What we lost is an extremely easy environment for authoring/creating them. Nothing has come even close since Flash. Not just game, but any kind of interactions and animations on the web.
Where did the tools go? Can a person not run Flash authoring tools with an era-appropriate operating system in a VM or something?
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Where did the tools go? Can a person not run Flash authoring tools with an era-appropriate operating system in a VM or something?
That's the only way I guess. What I meant, with the death of Flash, nothing appeared to offer the same tools for any other web technology
Macromedia also provided direction, focus, and marketing; more of the things that allowed Flash to reach saturation.
Someone could certainly come up with an open JS stack that accomplishes some of the same things in a browser on a modern pocket supercomputer. And countless people certainly have.
But without forces like marketing to drive cohesion, simplicity, and adoption then none of them can reach similar saturation.
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It's good that we have the runtime to run old Flash games. What we lost is an extremely easy environment for authoring/creating them. Nothing has come even close since Flash. Not just game, but any kind of interactions and animations on the web.
Where did the tools go? Can a person not run Flash authoring tools with an era-appropriate operating system in a VM or something?
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Don’t worry, they’re trying to sneak back in with WASM and drawing everything to canvas.
At least with WASM I'm not stuck using Javascript whether I like it or not. Yes, transpiling to Javascript is a thing, but it's not too much better, since transpiled code isn't much more readable than WASM (see also ClojureScript; CoffeScript isn't too bad though, but it's almost equivalent to JS).
The view you are saying here is one that seems resoundingly common. Is what I heard from Flutter and flutter-web: my experience as a dve is what matters. What I can make is what matters.
That's true, sure! But there's a balance. Society matters too. What agency users have, what their user agency allows them to do, how they can circuit bend your website for themselves also matters. How we judge the scales here is a factor.
I am so so excited for wasm. Particularly wasm-components, where there is more than a huge mega bundle of compile code, where there are intelligible code boundaries and calls across modules. That, I want to hope will be a semi legibile WASM. But a lot of wasm today feels like it really slides back down the ladder into this rebuffing form of development that doesn't recognize any of how the web was better because it was more than the synthetic product it created, how the web was better for it's protocols, legibility, and user agency. I hope we don't slide back into a new Flash or Applet era, where the user & legibility & agency are given no regard, where a developer egocentricity is the only guiding principle.
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A coworker of mine that worked at Adobe through the death of flash said a big reason for that death was Apple deciding the Ipod touch Safari would not support plugins. Adobe had big plans on the Ipod supporting Flash and that announcement all but killed their Flash division. Yes, Adobe supported Flash for years after that, but it was more of a life support thing and not active development. They saw the writing on the…
Makes sense, Flash was eating battery like crazy. And it was widely used in ads, so it would appear on all pages of the internet. One of the first things I used to install on all my computers (laptops and desktops alike) was "block Flash until clicked" add-on.