Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a new Flash

bill.newgrounds.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 247 posts

Re: Building a new Flash

#91

Post by foresto »

Retr0id wrote: post #77
latexr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why even consider hand-written SVG when drawing tools like Inkscape exist?

Sure, there are occasions to write markup from scratch, but vanishingly few in my experience.

Re: Building a new Flash

#92

Post by egypturnash »

lelandfe wrote: post #67
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…

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...

Yeah, if I was in a Animate studio I sure would be putting some energy for the entire last month into finding a good crack for it so we could deal with our old files, and talking about our plans for how to deal with the major hit the production pipeline would take when we picked a new animation program and started retraining everyone on it.

Re: Building a new Flash

#93

Post by tombert »

casey2 wrote: post #88
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 i…

I gotta admit I don't really know what you're talking about.

I think Flash was fun to develop in. It was easy and fun to write a game in it and it was something a lot more approachable and easier to distribute than trying to cobble together something with OpenGL or DirectX.

Also, I think a lot of the games on Flash actually are fun. I played through Mystery of Time and Space a few months ago and it still holds up. The puzzles are clever, the jokes are funny, the art is likeable, it's a good game.

But what I liked about Flash was that, because it was so approachable, there was a lot of creativity to stuff. A lot of the games weren't good in any kind of "objective" sense, but there was at least a distinct lack of cynicism with a lot of them. The people who made the games weren't doing it for money, they were doing it because they thought it would be cool to make a game. Some games, like Pico's School for example, were unlike basically anything that had come before it. Is Pico's School a masterpiece of game design? Nah, but it's certainly unique, and it was something that could be played on pretty much anyone's computer.

Re: Building a new Flash

#94

Post by random3 »

mmooss wrote: post #70
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?

This was around when we were trying to get Flash to work on the first iPhone, so we had a hackathon for a week. Since I was a distributed systems "hacker", I ended up doing what was needed :) and there were lots of questions related to the sizing of flash on web pages and what not. That's what started it - I simple python script that I refined during the hackathon to get the embed parameters etc.

But once I started processing the data, it became a thing and we made a small cross-team team to get this going. We eventually expanded the effort in a few different directions and wanted to do a Flash analytics, but ended up with the internal tool only due to privacy concerns.

Re: Building a new Flash

#95

Post by random3 »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #31
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…

Thanks for sharing. It's stories like these I've read since childhood that got me into this. Those little adventures into remote places to work on some computers. This was my version of Indiana jones. But everyone's in an AWS world right now.

It looks like there's a a bit of reversal in some areas (e.g. ML) and it may make sense to have more geographically distributed (edge) compute so maybe we'll get more diversity in the currently cloud-dominated space.

This said, it was always cool when we could control the entire stack, but the reality was that once we scaled things up, we had to throw things over the fence to IT, DevOps, SRE and whatever name evolutions there were and the reality is AWS/GCE/Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally.

Re: Building a new Flash

#96

Post by wisemang »

tombert wrote: post #93
casey2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I gotta admit I don't really know what you're talking about. I think Flash was fun to develop in. It was easy and fun to write a game in it and it was something a lot more approachable and easier to distribute than trying to cobble together something with OpenGL or DirectX. Also, I think a lot of the games on Flash actually are fun. I played through Mystery of Time and Space a few months ago and it still holds up. Th…

Totally. I remember a thing where there were four horses that each had an a capella part and you could click each horse to bring that part in or silence it. They all harmonized together and the silly little animations for each was a nice touch. I want to say circa 2005.

[edit] well that wasn't hard to find: https://www.numuki.com/game/singing-horses/

Anyways yes the security was abysmal but I’m sure it enabled creativity that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise.

Re: Building a new Flash

#97

Post by Sebguer »

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?

if you truly can't clock that this is AI written, you probably need to desperately develop this skill as soon as possible, because everything outside of the first sentence is so very, very clearly slop.

Re: Building a new Flash

#98

Post by latexr »

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.

The number is irrelevant. They are being used as separators on every list item, of course there are many. They could all be hyphens or arrows or colons and it would be exactly the same.

Look, I’m not saying this wasn’t written with an LLM. What I’m saying is that you don’t know that judging by the em-dashes alone.

Re: Building a new Flash

#99

Post by casey2 »

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…

Nor any semicolons. Also full of nonsense. SWF fundamentally runs action script. The idea that you are going to have a AS3 to C# transpiler and a C# scripting engine AND export SWFs is incongruous. Again, "C# code executed when the playhead enters a keyframe." Now I'd love the oppurinity to learn, but ctrl+f c# here [1] shows 0 results. Though I'm sure I'm just misunderstanding the meaning here ( ≖_≖).

[1] https://open-flash.github.io/mirrors/swf-spec-19.pdf

Re: Building a new Flash

#100

Post by tombert »

gs17 wrote: post #75
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.

I'm cautiously optimistic that it could work.

It's been quite awhile since I've written ActionScript [1], but I remember when I wrote it I didn't write it significantly differently than C#. You still have similar Java-style OOP semantics with types that I think wouldn't be too hard to map into C#, especially if you're willing to be dirty and use reflection.

[1] Gah, has it really been almost fourteen years? Time is stupid.

Post reply on HN