Looking at the sponsors, there are some big players in the old Flash world supporting this (Newsground, ArmorGames... even NYT?). What I can't understand is why Kongregate isn't among them.
Maybe I'm overestimating the money a site like Kongregate pulls in. I've assumed they'd have cash to throw at something that could resuscitate their catalog, so it's odd to see them not doing anything in the WASM space.
Modern kongregate is a shell of its former self. The vast majority of the people I knew who made it great back in the day, including the founders, have long since departed.
I still don’t quite understand why we don’t have a successful IDE / editor based on web technologies that would be anywhere close to Flash in terms of popularity.
Is the problem rooted not just in web technologies but in the fact that we live in a different era and creators don’t really express themselves in this way anymore?
Most purists insist on coding things in HTML/CSS and this stack is fairly unworkable for a good visual editor. Anyone who has built a robust visual editor ends up building one using canvas. (Figma is a great example)
Figma is great but it's not using classical tags to express fonts, tables, layout. Similarly Flash got it's layout and animation right... it just wasn't a web standard. A Canvas based editor/builder/WYSIWYG approach would be fantastic but it required us to move past HTML/CSS in the traditional and compatible model.
Said another way - if you try to use HTML/CSS to build a layout tool, you end up having to re-create browser layout and rendering engine.
Developers could build a design/tool similar to flash using canvas and I've actually prototyped elements of a tag/based design language that gets rid of the traditional HTML layout engine. It's significantly faster (1000x) to render/send over the wire but the moat of HTML/CSS is so large that I'm not sure there's interest in such approaches.
"Most purists insist on coding things in HTML/CSS" you write that like it's something bad.
Compared to flash HTML and CSS as enormous advantages ... it's not resource hungry and is accessible if you do it right. Through you have to know your art to use the advantages.
As a kid first learning about programming flash was amazing. The ability to draw or sequence sprites together into animations and then easily stitch those together into simple games is really powerful.
I'm not saying that we should bring back flash for entire websites as was trendy for a second, but I do think we lost something special that had a low barrier to entry for kids, artists etc to create interactive experiences
Ressource hungryness has changed since flash is no more.
Somewhere around half of the last decade, we starting having Chrome and Firefox taking hundred of megabytes per tabs and totalizing a few gigabytes that put them very close to what flash used to take, maybe cpu usage is still lower though.
It's not just that... It's pixels, em, ex, %, px, cm, mm, in, pt, pc... Not to mention margins, padding, box-model, absolute and relative positioning, flex-box, etc. etc. HTML/CSS is one of the most complex standards. You have to remove a lot before things get trivial.
From my point of view the next thing that fills that role would be unity. Though a big part of unitys strength is not being bound to one platform (web) but instead being cross-platform (web, mobile app, desktop, ...). Iirc it has been used by artists for both "advanced" topics like movies as well as for small games.
I am not sure if Unity will ever fill the gap left by Flash.
Flash IDE was easy to use even for very novice creators (at least at a basic level, not talking about ActionScript). So there was a ton of simple animations, silly games, just weird experiments without any purpose or meaning. Many people were just having fun with it and sharing their creations.
When Flash died, this whole ecosystem somehow disappeared instead of migrating to a clear successor.
I might also be getting the timing of it all wrong. Perhaps when Flash was slowly being deprecated it wasn’t that popular anymore and by that time most creators moved on to different—more fractured?—ecosystems.
Yes for the past few decades we've been dealing with HTML5 and related technologies. And while great for laying out simple websites, it pales in comparison to things like Flash in terms of building interactive games and animations. It's just not made to do that stuff and attempts to make it do stuff like that anyway tend to involve a lot of hackery, and workarounds for it's many limitations. Sometimes somebody manages something really nice with it but it seems to be non trivial to deliver good results consistently with it.
People frequently call out how wonderful "native" applications are compared to web applications are fundamentally talking about these limitations. Most web applications that also have mobile applications deliver a second rate and more mediocre experience on the web. With Canvas, WebGL, WASM, etc. a lot of that can now be addressed. Hence ruffle being able to deliver the experience we had decades ago when people routinely knocked out all sorts of things in Flash that are near impossible to do with HTML 5/JS without a lot of work.
All IOS and Android do is provide programmers a robust component library and a modern development experience around it; which is something web developers simply don't have and never have had. The built in browser components are pretty poor in comparison and the stuff people hack around that isn't a whole lot better typically. That's why people prefer native: richer components that work smoother and better. It's just nicer. And less work.
After two decades, I don't believe HTML5 + JS/CSS is actually fixable. There's a technical gap with "native" applications in terms of what it can be made to do. Luckily, with WASM, we don't have to. Ruffle is a nice example of that. Applications like Figma show that UIs in a browser can be fast, responsive, and slick. I see it as an early example of a new style application that mostly just opts out of the traditional web stack and its limitations.
WASM is only going to get better. Jetbrains actually silently released a WASM compiler for Kotlin recently that currently requires several experimental flags on Chrome to enable all the new features it needs for e.g. garbage collection and a few other things. Once that stuff stabilizes in browsers, there's going to be an influx of languages that don't do manual memory management and those languages will bring new tools and component frameworks. It will become basically a general purpose architecture you can target with pretty much anything that has a compiler. Doing DOM/CSS based work with that is going to be possible of course. But driving a "native" framework that bypasses that, probably makes more sense for a lot of things.
Adobe Animate, formerly known as Flash (the authoring software), supports HTML5. But since it doesn't support ActionScript with HTML5, only JavaScript, it might have lost a lot of its old momentum?
For the first time in ~8 years I was able to watch old flash content I had lying around and all I needed to do was link to the ruffle JS library. Worked flawlessly.
Thanks for letting those videos live again, Ruffle team!
I was a drive-by contributor of a few PRs to Ruffle out of love for old flash videos and one of my favourite users is The Internet Archive. It’s wonderful that this stuff is preserved in the active sense and that you no longer need to view YouTube/video renders of flash content to see all the old animations.
Obviously the vector graphics is both lightweight and scales beautiful, but somehow the loading screens and various bits of interactivity in primarily video content are almost as important to me at least.
This has saved parts of my childhood from the brink of extinction.
An issue is that only the old stuff works, because AS2 has been implemented. The newer (imo) creative stuff still doesn't work due to spotty AS3 support
yeah, I was excited to revive Homestuck's interactive parts, but they were all AS3. I hacked around with Ruffle to see if I could add enough to get them working, but at the time AS3 support was an empty skeleton.
have they gotten some AS3 working? if so I might revisit.
My favourite thing about Ruffle is that it can be installed as a browser extension, which allows to seamlessly view flash animations on old websites with a modern browser.
after all of the bad experiences with Flash only websites for UI/X and games developed for FB distribution, I had almost forgotten about all of the animated shorts and what not other clever use of Flash
If my memory is correct, the entire Peppa Pig[1] TV Series was done in Flash. Many other popular TV series were done entirely in Flash. A good friend and fellow Flash champion, Chris Georgenes[2], did quite a lot of good animations during the early days of Flash.
This show is a masterclass in animation, I have to say. Everything is built out of essential geometric shapes, yet has an incredibly strong character. Brilliant stuff.
I think it looks kind of terrible to be honest. I'm not surprised at all it's made with flash. It looks like the sort of thing a talentless non-artist who can only make basic shapes like me could manage.
Peppa Pig is much better animated IMO. Or should I say much better drawn. It doesn't have much animation either but the people that do the drawing are clearly better artists.
According to their compatability section (see: https://ruffle.rs/ then scroll down), it looks like, after years of work, that they're only up to supporting 10% of the AS3 language, and only 5% of the AS3-based API. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be regretting all those expensive Flex development books that I recycled a while back.
Flash/Flex: it's not coming back, just let it fade away?
I tried running the demo with Learn To Fly (the penguin flying/distance game); the physics in the game is a bit broken (slowly rising off the ground) and there is no controller input.
But overall a really cool project; i'm not bashing it ofc, it just needs some more work but it seems pretty capable in other games.
Future Edit: After spending too much time trying to install the addon for firefox from their site (as i don't like the idea of only installing validated addons) I was able to go into about:config and change "xpinstall.signatures.required" to false. Leaving this here if anyone else runs into this problem.
I'm assuming what they meant is that video has become the new "casual, accessible, vibrantly creative" medium on the internet, thanks to platforms like TikTok and all the powerful editing tools they include. Not a direct replacement but a spiritual successor
This is mainly for keeping Internet history accessible. Flash had tons of problems, but a lot of amazing content was created on the platform. Now that it's gone, it's difficult or impossible to access the historical content.
I don't expect anyone to be making new flash content, but I'm really excited that all this work is going in to make sure we don't lose a really cool slice of Internet history
Flash ... like zombie which didn't want to remain buried forever.
Why does anyone sit down and even think about coding something for that abandoned technology fart?
I don't get it.
The sheer amount of history and nostalgia that somewhere from 1 - 2 generations have tied up in flash is immense.
That history is worth preserving as much as possible, same as any other emulation/implementation. Not too mention however many "Business critical and you must use this flash app" applications there are, which is presumably non 0.
When Adobe triggered the unanticipated total shutdown of Flash player which they had inserted as a time bomb, I found myself rewriting crucial business software, and an entire city rail system in China had to shut down...
I would say that Ruffle is my generations equivalent of Mupen64, or many devices on libretro.
Why isn't us preserving our childhood games seen as reasonable?
Don't get me wrong - I'm glad flash is dead. But I'm also glad what flash programs are out there can be preserved, and that there's a possibility for new, libre, action in that space.
They would benefit greatly from a new Flash player, yet it seems they are content with having their users figure it out themselves ( https://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/193280... ).
Maybe I'm overestimating the money a site like Kongregate pulls in. I've assumed they'd have cash to throw at something that could resuscitate their catalog, so it's odd to see them not doing anything in the WASM space.