9 ms·

End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modif

by amitt 9y ago

End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.

jmcdiesel 9y ago
It was good for the time. So were java applets... but, as they say, to everything there is a season, and the sun is season is changing in the web media space..
- baby 9y ago
  The web has become less interactive, and less animated. It's all about static pages now (literally, not as .html)
- masklinn 9y ago
  > It was good for the time. So were java applets… It's really not comparable. Flash + AS was a RAD environment, many a game developer got their start (and even built full-fledged games[0]) through it. I'd argue that its biggest contributions were not web-bound[1], and I don't know of any other environment which is both as easy to get started with and as flexible. [0] it's famously the primary expressive environment of Edmund McMillen: Gish, Aether and Binding of Isaac are all Flash though the later got rewritten natively in Rebirth, Super Meat Boy is the native successor to the Flash Meat Boy, The End is Nigh may well be his first game which did not start in Flash (and even that's unclear as it grew from a 2-weeks game jam) [1] except insofar as they were being embedded/distributed through it e.g. newsgrounds or armorgames
omg_ketchup 9y ago
Hot damn, an actual Farmville developer. My big plan fresh out of college was to make a Farmville-esque game with some action elements. Got WAY further along than I rightly should have, and I have AS3 to thank for that. It's a shame it's going away. Glad the pros from that time feel the same way I do about it.
- govg 9y ago
  Did you actually end up developing a game like that? Otherwise, Stardew Valley might be something you're interested in.
  - DiabloD3 9y ago
    Stardew Valley is the kind of game where you can go "hrm, I'll play for a couple minutes before work" and then go "hey, where did the sun go?!" Of course, so is Factorio...
    - learc83 9y ago
      I can no longer play Factorio. It is completely impossible for me to play without getting sucked in and wasting hours. The worst part is that I feel productive while playing it. It's so close to the satisfaction I get from actually building something that it's just too dangerous for me to play these days :)
      - DiabloD3 9y ago
        The peak satisfaction: eventually converting your base to 20+k logistic bot storms operating the entirety of your base and cranking out 10k+ blue circuits an hour. Peaker satistfaction: Using mods to up the complexity and difficulty, and using all of AAI + all of Bob's + all of Angel's. New ores, vastly more complex refining, and you don't start with shit (literally makes like 2-3 hours to catch up to where you normally start tech wise on vanilla).
kotojo 9y ago
I played way to much farmville around 2009 running a schools front desk! Thanks for that! Out of curiosity what is your language of choice now days?
- amitt 9y ago
  Mobile games/vr/ar - Unity or Unreal Web Backend - Elixir/Phoenix (we used PHP for FV), Python in some cases Web Frontend / Native Mobile Apps - React & React Native JS has effectively caught up to what AS3 offered back then minus type safety (which TypeScript offers).
jchw 9y ago
I wish we could take the best of AS3, ESNext, and TypeScript, and make it into one WebAssembled language... Well okay. That's insane. But there's a part of me that wants to know how far it would go.
- wooter 9y ago
  Isnt JS/ES approaching this? + the native stuff
  - jchw 9y ago
    More or less yeah. But I worry it will take a pretty big change in direction before we can get something as crazy as types in the browser. To be fair, I would have never guessed browsers would be able to implement the current standards to the degree that they have.
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    It's probably worth remembering that AS3 was essentially based on the draft (later abandoned) ES4; there's still a vague agreement that most of those features should come back.
- larsiusprime 9y ago
  That's basically Haxe, if/when it adds a WebAssembly target. It already supports regular JS. www.haxe.org
  - jdonaldson 9y ago
    We're basically waiting for the spec for GC to come together and early betas to hit the repo. Support for the WebAssembly target will come soon after. https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/Overview.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O... Follow haxe.io for news, etc. : https://haxe.io/ https://haxe.io/
    - jchw 9y ago
lynxaegon 9y ago
Yes back than even AS2 was good. But now you have a lot of great tools available for HTML5 and Unity. You can build anything you would have in Flash. I wouldn't say AS3 is the best programming language, but that's just my point of view. I, for one, don't have a favorite language because i think that each language has it's pros and cons and each language excels in a certain area.
- ivm 9y ago
  HTML5 toolset is too fragmented and developer-oriented. Unity is humongous and WebGL builds are too big. There's no replacement for Flash.
  - MrBra 9y ago
    What's your opinion on Haxe?
    - ivm 9y ago
      It may be ok for developers but the Flash scene was full of non-developers who used mostly the visual Flash editor and copy-pasted some scripts if necessary.
vr46 9y ago
Loved AS3. We managed to make lots of great work with it that didn't hog the CPU and performed beautifully. But the Flash runtime was the big problem. I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming. Still, big ups to everyone who worked on Flash, past and present. Thanks, y'all.
- zwetan 9y ago
  > "I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming." You still have Adobe AIR to target desktop and mobile GUI apps. And you have a also the open source project Redtamarin https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin for shell scripts, command-line tools, server-side, etc. in 32bit/64bit for Windows, macOS and Linux
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming." Haxe is probably something you'll be interested in: https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/
- virgilp 9y ago
  You're welcome! (though I only worked on a small part of it - vector/SIMD instruction support, for gaming usecases) I think a lot of the stuff that screwed the language was that it was initially supposed to be "an evolution of javascript" (ecmascript 4? I forget), so it took a on lot of the undesirable features of JavaScript, it was never a complete break from it. Also, Adobe made a big-ish mistake in that it didn't keep the runtime separated from the VM - a lot of the VM abstractions (like pointer tagging) leaked into the runtime, and this is why a lot of things were harder to optimize in the VM than they should've been. Fortunately, the browser vendors didn't have this problem, that's why their GC could "run circles around Flash".
  - vr46 9y ago
    Hey, hello! I know there were features that AS3 couldn't access, but other languages like Haxe could. Would you be able to elaborate more on the VM/runtime issues?
pselbert 9y ago
AS3 was like learning Java, but with the lifecycle gotchas of JavaScript. Ten years ago it offered everything that JS did, except it required static compilation. The development speed of JS+CSS was vastly better than with pure AS. I'll slightly mourne the passing of Flash.
pterylae 9y ago
I just have to throw in my 2 cents here. Actionscript outclasses any other language I've used for building custom UI components or just plain experimentation (I'm looking at you in particular, C#). My favorite experience with the language - building a dynamic GIS mapping engine using item renderers. It pains me to no end to watch this designer-friendly* language fade away into oblivion. Thanks Adobe. *at least for me
boubiyeah 9y ago
Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform. BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg and return value types; type inference was non existant, Vector was invariant, etc. Let's face it, Adobe wasn't the best at language design. Typescript is today so much better than AS3 ever was.
- tomc1985 9y ago
  To say nothing of their ridiculous security sandbox design... I remember trying to make banner ads with dynamic price data and between all the various detached hosting abstractions and ActionScript's security requirements (in a time before this kind of setup was common) it was a hell of a project.
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so long. Just needed to say that.
  - nojvek 9y ago
    When Typescript came, I was like. Yay! Someone made JS become AS3 like. That's when I seriously got into javascript. Flash could do some amazing things back in the day, They had GPU accelerated graphics, microphone, image manipulation, video, and a whole host of other things that HTML didn't have. I think Flash inspired browsers to do better. Now it can die happily.
    - slackingoff2017 9y ago
      You should look at C# in .NET core as well. C# was designed by the same guy as Typescript and Delphi, the famous language designer Anders Hejlsberg. His languages are the most logical and elegant I have used, all truly pleasant to work with. Building a decent language that compiles down so cleanly to Javascript is a minor miracle.
spyder 9y ago
Haxe!
Shinchy 9y ago
AS3 is still one of my favourite languages I've worked with, loved the class system they had in place for it.
npolet 9y ago
I used to working with AS3 and was always confused about the amount of hate that was thrown it's way. I found most things about the development flow very nice and it was a brilliant abstraction that HTML and JS just didn't provide. I was involved in developing a really simple video editor in the browser that would have been impossible (or at least incredibly difficult) to accomplish without AS3 and the graphical abilities that it allowed. But... it really did used to suck power from laptop batteries like nothing else. I'll miss you flash. Thanks for shaping what we do and use now.
bigbugbag 9y ago
> 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time. Would that have been a major loss for humanity as a whole ? Farmville improved the life of how many people ? how many hours wasted, people made miserable and money lifted from cash cows ?

by amitt 9y ago

jmcdiesel 9y ago

It was good for the time. So were java applets... but, as they say, to everything there is a season, and the sun is season is changing in the web media space..

baby 9y ago
The web has become less interactive, and less animated. It's all about static pages now (literally, not as .html)
masklinn 9y ago
> It was good for the time. So were java applets… It's really not comparable. Flash + AS was a RAD environment, many a game developer got their start (and even built full-fledged games[0]) through it. I'd argue that its biggest contributions were not web-bound[1], and I don't know of any other environment which is both as easy to get started with and as flexible. [0] it's famously the primary expressive environment of Edmund McMillen: Gish, Aether and Binding of Isaac are all Flash though the later got rewritten natively in Rebirth, Super Meat Boy is the native successor to the Flash Meat Boy, The End is Nigh may well be his first game which did not start in Flash (and even that's unclear as it grew from a 2-weeks game jam) [1] except insofar as they were being embedded/distributed through it e.g. newsgrounds or armorgames

omg_ketchup 9y ago

Hot damn, an actual Farmville developer. My big plan fresh out of college was to make a Farmville-esque game with some action elements. Got WAY further along than I rightly should have, and I have AS3 to thank for that. It's a shame it's going away. Glad the pros from that time feel the same way I do about it.

govg 9y ago
Did you actually end up developing a game like that? Otherwise, Stardew Valley might be something you're interested in.
- DiabloD3 9y ago
  Stardew Valley is the kind of game where you can go "hrm, I'll play for a couple minutes before work" and then go "hey, where did the sun go?!" Of course, so is Factorio...
  - learc83 9y ago
    I can no longer play Factorio. It is completely impossible for me to play without getting sucked in and wasting hours. The worst part is that I feel productive while playing it. It's so close to the satisfaction I get from actually building something that it's just too dangerous for me to play these days :)
    - DiabloD3 9y ago
      The peak satisfaction: eventually converting your base to 20+k logistic bot storms operating the entirety of your base and cranking out 10k+ blue circuits an hour. Peaker satistfaction: Using mods to up the complexity and difficulty, and using all of AAI + all of Bob's + all of Angel's. New ores, vastly more complex refining, and you don't start with shit (literally makes like 2-3 hours to catch up to where you normally start tech wise on vanilla).

kotojo 9y ago

I played way to much farmville around 2009 running a schools front desk! Thanks for that! Out of curiosity what is your language of choice now days?

amitt 9y ago
Mobile games/vr/ar - Unity or Unreal Web Backend - Elixir/Phoenix (we used PHP for FV), Python in some cases Web Frontend / Native Mobile Apps - React & React Native JS has effectively caught up to what AS3 offered back then minus type safety (which TypeScript offers).

jchw 9y ago

I wish we could take the best of AS3, ESNext, and TypeScript, and make it into one WebAssembled language... Well okay. That's insane. But there's a part of me that wants to know how far it would go.

wooter 9y ago
Isnt JS/ES approaching this? + the native stuff
- jchw 9y ago
  More or less yeah. But I worry it will take a pretty big change in direction before we can get something as crazy as types in the browser. To be fair, I would have never guessed browsers would be able to implement the current standards to the degree that they have.
- gsnedders 9y ago
  It's probably worth remembering that AS3 was essentially based on the draft (later abandoned) ES4; there's still a vague agreement that most of those features should come back.
larsiusprime 9y ago
That's basically Haxe, if/when it adds a WebAssembly target. It already supports regular JS. www.haxe.org
- jdonaldson 9y ago
  We're basically waiting for the spec for GC to come together and early betas to hit the repo. Support for the WebAssembly target will come soon after. https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/Overview.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O... Follow haxe.io for news, etc. : https://haxe.io/ https://haxe.io/
  - jchw 9y ago

lynxaegon 9y ago

Yes back than even AS2 was good. But now you have a lot of great tools available for HTML5 and Unity. You can build anything you would have in Flash. I wouldn't say AS3 is the best programming language, but that's just my point of view. I, for one, don't have a favorite language because i think that each language has it's pros and cons and each language excels in a certain area.

ivm 9y ago
HTML5 toolset is too fragmented and developer-oriented. Unity is humongous and WebGL builds are too big. There's no replacement for Flash.
- MrBra 9y ago
  What's your opinion on Haxe?
  - ivm 9y ago
    It may be ok for developers but the Flash scene was full of non-developers who used mostly the visual Flash editor and copy-pasted some scripts if necessary.

vr46 9y ago

Loved AS3. We managed to make lots of great work with it that didn't hog the CPU and performed beautifully. But the Flash runtime was the big problem. I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming. Still, big ups to everyone who worked on Flash, past and present. Thanks, y'all.

zwetan 9y ago
> "I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming." You still have Adobe AIR to target desktop and mobile GUI apps. And you have a also the open source project Redtamarin https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin for shell scripts, command-line tools, server-side, etc. in 32bit/64bit for Windows, macOS and Linux
ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming." Haxe is probably something you'll be interested in: https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/
virgilp 9y ago
You're welcome! (though I only worked on a small part of it - vector/SIMD instruction support, for gaming usecases) I think a lot of the stuff that screwed the language was that it was initially supposed to be "an evolution of javascript" (ecmascript 4? I forget), so it took a on lot of the undesirable features of JavaScript, it was never a complete break from it. Also, Adobe made a big-ish mistake in that it didn't keep the runtime separated from the VM - a lot of the VM abstractions (like pointer tagging) leaked into the runtime, and this is why a lot of things were harder to optimize in the VM than they should've been. Fortunately, the browser vendors didn't have this problem, that's why their GC could "run circles around Flash".
- vr46 9y ago
  Hey, hello! I know there were features that AS3 couldn't access, but other languages like Haxe could. Would you be able to elaborate more on the VM/runtime issues?

pselbert 9y ago

AS3 was like learning Java, but with the lifecycle gotchas of JavaScript. Ten years ago it offered everything that JS did, except it required static compilation. The development speed of JS+CSS was vastly better than with pure AS. I'll slightly mourne the passing of Flash.

pterylae 9y ago

I just have to throw in my 2 cents here. Actionscript outclasses any other language I've used for building custom UI components or just plain experimentation (I'm looking at you in particular, C#). My favorite experience with the language - building a dynamic GIS mapping engine using item renderers. It pains me to no end to watch this designer-friendly* language fade away into oblivion. Thanks Adobe. *at least for me

boubiyeah 9y ago

Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform. BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg and return value types; type inference was non existant, Vector was invariant, etc. Let's face it, Adobe wasn't the best at language design. Typescript is today so much better than AS3 ever was.

tomc1985 9y ago
To say nothing of their ridiculous security sandbox design... I remember trying to make banner ads with dynamic price data and between all the various detached hosting abstractions and ActionScript's security requirements (in a time before this kind of setup was common) it was a hell of a project.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so long. Just needed to say that.
- nojvek 9y ago
  When Typescript came, I was like. Yay! Someone made JS become AS3 like. That's when I seriously got into javascript. Flash could do some amazing things back in the day, They had GPU accelerated graphics, microphone, image manipulation, video, and a whole host of other things that HTML didn't have. I think Flash inspired browsers to do better. Now it can die happily.
  - slackingoff2017 9y ago
    You should look at C# in .NET core as well. C# was designed by the same guy as Typescript and Delphi, the famous language designer Anders Hejlsberg. His languages are the most logical and elegant I have used, all truly pleasant to work with. Building a decent language that compiles down so cleanly to Javascript is a minor miracle.

spyder 9y ago

Haxe!

Shinchy 9y ago

AS3 is still one of my favourite languages I've worked with, loved the class system they had in place for it.

npolet 9y ago

I used to working with AS3 and was always confused about the amount of hate that was thrown it's way. I found most things about the development flow very nice and it was a brilliant abstraction that HTML and JS just didn't provide. I was involved in developing a really simple video editor in the browser that would have been impossible (or at least incredibly difficult) to accomplish without AS3 and the graphical abilities that it allowed. But... it really did used to suck power from laptop batteries like nothing else. I'll miss you flash. Thanks for shaping what we do and use now.

bigbugbag 9y ago

> 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time. Would that have been a major loss for humanity as a whole ? Farmville improved the life of how many people ? how many hours wasted, people made miserable and money lifted from cash cows ?