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I do understand some of the reasons behind the web community’s rejection of flash over the past decade and a half — security and accessibility issues, closed st

by lxe 8y ago

I do understand some of the reasons behind the web community’s rejection of flash over the past decade and a half — security and accessibility issues, closed standards, etc. However Flash and Shockwawe technology enabled smooth interactive graphics on 90’s and 00’s desktop hardware, in packages that are friendly for 56kbps dialup connections. Nothing compares to it, still to this day — web platform tech still horribly underperforms and is only now capable of what flash could do a decade ago. We could also blame Apple and Smartphones and Yourube for its demise, but I feel like we haven’t moved forward in terms of quality shareable interactive media since Flash.

exgamedev 8y ago
It all moved to mobile. The audience, the devs, the marketing money, all of it. There's 100x more lotto ticket buyers on mobile than there ever were Flash devs which obscures it; but every Flash dev moved on to mobile or simply moved on from games. You could release the perfect canvas game engine tomorrow and if Unity didn't port to it not a single game dev would build a company around it
IshKebab 8y ago
Flash was good for games, and sure we don't really have anything comparable yet. But that is irrelevant. The reason it was killed is because it was mostly used for video and it was really awful at that. Especially on mobile.
mhenr18 8y ago
I hope by smooth you're referring to the graphics being vector vs bitmap, because Flash performed really badly once you added any kind of complexity to a scene. (edit: simple things worked brilliantly though, and often that was enough.) The key innovation of Flash was and still is the creation side of things in Flash Pro rather than the runtime. My main experience was with Line Rider. I didn't create it, but I became involved in the community and started making tweaked versions with tools that made it easier to create tracks (as opposed to versions that let you do things like change the physics or the rider). Every line you added to a track caused a new MovieClip to be added to the scene that had a line drawn in it. By the time you had around 3,000 lines or so you'd start to get reduced framerates. 3,000 lines sounds like a lot, but is tiny when you consider tracks that have accompanying artwork. A few years ago, we released a JS + WebGL rewrite of Line Rider that has a physics engine that's bug-for-bug compatible with the original (you can play it at https://www.linerider.com/ https://www.linerider.com/ if you're interested - sorry if that's too self promotional). With access to WebGL and a massively faster ECMAScript runtime, the JS version runs multiple orders of magnitude faster than the original Flash version. It's now possible to work with tracks that have hundreds of thousands of lines without experiencing frame rate drops as opposed to just a few thousand lines. So as for web platform tech underperforming from a runtime point of view, I disagree. The problem is that all the ingredients are there to make something great, but the developer effort required is monumental in comparison to how fast it was to make something work with Flash Pro.
- annywhey 8y ago
  To be fair, it became possible to do deeper graphical optimizations in Flash later in its lifespan(particularly after the BitmapData API, and towards the very end, Stage3D) but I would agree that it wasn't in the spirit of the tool to work on Flash games with an eye towards high framerates, that just happened as a byproduct of the web-game space professionalizing around the close of the last decade. It really was an odd, "software is brutal" history in that in a very short timeframe Flash progressed from being the domain of hobbyist game makers, animators and web site designers into the core client technology of every web site using audio and video. And then a few years after that, it was cut off from expanding to mobile and was strangled on the web through expansion of HTML.

by lxe 8y ago

exgamedev 8y ago

It all moved to mobile. The audience, the devs, the marketing money, all of it. There's 100x more lotto ticket buyers on mobile than there ever were Flash devs which obscures it; but every Flash dev moved on to mobile or simply moved on from games. You could release the perfect canvas game engine tomorrow and if Unity didn't port to it not a single game dev would build a company around it

IshKebab 8y ago

Flash was good for games, and sure we don't really have anything comparable yet. But that is irrelevant. The reason it was killed is because it was mostly used for video and it was really awful at that. Especially on mobile.

mhenr18 8y ago

I hope by smooth you're referring to the graphics being vector vs bitmap, because Flash performed really badly once you added any kind of complexity to a scene. (edit: simple things worked brilliantly though, and often that was enough.) The key innovation of Flash was and still is the creation side of things in Flash Pro rather than the runtime. My main experience was with Line Rider. I didn't create it, but I became involved in the community and started making tweaked versions with tools that made it easier to create tracks (as opposed to versions that let you do things like change the physics or the rider). Every line you added to a track caused a new MovieClip to be added to the scene that had a line drawn in it. By the time you had around 3,000 lines or so you'd start to get reduced framerates. 3,000 lines sounds like a lot, but is tiny when you consider tracks that have accompanying artwork. A few years ago, we released a JS + WebGL rewrite of Line Rider that has a physics engine that's bug-for-bug compatible with the original (you can play it at https://www.linerider.com/ https://www.linerider.com/ if you're interested - sorry if that's too self promotional). With access to WebGL and a massively faster ECMAScript runtime, the JS version runs multiple orders of magnitude faster than the original Flash version. It's now possible to work with tracks that have hundreds of thousands of lines without experiencing frame rate drops as opposed to just a few thousand lines. So as for web platform tech underperforming from a runtime point of view, I disagree. The problem is that all the ingredients are there to make something great, but the developer effort required is monumental in comparison to how fast it was to make something work with Flash Pro.

annywhey 8y ago
To be fair, it became possible to do deeper graphical optimizations in Flash later in its lifespan(particularly after the BitmapData API, and towards the very end, Stage3D) but I would agree that it wasn't in the spirit of the tool to work on Flash games with an eye towards high framerates, that just happened as a byproduct of the web-game space professionalizing around the close of the last decade. It really was an odd, "software is brutal" history in that in a very short timeframe Flash progressed from being the domain of hobbyist game makers, animators and web site designers into the core client technology of every web site using audio and video. And then a few years after that, it was cut off from expanding to mobile and was strangled on the web through expansion of HTML.