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I've come across a lot of similar sentiment from ex-Flash devs, who romanticise its heyday as a period of fertile creativity (true) and say that HTML5/JS/CSS/SV

I've come across a lot of similar sentiment from ex-Flash devs, who romanticise its heyday as a period of fertile creativity (true) and say that HTML5/JS/CSS/SVG is an inadequate replacement (false). In truth, the fundamental capabilities of the modern web platform matches and typically exceeds anything that was offered by Flash. What these people are really lamenting is the ease of authorship that Flash provided to non-technical users. Macromedia/Adobe provided a suite of powerful tools for authoring Flash animations and applications. There is no free equivalent available targeting HTML/JS. This is not a problem of capability in the platform technologies. It is because there is no economic incentive to make and give away such tools. What equivalents do exist in this sector cost money. When it comes to Flash, the old adage, "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" holds true. The Flash authorship tools were free because 3rd party authors creating Flash content were assisting in the promulgation of a proprietary platform that was gradually replacing open web standards. Had they succeeded, Macromedia/Adobe would inevitably have looked to squeeze and monetise their domination of the web. Programmers are often accused of not understanding what Flash offered to artists. Maybe that's true, but I've not encountered many artists who conversely understand the above.

nn3 6y ago
This raises the question - what paid HTML tools are available today which are as easy to use and have similar capabilities as the old Adobe tools?
- chii 6y ago
  none - flash is still the only tool i know of that had the scene model which allowed you to have animations within objects in the scene. It was a very easy model to use, but is powerful. Flash can export to html/canvas iirc. I dont think the lack of tools is the reason why html5 didn't replace flash in terms of output of new games/animations.
larsiusprime 6y ago
> What these people are really lamenting is the ease of authorship that Flash provided to non-technical users. Yes, that's what we've been saying. And it was HTML5 boosters who said that when Flash died nothing of value would be lost, I'm pointing out their comparing a platform & authoring tools with a narrow tech stack. And the Flash Authorship tools were absolutely NOT free. You had to pay hundreds of dollars for the Flash IDE (not that it stopped people from pirating it). FlashDevelop was free, but that was not an Adobe product.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
danShumway 6y ago
> There is no free equivalent available targeting HTML/JS I commented to the same effect elsewhere, but I would take this a step farther. There is no alternative, free or paid, Open Source or proprietary, targeting any platform (even just iOS or Windows) that is as good as Flash was at rapid prototyping and accessible game creation. To me, the focus on the web is really frustrating. Unity is not as good as Flash was for rapid prototyping. Gamemaker is not as good as Flash was for animation. It's not the platform's problem that literally no one has found a way to merge animation, artwork, and programming in the same way as Flash did. It's not that there's something awful about the web and that it ruined the ability to make that tool. Literally no one for any platform for any motivation has ever replicated Flash even just as a content creation tool. So why are we talking about the web at this point? WebGL, Canvas, and WASM are powerful enough to replace Flash. That is not the issue anymore. I think when people touted the web as a replacement for Flash, there was an expectation that some company or Open Source initiative somewhere was going to make effective tools and that never happened. And instead of talking about the fact that the entire games industry has been unable to replicate Flash, we're attacking the Open web instead. I agree that Flash was prematurely killed online, I agree that HTML advocates were too dismissive about the problems. But we are far past that point. The web kept its end of the bargain, the APIs exist, but nobody else built the necessary tools. We should be talking game engines right now, not the web.
- chii 6y ago
  the flash/macromedia creative suite is so good, and even tho it wasn't free, it was popular (with plenty of pirated copies obviously). If your thesis is true that the web/html api could've been just as good as flash had there just been a suite of tools to create the content, then why doesn't one already exist? I think the true underlying issue is that the expectations of the users have grown - "simple" animations that can be created in the flash suite and replicated using a html suite cannot satisfy users any more.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    > then why doesn't one already exist? I think that's the big question that these threads need to be asking, because it's not just that it doesn't exist for the web. It doesn't exist anywhere for any platform. Coming in and just saying, 'HTML5 can't replicate Flash' -- not only is that inaccurate, it's unhelpful. We need to ask what modern developers need and why we seem to be unable to supply that. What are our modern tools missing? Would Flash still be relevant for indie development today? Do we need something more extensive or powerful? Do we need to rethink developer workflows? Is the problem funding, or finding a way to monetize, or is it a community problem where we just can't get indie devs to standardize on one tool? Every thread where people complain about the loss of Flash could be a really productive conversation about what a modern animation engine would need and how we could build one. But instead it's just people re-litigating a 15-20 year old fight for no reason. Because the APIs are there. Any company could build an animation engine today that output to any low-level language: C, Rust, whatever. And the output could be compiled to WASM and the pixel buffers could be rendered to a canvas. We could even do smart updates and partial re-renders and cache large operations on separate canvases. Or that frame compilation could happen behind the scenes in WASM and the image data could be spit out as a single array of pixels. We could do all of the optimizations we need. But that tool doesn't exist. It doesn't exist for the web, or for iOS, or for Android, or for Windows, or for any modern console. Why? That's the productive question to ask, that's the question that will actually help us make progress towards replacing Flash. The only thing the web can provide is APIs and technology, at some point game devs need to stop complaining about the web in specific and start asking why our game dev tools in general aren't up to snuff.
SimianLogic2 6y ago
I think the point you're missing is that Flash supported an entire ecosystem. Because it was easy to distribute the files (and steal them from other portals), there were tons of game portals out there competing for traffic. This competition created incentives to do special deals (add my logo and a link for $2k before you launch). I released several games sponsored by Kongregate which went viral and got distributed to thousands of portals. Higher-tier portals would reach out and purchase a site-locked version without their competitor's branding for an additional $300-$1k depending on if they had their own API for high scores and such. Because there were SO many portals, it wasn't as winner-take-all as the modern mobile marketplaces. I could easily recreate my games in javascript today (or swift. or C#/unity. or whatever) from an "is this possible" point of view, but I think it's much harder to make money today. You could argue that's more due to the competition level and number of creators than Flash, but I think the siloed app stores are awful for the long tail and smaller developers. That ramp-up of competition kind of happened even before Flash was dead-dead, though--the big portals existed in a time before Facebook games (which suck now but were amazing for awhile) and mobile games. It's wild now to see my kids (5 & 8) play a lot of online games on modern much-shittier-than-Kongregate-and-Newgrounds portals, but there's basically a short time period between "old enough to play games" and "old enough for their own phone or steam account" that they're in right now, and I suspect that audience isn't big enough to support the kind of innovation we saw before Facebook games (which were also made with Flash, for the most part!).
trianglem 6y ago
tldr there is no replacement
nemothekid 6y ago
The Flash authorship tools were free because 3rd party authors creating Flash content were assisting in the promulgation of a proprietary platform that was gradually replacing open web standards. What? The Flash authorship tools were definitely not free. I remember Macromedia Studio used to cost nearly a grand. They were widely spread because, like Photoshop, Macromedia/Adobe didn't bother cracking down on piracy.
AshleysBrain 6y ago
There are actually a number of tools that allow easy HTML5 authorship for non-technical users. We make one too - Construct 3 [1]. I think one reason Flash had such prominence was their effective monopoly. Remember when you had to install a browser plugin to get Flash? They reached ubiquity, but it was basically an impossible job for anyone else to achieve. So if you wanted Flash-like content, Flash was your only real option. Since HTML5 is based on open technologies, there are lots of competing tools on the market doing exactly what some people apparently lament are no longer available. They're out there if you look, and arguably it's a healthier marketplace since there's real competition - although the choice is more complicated now, since there isn't that one option everyone uses. [1] https://www.construct.net https://www.construct.net
hartator 6y ago
> The Flash authorship tools were free Flash MX was a paid tool.
cblconfederate 6y ago
> that was gradually replacing open web standards. Flash was offering things that the normal web couldn't do (like video). It took a long time for the web to catch up nominally, and it's still lacking Macromedia would still be selling Flash if there was an open standard that replaced swf and was equally performant After all the web is now full of SPAs which are a very bloated version of flash pages with much less functionality

nn3 6y ago

This raises the question - what paid HTML tools are available today which are as easy to use and have similar capabilities as the old Adobe tools?

chii 6y ago
none - flash is still the only tool i know of that had the scene model which allowed you to have animations within objects in the scene. It was a very easy model to use, but is powerful. Flash can export to html/canvas iirc. I dont think the lack of tools is the reason why html5 didn't replace flash in terms of output of new games/animations.

larsiusprime 6y ago

> What these people are really lamenting is the ease of authorship that Flash provided to non-technical users. Yes, that's what we've been saying. And it was HTML5 boosters who said that when Flash died nothing of value would be lost, I'm pointing out their comparing a platform & authoring tools with a narrow tech stack. And the Flash Authorship tools were absolutely NOT free. You had to pay hundreds of dollars for the Flash IDE (not that it stopped people from pirating it). FlashDevelop was free, but that was not an Adobe product.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

danShumway 6y ago

> There is no free equivalent available targeting HTML/JS I commented to the same effect elsewhere, but I would take this a step farther. There is no alternative, free or paid, Open Source or proprietary, targeting any platform (even just iOS or Windows) that is as good as Flash was at rapid prototyping and accessible game creation. To me, the focus on the web is really frustrating. Unity is not as good as Flash was for rapid prototyping. Gamemaker is not as good as Flash was for animation. It's not the platform's problem that literally no one has found a way to merge animation, artwork, and programming in the same way as Flash did. It's not that there's something awful about the web and that it ruined the ability to make that tool. Literally no one for any platform for any motivation has ever replicated Flash even just as a content creation tool. So why are we talking about the web at this point? WebGL, Canvas, and WASM are powerful enough to replace Flash. That is not the issue anymore. I think when people touted the web as a replacement for Flash, there was an expectation that some company or Open Source initiative somewhere was going to make effective tools and that never happened. And instead of talking about the fact that the entire games industry has been unable to replicate Flash, we're attacking the Open web instead. I agree that Flash was prematurely killed online, I agree that HTML advocates were too dismissive about the problems. But we are far past that point. The web kept its end of the bargain, the APIs exist, but nobody else built the necessary tools. We should be talking game engines right now, not the web.

chii 6y ago
the flash/macromedia creative suite is so good, and even tho it wasn't free, it was popular (with plenty of pirated copies obviously). If your thesis is true that the web/html api could've been just as good as flash had there just been a suite of tools to create the content, then why doesn't one already exist? I think the true underlying issue is that the expectations of the users have grown - "simple" animations that can be created in the flash suite and replicated using a html suite cannot satisfy users any more.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > then why doesn't one already exist? I think that's the big question that these threads need to be asking, because it's not just that it doesn't exist for the web. It doesn't exist anywhere for any platform. Coming in and just saying, 'HTML5 can't replicate Flash' -- not only is that inaccurate, it's unhelpful. We need to ask what modern developers need and why we seem to be unable to supply that. What are our modern tools missing? Would Flash still be relevant for indie development today? Do we need something more extensive or powerful? Do we need to rethink developer workflows? Is the problem funding, or finding a way to monetize, or is it a community problem where we just can't get indie devs to standardize on one tool? Every thread where people complain about the loss of Flash could be a really productive conversation about what a modern animation engine would need and how we could build one. But instead it's just people re-litigating a 15-20 year old fight for no reason. Because the APIs are there. Any company could build an animation engine today that output to any low-level language: C, Rust, whatever. And the output could be compiled to WASM and the pixel buffers could be rendered to a canvas. We could even do smart updates and partial re-renders and cache large operations on separate canvases. Or that frame compilation could happen behind the scenes in WASM and the image data could be spit out as a single array of pixels. We could do all of the optimizations we need. But that tool doesn't exist. It doesn't exist for the web, or for iOS, or for Android, or for Windows, or for any modern console. Why? That's the productive question to ask, that's the question that will actually help us make progress towards replacing Flash. The only thing the web can provide is APIs and technology, at some point game devs need to stop complaining about the web in specific and start asking why our game dev tools in general aren't up to snuff.

SimianLogic2 6y ago

I think the point you're missing is that Flash supported an entire ecosystem. Because it was easy to distribute the files (and steal them from other portals), there were tons of game portals out there competing for traffic. This competition created incentives to do special deals (add my logo and a link for $2k before you launch). I released several games sponsored by Kongregate which went viral and got distributed to thousands of portals. Higher-tier portals would reach out and purchase a site-locked version without their competitor's branding for an additional $300-$1k depending on if they had their own API for high scores and such. Because there were SO many portals, it wasn't as winner-take-all as the modern mobile marketplaces. I could easily recreate my games in javascript today (or swift. or C#/unity. or whatever) from an "is this possible" point of view, but I think it's much harder to make money today. You could argue that's more due to the competition level and number of creators than Flash, but I think the siloed app stores are awful for the long tail and smaller developers. That ramp-up of competition kind of happened even before Flash was dead-dead, though--the big portals existed in a time before Facebook games (which suck now but were amazing for awhile) and mobile games. It's wild now to see my kids (5 & 8) play a lot of online games on modern much-shittier-than-Kongregate-and-Newgrounds portals, but there's basically a short time period between "old enough to play games" and "old enough for their own phone or steam account" that they're in right now, and I suspect that audience isn't big enough to support the kind of innovation we saw before Facebook games (which were also made with Flash, for the most part!).

trianglem 6y ago

tldr there is no replacement

nemothekid 6y ago

The Flash authorship tools were free because 3rd party authors creating Flash content were assisting in the promulgation of a proprietary platform that was gradually replacing open web standards. What? The Flash authorship tools were definitely not free. I remember Macromedia Studio used to cost nearly a grand. They were widely spread because, like Photoshop, Macromedia/Adobe didn't bother cracking down on piracy.

AshleysBrain 6y ago

There are actually a number of tools that allow easy HTML5 authorship for non-technical users. We make one too - Construct 3 [1]. I think one reason Flash had such prominence was their effective monopoly. Remember when you had to install a browser plugin to get Flash? They reached ubiquity, but it was basically an impossible job for anyone else to achieve. So if you wanted Flash-like content, Flash was your only real option. Since HTML5 is based on open technologies, there are lots of competing tools on the market doing exactly what some people apparently lament are no longer available. They're out there if you look, and arguably it's a healthier marketplace since there's real competition - although the choice is more complicated now, since there isn't that one option everyone uses. [1] https://www.construct.net https://www.construct.net

hartator 6y ago

> The Flash authorship tools were free Flash MX was a paid tool.

cblconfederate 6y ago

> that was gradually replacing open web standards. Flash was offering things that the normal web couldn't do (like video). It took a long time for the web to catch up nominally, and it's still lacking Macromedia would still be selling Flash if there was an open standard that replaced swf and was equally performant After all the web is now full of SPAs which are a very bloated version of flash pages with much less functionality