5 ms·

Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful

Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff. I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, you could figure out how to make buttons and event mappings, and I thought it was so cool that you could easily animate things in the form of movie clips without having to finagle with cycling through sprites. I made simple point and click adventures, interactive menus, and once I took physics and calculus in high school, a very simple platformer. It was a lot of fun. Nowadays the closest thing I've found for a similar level of easiness is GameMaker Studio, and I have a copy (legitimate this time :) ), and it's fun to play with, but it still feels more complicated than it needs to be. With Flash, I never had to learn about shader programming or anything like that. To be clear, I'm not trying to knock GameMaker for this, it's a great tool, it's just not as simple as Flash, for better or worse. Obviously Flash Player needed to die, and I'm not suggesting we resurrect it. It was a horrible buggy mess a lot of the time (especially on non-Windows platforms in my experience), but I don't feel like we've really "replaced" it fully yet, at least not on the development side. Hypercard was a bit before my time, sadly (we didn't have a working Mac in the 90s), but it looks like something I would have really enjoyed playing with.

phailhaus 6y ago
I commented the same sentiment a while back and someone pointed me to Construct [1] as a spiritual successor to Flash! [1] https://www.construct.net/ https://www.construct.net/
- tombert 6y ago
  I actually have a license to Construct as well, and like GameMaker it's fun and I do like it (though I think I actually like GameMaker a bit more). I haven't used it in like 6 years, so my knowledge is fairly out of date, but if I remember correctly, it's kind of lacking my favorite feature from Flash: the ability to use a professional-grade animation tool directly within the program. No messing with exporting sprite sheets or a series of bitmaps or anything, you can just create a movie clip, double click it, animate it, go back, and click "export to code". It's a true "one-stop-shop" for doing almost everything in your project. GameMaker actually has a pretty-ok sprite animation system built in, good enough for most retro-style games, but it's still pretty weak compared to Flash for anything more complex.
  - phailhaus 6y ago
    Looks like Construct has an Animations Editor too :) I get where you're coming from though, Flash was directly responsible for that golden age of creativity, because it was so accessible that literally children were making cool things with it. https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/manuals/construct-3/interface/animations-editor https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/manuals/construct-3/...
    - tombert 6y ago
      I knew you could tweak imported animations and stuff, but it didn't hold a candle to Flash's stuff, since Flash was an "animation-first" program. Maybe I need to play with Construct again though, it's probably improved substantially in six years.
jchw 6y ago
What about Adobe Animate? Granted, I haven’t actually tried, but my understanding is that it is like Flash but targeting the modern web.
- tombert 6y ago
  I haven't tried it, though if I recall they've greatly started de-emphasizing the coding aspect of it. Even still, I don't believe I can export directly to anything supported nowadays, right? Does the HTML5 exporter work?
  - jchw 6y ago
    It seems to still support ActionScript 3, though again, not personally experienced. Still, this would suggest you can export an existing Flash project to HTML5: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/create-publish-html5-canvas-document.html https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/create-publish-html5-... edit: Looking more closely, I do now see that you have to manually convert the AS3 when exporting to HTML5. That’s a bummer.
    - tombert 6y ago
      Yeah, that's what I thought. I remember hearing that you couldn't magically export your AS3 into HTML5 like you can with something like GameMaker. Somewhat ironically, due to something like Ruffle, exporting to an SWF like before might actually be a viable option again, since you'd get all the nice sandboxing of modern browsers while having pretty-ok flash compatibility.
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    Adobe Animate is actively developed and supported, so I'm sure it still exports to HTML5.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  I tried it out when it was called Edge and found it really easy to make interactive stuff using it! Since I've never made anything using Flash I don't know and would be quite interested in what it's lacking in comparison.
seanalltogether 6y ago
Flash was the perfect tool for someone to go from absolute beginner to fairly proficient developer. You could pick up the tool and the very first thing you could do was draw shapes, or maybe even a robot. Then you figured out you could animate them along a timeline, so now you can make the legs of your robot move from one side of the screen to another. Then you realized each shape is a discrete object, and you can attach scripts to that object to fire a laser across the screen, then... As much as I appreciated having more advanced tools like Unity later in my career, you can't beat the self discovery that was possible with Flash.
- tombert 6y ago
  Totally agree, and that's what I love about it, it allows you to focus on the fun parts of building games (e.g. moving graphics around, designing your own perfect control scheme) instead of spending twelve hours learning the intricacies of shader programming and whatnot.
II2II 6y ago
I suspect that there is a sweet spot for learning and teaching programming, and it typically happens soon after a new technology emerges. There is a lot of excitement, many low-hanging fruit, and the tools tend to be easier to work with. As time goes on, there is less motivation since the excitement has diminished and there are fewer unique contributions to make. More important though, the tools become more complex since their development has to address the needs of larger projects with more specific needs. I have seen this pattern repeat several times over in my life: programming personal computers with BASIC in the 1980's and web development in the late 1990's are the most obvious examples. HyperCard sort of fits in between since it was one of the more accessible GUI development tools, though it was by no means the only one.
tarsinge 6y ago
You touch on something that for me is the real issue: there is only one level of complexity today: maximum. Building a blog, a news website, a niche web app, or the new Facebook, it nearly doesn't matter, you must use the latest state of art tools. We have completely lost all the intermediate levels between beginner and professional. Sometimes it's justified as an unfortunate effect of the internet for sites and apps handling personal and sensitive data, something that the semi-professional 90's shareware didn't have to deal with. But I feel like that doesn't explain it all.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  Well there's always PICO-8. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
  - tombert 6y ago
    Pico-8 is a lot of fun, I made a ray-casting FPS thing in there a few years ago. That said, Pico-8 is (purposefully) limited pretty substantially. You can only have like 32kb of RAM, you are really limited in your sprite size, and I think the built-in editor is kind of annoying. Flash was fun because it was super easy to get into, but it kind of felt like a "big kid" programming environment. While I know the performance wasn't great, outside of that I never felt limited by Flash.
    - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
      PICO-8 has 2 MB of Lua RAM (every Lua variable is 64 bits minimum so that's not a huge lot to play with). If the limitations feel too restricting, there's always TIC-80. https://tic80.com/ https://tic80.com/
grishka 6y ago
There is a very active open-source project called Ruffle[1] which aims to reimplement Flash Player to play the already existing Flash content. It runs in the browser via WASM as well as a standalone native app on all three desktop OSes. It doesn't support AS3 yet. But as far as I can tell, there's no one trying to recreate Flash the authoring program. Which is a big shame IMO. We need something that enables creativity with a low barrier to entry. [1] https://ruffle.rs https://ruffle.rs
- Jetrel 6y ago
  Yeah - now that a legacy of flash apps exist, having a runtime for them is important. But as you say - back in the old days, the truly important thing had nothing to do with the runtime, and had everything to do with the authoring program. Someone really needs to build something similar, and - because we're starting in a later era, the only influence it needs to take from flash lies in the UI/UX.
  - grishka 6y ago
    > the only influence it needs to take from flash lies in the UI/UX. It could use the SWF file format too, there's nothing wrong with that IMO, and there already are many tools built around it.
- tombert 6y ago
  Ruffle is pretty sweet, it resurrected Homestar Runner so I legally have to love it. As I said, I do think GameMaker is a reasonable enough substitute for stuff. While I find having to write shaders a bit irritating, you don't have to do it very often, and you can get up and running in a fairly short amount of time, and it's HTML5 exporter works pretty much perfectly from what I've played with. Is it as easy as Flash? No, but it's still a pretty low barrier-to-entry for people, I think I could probably teach a kid how to use it and they'd pick up the basics.
  - grishka 6y ago
    > Is it as easy as Flash? No, but it's still a pretty low barrier-to-entry for people IMO it is too high. People who are not very much into tech are easily scared away by the need to write any code. The thing with Flash is that when you launch it and create a new project, it looks, feels and works like a vector graphics editor — because it is one, and a very good one. You start drawing stuff. You start animating stuff. If all you want to make is a cartoon, ActionScript is entirely optional. But then you start wanting to add buttons that do simple things like "go to frame X". You copy-paste ActionScript for that. You go deeper and deeper into the ActionScript rabbit hole. Before you've realized it, you're coding complex logic for a game. Flash lures you into wanting to write code by being an extremely easy to use animation editor. GameMaker repulses you by making writing code a prerequisite for going any further.
ksec 6y ago
>I'm not suggesting we resurrect it They should and open source it.

phailhaus 6y ago

I commented the same sentiment a while back and someone pointed me to Construct [1] as a spiritual successor to Flash! [1] https://www.construct.net/ https://www.construct.net/

tombert 6y ago
I actually have a license to Construct as well, and like GameMaker it's fun and I do like it (though I think I actually like GameMaker a bit more). I haven't used it in like 6 years, so my knowledge is fairly out of date, but if I remember correctly, it's kind of lacking my favorite feature from Flash: the ability to use a professional-grade animation tool directly within the program. No messing with exporting sprite sheets or a series of bitmaps or anything, you can just create a movie clip, double click it, animate it, go back, and click "export to code". It's a true "one-stop-shop" for doing almost everything in your project. GameMaker actually has a pretty-ok sprite animation system built in, good enough for most retro-style games, but it's still pretty weak compared to Flash for anything more complex.
- phailhaus 6y ago
  Looks like Construct has an Animations Editor too :) I get where you're coming from though, Flash was directly responsible for that golden age of creativity, because it was so accessible that literally children were making cool things with it. https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/manuals/construct-3/interface/animations-editor https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/manuals/construct-3/...
  - tombert 6y ago
    I knew you could tweak imported animations and stuff, but it didn't hold a candle to Flash's stuff, since Flash was an "animation-first" program. Maybe I need to play with Construct again though, it's probably improved substantially in six years.

jchw 6y ago

What about Adobe Animate? Granted, I haven’t actually tried, but my understanding is that it is like Flash but targeting the modern web.

tombert 6y ago
I haven't tried it, though if I recall they've greatly started de-emphasizing the coding aspect of it. Even still, I don't believe I can export directly to anything supported nowadays, right? Does the HTML5 exporter work?
- jchw 6y ago
  It seems to still support ActionScript 3, though again, not personally experienced. Still, this would suggest you can export an existing Flash project to HTML5: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/create-publish-html5-canvas-document.html https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/create-publish-html5-... edit: Looking more closely, I do now see that you have to manually convert the AS3 when exporting to HTML5. That’s a bummer.
  - tombert 6y ago
    Yeah, that's what I thought. I remember hearing that you couldn't magically export your AS3 into HTML5 like you can with something like GameMaker. Somewhat ironically, due to something like Ruffle, exporting to an SWF like before might actually be a viable option again, since you'd get all the nice sandboxing of modern browsers while having pretty-ok flash compatibility.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  Adobe Animate is actively developed and supported, so I'm sure it still exports to HTML5.
solarkraft 6y ago
I tried it out when it was called Edge and found it really easy to make interactive stuff using it! Since I've never made anything using Flash I don't know and would be quite interested in what it's lacking in comparison.

seanalltogether 6y ago

Flash was the perfect tool for someone to go from absolute beginner to fairly proficient developer. You could pick up the tool and the very first thing you could do was draw shapes, or maybe even a robot. Then you figured out you could animate them along a timeline, so now you can make the legs of your robot move from one side of the screen to another. Then you realized each shape is a discrete object, and you can attach scripts to that object to fire a laser across the screen, then... As much as I appreciated having more advanced tools like Unity later in my career, you can't beat the self discovery that was possible with Flash.

tombert 6y ago
Totally agree, and that's what I love about it, it allows you to focus on the fun parts of building games (e.g. moving graphics around, designing your own perfect control scheme) instead of spending twelve hours learning the intricacies of shader programming and whatnot.

II2II 6y ago

I suspect that there is a sweet spot for learning and teaching programming, and it typically happens soon after a new technology emerges. There is a lot of excitement, many low-hanging fruit, and the tools tend to be easier to work with. As time goes on, there is less motivation since the excitement has diminished and there are fewer unique contributions to make. More important though, the tools become more complex since their development has to address the needs of larger projects with more specific needs. I have seen this pattern repeat several times over in my life: programming personal computers with BASIC in the 1980's and web development in the late 1990's are the most obvious examples. HyperCard sort of fits in between since it was one of the more accessible GUI development tools, though it was by no means the only one.

tarsinge 6y ago

You touch on something that for me is the real issue: there is only one level of complexity today: maximum. Building a blog, a news website, a niche web app, or the new Facebook, it nearly doesn't matter, you must use the latest state of art tools. We have completely lost all the intermediate levels between beginner and professional. Sometimes it's justified as an unfortunate effect of the internet for sites and apps handling personal and sensitive data, something that the semi-professional 90's shareware didn't have to deal with. But I feel like that doesn't explain it all.

hypertele-Xii 6y ago
Well there's always PICO-8. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
- tombert 6y ago
  Pico-8 is a lot of fun, I made a ray-casting FPS thing in there a few years ago. That said, Pico-8 is (purposefully) limited pretty substantially. You can only have like 32kb of RAM, you are really limited in your sprite size, and I think the built-in editor is kind of annoying. Flash was fun because it was super easy to get into, but it kind of felt like a "big kid" programming environment. While I know the performance wasn't great, outside of that I never felt limited by Flash.
  - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    PICO-8 has 2 MB of Lua RAM (every Lua variable is 64 bits minimum so that's not a huge lot to play with). If the limitations feel too restricting, there's always TIC-80. https://tic80.com/ https://tic80.com/

grishka 6y ago

There is a very active open-source project called Ruffle[1] which aims to reimplement Flash Player to play the already existing Flash content. It runs in the browser via WASM as well as a standalone native app on all three desktop OSes. It doesn't support AS3 yet. But as far as I can tell, there's no one trying to recreate Flash the authoring program. Which is a big shame IMO. We need something that enables creativity with a low barrier to entry. [1] https://ruffle.rs https://ruffle.rs

Jetrel 6y ago
Yeah - now that a legacy of flash apps exist, having a runtime for them is important. But as you say - back in the old days, the truly important thing had nothing to do with the runtime, and had everything to do with the authoring program. Someone really needs to build something similar, and - because we're starting in a later era, the only influence it needs to take from flash lies in the UI/UX.
- grishka 6y ago
  > the only influence it needs to take from flash lies in the UI/UX. It could use the SWF file format too, there's nothing wrong with that IMO, and there already are many tools built around it.
tombert 6y ago
Ruffle is pretty sweet, it resurrected Homestar Runner so I legally have to love it. As I said, I do think GameMaker is a reasonable enough substitute for stuff. While I find having to write shaders a bit irritating, you don't have to do it very often, and you can get up and running in a fairly short amount of time, and it's HTML5 exporter works pretty much perfectly from what I've played with. Is it as easy as Flash? No, but it's still a pretty low barrier-to-entry for people, I think I could probably teach a kid how to use it and they'd pick up the basics.
- grishka 6y ago
  > Is it as easy as Flash? No, but it's still a pretty low barrier-to-entry for people IMO it is too high. People who are not very much into tech are easily scared away by the need to write any code. The thing with Flash is that when you launch it and create a new project, it looks, feels and works like a vector graphics editor — because it is one, and a very good one. You start drawing stuff. You start animating stuff. If all you want to make is a cartoon, ActionScript is entirely optional. But then you start wanting to add buttons that do simple things like "go to frame X". You copy-paste ActionScript for that. You go deeper and deeper into the ActionScript rabbit hole. Before you've realized it, you're coding complex logic for a game. Flash lures you into wanting to write code by being an extremely easy to use animation editor. GameMaker repulses you by making writing code a prerequisite for going any further.

ksec 6y ago

>I'm not suggesting we resurrect it They should and open source it.