21 ms·

I can no longer compile my first Flash game

189 points by devtailz 5y ago

btdmaster 5y ago
I don't know what it can do exactly but I had a very good experience modifying an SWF with FFDEC: https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler
- ajcoll5 5y ago
  FFDEC is pretty good - better in some cases than commercial solutions. I've been using it to fix some of the Flash based Rockstar Games websites that are no longer available before throwing them up on my 'museum' site that uses Ruffle to display them.
  - andai 5y ago
    Could you link the museum? Tried Ruffle a long time ago, would love to see how well it works now. Also curious what kind of fixes you had to apply. Once you patched the source, did you use the same tool FFDec to compile them again?
    - ajcoll5 5y ago
      https://museum.rockstarnexus.com/ https://museum.rockstarnexus.com/ The majority of the sites in the museum I captured using Charles proxy back in 2011. I have also included a few sites that Internet Archive had captured, but weren't functioning properly in the Wayback Machine due to either scripting or Flash requirements. The changes vary. There are a number of instances of direct linking to content instead of using relative paths, which can usually be fixed pretty easily using FFDEC's in-place Action Script editor. Toward the last 8 or so years these sites were accessible, Rockstar started to remove certain trailers - likely due to music licensing. For these I've had to dig into Internet Archive and see if I can find the original SWF files before changes were made. If I cannot, I then decompile sites back into Flash projects and use an old copy of Creative Suite 6 I have access to in order to restore certain buttons and elements. Ruffle still needs work but definitely has been improving. The project has been mainly focused on AS1&2 and has little/not-yet-working AS3 support. Sites like Vice City mostly work, but the background colors are off and sounds like the radio won't stop playing once started. Sites that Rockstar developed onward from 2006 like Liberty City Stories are a lot more broken at the moment unfortunately.
atum47 5y ago
Your game looks beautiful. Love the artwork
marcodiego 5y ago
I'd be impressed if someone could still run it. Actually not that much, ruffle compatibility is quite good these days.
- andai 5y ago
  I followed the instructions in the post (git clone repo, open Main.swf in Flash Player Projector. You really do need the repo, the swf file won't work by itself) and the game worked fine. (I did get stuck on level one, but I reckon that's a "user problem" ;)
song 5y ago
I tried downloading Flash Player standalone and run it but all I get is a grey screen. There's a lot of great flash games out there, not sure if there's a good solution (opensource or otherwise) to run them
- andai 5y ago
  I had the same issue, turns out you have to clone the whole repo first, swf won't work by itself.
- psyc 5y ago
  I recently had a reason to play a couple of old flash games. One of them I found a player that would run it. The other, I could not find any player that would run it. I can understand Adobe discontinuing Flash - that's normal. I really hate that Flash has been, like, forensically erased from history though. I'm surprised there's not more open-source effort than there is to preserve it.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    There is https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ , which I think has pretty good compatibility these days.
  - __s 5y ago
    Checkout Flashpoint: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint
deckarep 5y ago
I know this doesn’t satisfy compilation issues but for playing Flash content using a modern engine try out: https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ It’s written in Rust (don’t shoot the messenger) and was able to play some flash content I had produced around 1999… Ok I’m going to go crawl back under my rock.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  I tried my old startup from here: http://dudefactory.com/ http://dudefactory.com/ And it boots to the title screen, but I guess there is some sort of check inside the SWF to make sure it is running inside the right domain, because then it tries to redirect the browser back to the main URL and won't load the main avatar creation screen. Bummer. (I downloaded Adobe's Flash Projector and the behavior is the same) EDIT: I installed the Chrome browser extension instead and it booted up fine. Some rendering issues to do with stroke widths that make it reasonably unusable, but it worked and when you click to download you get the actual proper file since it is rendered using .NET on the back end.
  - deckarep 5y ago
    I had a similar problem. My flash content was several modules where the main module swapped in and loaded in sub-modules. The main screen would loaded but when clicked wouldn’t resolve the sub-modules correctly but I was able to just play the sub-modules and individually and see the old content in all its cheesy glory.
- Shank 5y ago
  Ruffle is an awesome project, but there's a huge amount of work that has to be done to support the entire catalog of Flash content. > AVM2 is ActionScript 3, which was introduced with Flash Player 9 (June 2006). After the release of Flash Professional CC (2013), authors are required to use ActionScript 3 - making any movie made after that date very likely to fall under this category. > Ruffle is still working on the foundational support for AVM 2, and does not yet support any content that requires it. A warning will be placed in the log when you attempt to play AVM 2 content, for this reason. We do plan on supporting this soon!
auriplane 5y ago
Try something like this? fcsh-wrap -static-link-runtime-shared-libraries -benchmark=false -debug=false -o tmp.swf -source-path=src -library-path+=lib/as3-signals-v0.8.swc -- src/core/Main.as It almost builds for me, but I think since my Flash projects were older than yours my copy of the Flex SDK might be too old.
- mst 5y ago
  I dearly hope something along these lines works, especially given the author has a repository and thinks the last set of optimisations may have been what introduced a bunch of the current bugs - if that's so, backing out those patches and relying on modern machine's performance to make the optimisations not matter might work out really nicely. Yeah, I'm being hopeful from a complete lack of expertise here. But it'd still be -really- cool if it worked out.
  - auriplane 5y ago
    It turns out it does build with a newer Flex SDK, but all I get when I run the resulting .swf is a grey screen.
    - auriplane 5y ago
      The grey screen thing, it turns out, is just because I didn't run the .swf from the bin/ directory. It runs just fine once I put the output file there! For what it's worth, I built it with 4.6.0 of the Flex SDK, which Adobe is still hosting: https://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/flex/sdk/builds/flex4.6/flex_sdk_4.6.0.23201B.zip https://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/flex/sdk/builds/flex4.6/fle... So yeah, problem solved, I guess?
      - devtailz 5y ago
        Thanks for this. Just to confirm https://github.com/Draknek/fcsh-wrap https://github.com/Draknek/fcsh-wrap is what you are referring to? When I tried the Flex SDK I had troubles getting it configured and pointing to the correct files. I'll see if I can give this a try this evening
caslon 5y ago
For anyone with some extra time on their hands, Flash games still work on Pale Moon.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  They also work outside of any browser in Flash Projector, provided you download the actual .swf file.
derefr 5y ago
Kind of confused why people would try to run/compile/etc. Flash games on modern platforms. If this game were a native app from that era, you'd think nothing of whipping out a Windows XP VM and installing an era-appropriate toolchain in it. And really, the same applies not only for native executables, but to any proprietary / non-standards-based format from a previous era that's since been left to the wayside. Want to use a website that embeds a Java applet? You'd better (effectively) time-travel to 2005. IMHO, at this point, a Flash game (for which the source code is not available) should really be "modernized" similarly to the way the Internet Archive makes old Windows and Mac software available — by wrapping them up into their own little standalone VM images. Like this: https://archive.org/details/chips_challenge_windows_3.x https://archive.org/details/chips_challenge_windows_3.x
- hajile 5y ago
  https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle A flash VM running in safe WebAssembly sounds like an awesome idea for preserving a lot of older web content.
- Retric 5y ago
  Most native windows applications from 2005 still work on modern systems, though they might not work well with higher resolutions etc.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Yes, because Windows still exists and has a team that cares about backward compatibility. Adobe Flash does not still exist. (Adobe Animate does, yes, but the SWF export format, no.) Also, even living software calls its compatibility somewhere. Windows programs from 1995 do not work on modern systems. Mostly because many of them still had 16-bit components at that point (e.g. a 16-bit installer), and 64-bit Windows doesn't run 16-bit executables.
    - Laforet 5y ago
      It does not have to be 16 bit. A lot of 32 bit programs I wrote in Virtual Basic 5 or 6 does not work properly in Windows 7 or later. This is not for a lack of runtime files, but the program will either exit early with cryptic error messages or have extremely glitchy UI that makes them unusable.
nevster 5y ago
I recently had a similar experience updating an old iphone app that was written in Swift 2. I had to use an old 2009 iMac with a copy of Xcode 8 to migrate to Swift 3, then a 2016 MacBook Pro with Xcode 10 to migrate to Swift 4. Then I could finally perform the final migration and compile/deploy on my M1 Macbook Pro. It was ridiculous!
- xuki 5y ago
  You kinda did this to yourself by using Swift when it was not stable yet. Meanwhile old Objective-C code continues to work just fine on iOS 15.
  - mst 5y ago
    I agree wrt Obj-C but as a non-Mac developer it would not have been obvious to me a priori that something that was declared version 2 already wasn't stable. (I would absolutely assume that if it was officially still unstable that would have been documented somewhere ... I would absolutely not assume that I would have noticed)
    - nevster 5y ago
      Agree - 99.9% of Java 1 apps will still compile and run just fine on Java 17
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        Unless you used XML.
        mlyle 5y ago
        Are you talking about jaxp? Don't old jaxp jars still work?
        cesarb 5y ago
        The parent comment is probably talking about the J2EE packages which used to come with the JRE before Java 11; a lot of code which used to run on Java 8 and earlier no longer runs on Java 11 and later unless you manually add a couple of extra JARs to the classpath (and good luck knowing which ones are needed when reflection is involved). However, the grandparent comment is talking about Java 1, which is before J2EE; the thing which would break code from that time is probably not going to be XML, but instead things like Applet support. There's a good chance that a Java 1 app is in fact an applet designed to run within a browser, and no longer runs fine on Java 17 since the Java plugin is no longer supported.
ransom1538 5y ago
Flash died because Jobs wanted it to die. He was worried about AS3s extremely fast development rate (the vector art in fla was years ahead). If iphones supported flash they could develop their own stores and push out games -- all going around apples gating. Security! Glitches! those are all lies - that could have been fixed.
- kelnos 5y ago
  > Security! Glitches! those are all lies - that could have been fixed. How many years did Adobe have to make those security fixes, though? And yet Flash was probably the #1 security threat for people using a web browser. I agree that Jobs' reasons for wanting to kill Flash were not particularly altruistic, but it either needed to die, or Adobe should have completely open-sourced it and/or documented everything so people could write compatible (and open) compilers and runtimes. Depending on proprietary software for things you want to keep runnable for years and years is just a bad idea. If Jobs hadn't been the catalyst, Flash would have died for some other reason, eventually. I can understand that OP perhaps didn't see that at the time (I'm sure I've made the same mistake myself long ago), but that would seem to be inevitable.
- b112 5y ago
  It took almost a decade for flash to even work in a 64bit userland for Linux. I recall the sole dev at the time, complaining that he codebase was a spaghetti mess of undocumented garbage. So I think Jobs was right here. Anyhow, Adobe is famous for dead end, junky stuff. Their early days were golden, but they rested on old IP, milking it. EG, flash, cold fusion, their licensing garbage. These days they do all sorts of weird stuff, and due to their name even banks are silly enough to trust their fraud detection business. First time I've ever pitied banks.
  - throw_m239339 5y ago
    Unfortunately Adobe is deeply anchored in the design industry with tools like InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effect(no competition on PC),... so they have a solid foothold they are going to milk for a very long time. However, most of their newer UX products do not seem to beat the competition, which is a good thing at least.
Laforet 5y ago
I teach high school students from time to time and over the years I have accumulated a large library of STEM training material. Of which there are a lot of PowerPoint slides with interactive Flash content embedded. When MS and Adobe turned off Flash for Windows, the MS Office flash plugins also stopped working. I had to set up a VM running windows 7 to be able to use them again. It is not as smooth as running powerpoint natively but it's good enough for classroom demonstrations. However when students ask me to share the slides I have to tell them that while they are welcome to have it, about half of the stuff won't work properly because of a rich media plugin they are too young to have heard about. Besides, I don't want to teach them how to set up their own VM, and I doubt they are willing to go that far. I have spent some time looking into this problem and have not found any third party tools that will allow embedded flash to work again. So much for the digital dark age.
- alexjurkiewicz 5y ago
  That content must be teen years old now. It seems ok for training materials to be refreshed once a decade.
  - ls15 5y ago
    Some flash content is incredibly creative and complex. Chances are that it just gets replaced with less interesting content.
- jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
  15 year old students are too young to know flash? Damn, I'm actually getting old
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Homestar Runner is old enough to buy you cold ones.
  - hajile 5y ago
    Steve Job's letter on flash is 12 years old now. https://www.statista.com/chart/3796/websites-using-flash/ https://www.statista.com/chart/3796/websites-using-flash/ Flash lost half of its marketshare down to 15% by 2014. I'd wager that most of the remaining sites were more niche or legacy and probably not seen by a 7 year old kid under general circumstances.
tokumei 5y ago
Flash is terrible in retrospect, but I used to love making Flash games in high school by myself. Amazing experience.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  > Flash is terrible in retrospect, but I used to love making Flash games in high school by myself. Amazing experience. Flash isn't terrible. Flash as a browser plugin was terrible and insecure indeed. Flash was no more terrible than Java or .net on the desktop as a multimedia app platform. In fact it made it easy not only to create interactive "experiences", games, but also artist authoring tools. Alchemy allowed to incorporate C/++ code into Flash, and Flash also had its own shader editor for effects. Adobe threw the baby with the bath water.
- assemblylang 5y ago
  > Flash is terrible in retrospect Actually it has a good use case for videos and animation. Flash animation uses vector graphics, saving huge amounts of space for basic animations and allowing the animation to scale to any screen size without degrading resolution. Part of the reason Flash took off on the web was due to small size (useful when network throughput was more limited).
- rightbyte 5y ago
  The tooling was excelent. In a way tooling is more important than the underlying tech. Especially for amatour projects.
a_shovel 5y ago
> This is made more frustrating by the fact that something about newer standalone flash players causes one of the levels to be near unplayable. It might be something else. I replayed Nitrome's Mutiny a while back, and though BlueMaxima's Flashpoint could get me around the site lock, whenever an enemy used the anchor weapon, the game would lock up for about half a minute, with the anchor at the top of the screen but still waiting to fall. This never happened back in the day. I bring this up because Flashpoint comes with a few dozen different versions of Flash, and none of them fixed the bug. So it's probably not the Flash player version. Maybe it's something in the OS, I dunno.
- hoten 5y ago
  Didn't Flash games sometimes employ DRM-type stuff to prevent swf jacking? Check the domain, and if it isn't an approved on, fail to run / do something devilish like make the game unwinnable with a note about it being stolen. EDIT: Oh, you were saying Flashpoint got around some initial domain check. Perhaps the developer added multiple, one obvious, loud one upfront and a few more later in the game.
  - a_shovel 5y ago
    It wasn't DRM. The game was still playable, this one attack would just take much longer than normal. It was unfortunate, since I was planning to try speedrunning the game, and the bug just ruined the flow and the pace.
naikrovek 5y ago
would Adobe Animator not work? fairly sure it is the old Flash with a new name and new ways to publish your stuff.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  Lots of AS3 developers never actually touched Flash Professional, in fact CS3 was outright broken in AS3 because they expected you to use Flash Builder / Flex. This was the point where Flash stopped being the way you wrote Flash games.
noduerme 5y ago
The only reason I still subscribe to Adobe, who I hate, is to be keep a working version of Flash Builder around in case I ever want to recompile old AIR games I wrote that no one will ever see now. Sad times.
- andai 5y ago
  You may be interested in https://airsdk.harman.com/ https://airsdk.harman.com/ https://airsdk.dev/ https://airsdk.dev/ https://github.com/airsdk https://github.com/airsdk It's still actively being supported (and developed?) after Adobe transferred it to HARMAN. "The SDK is free for personal use and for low-income companies." Update: upon further digging I found a link to a different company developing "CheerpX for Flash", a WASM runtime that runs SWFs in the browser. Also nonfree, no pricing info, but they seem to be generous to nonprofits and education. https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/ https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Meh. The implementation is not the game
abetusk 5y ago
A reminder to invest in libre/free/open infrastructure folks. It's not just widening the tent and lowering the barrier to entry for people today, it's also making it accessible to all of our future selves.
- wiz21c 5y ago
  Well, free software also do die sometimes. But sure, it's by far the best option. All the things I do with a computer is based on free or open source software or open standard. Curiously, everything still works 20 years after... Watching movies, listening music, text/calc, coding, mail, internet,... (not playing game though, the kids have their console but they don't create anything with it, so I don't care if it gets obsoleted)
  - praptak 5y ago
    Free software dies but usually because of lack of interest. Case in point: Ruffle. Flash died, free software picked up the torch.
- ant6n 5y ago
  Free software won't mean that operating systems won't disable software by retiring APIs. For example on Linux, at some point somebody deprecated some systray icon Api. And some linuxes, like elementary OS just full on disabled systray icons, with some arguments about this having been deprecated years ago, and u shouldn't use software that depends on systray icons. This doesn't just disable old software, but also current software - for example the Dropbox client doesn't work out of the box, and caffeine/caffeinate doesn't work either.
  - abetusk 5y ago
    You bring up valid points about engineering practices and backwards comparability in general. I do think you're nitpicking a bit when it comes to the issue at hand. For example, in you grievance, is there a way to provide a Docker solution to run the working code under 'emulation'? Is there a way to compile an older version of the kernel to run these programs in the way you want? I don't know but my bet is that the answer is 'yes' to both of those. My point is that this wouldn't even really be possible without a FOSS ecosystem. It requires labor from someone who cares enough to fix it but at least the avenue is open enough in the form of accessible standards and code. Under a proprietary standard or source these would need to be reverse engineered or, in maybe an extreme case, be illegal.
thorncorona 5y ago
I'm honestly really sad that there's no simple way to get Flash games working anymore. Flash games were a huge part of my childhood and now all of them are basically unplayable without spinning up a VM.
- assemblylang 5y ago
  Check out both Ruffle[0] and Flashpoint[1]. Ruffle is an open source flash player emulator that compiles to WASM and has a browser plugin you can add that will allow you to run embedded flash content on a web page (although its not needed if the server serves up a copy of Ruffle). Flashpoint is a collection of thousands of flash games with an easy interface to play them through flash player. [0] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle [1] https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/downloads/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/downloads/
- imtringued 5y ago
  I have used the standalone flash player by adobe on linux. I don't know what you are talking about.
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  This situation sucks, but this is one of the big reasons why so many devs will warn you against having closed-source proprietary dependencies. The day the company behind it kills support, all your projects are dead. And it's always a matter of time. If your wifi card has proprietary firmware, you can replace the card eventually. If the language compiles is proprietary, it's only a matter of time. If flash had been open source, I'm sure there's be some small group of passionate devs keeping it alive. But as it is, this is simply not possible. Let this be a warning if future choices.
baby 5y ago
I have the same problem with a bunch of flash animations I made a long time ago. This makes me really sad :(
hutrdvnj 5y ago
> I remember using FDT for development, but this program crashes upon opening. I’ve tried installing the Flex SDK, but running the compiler throws errors about finding the location of certain required files (why these aren’t a part of the SDK is beyond me). There's likely some breaking changes in the past decade of Flex SDK. Try to use a VM or Container with something like Ubuntu 12.04 or Debian old-stable and use old versions of the Flex SDK, this will give you a higher chance to compile successfully.
FounderBurr 5y ago
Always preserve your tool chain. If you can’t, anything you develop will never really belong to you.
ksec 5y ago
Unpopular opinion. Flash ( its runtime and the Dev Environment ), HyperCard, and arguably Visual Basic 6.0 These three in my opinion bring a lot of people into coding. I guess the word programming would be too prestige to be used to describe them and may anger those in Silicon Valley. But for the 99% of people out there, all they wanted was their computer somehow do what they tell them to do without being shown all these functional / object oriented programming and which programming language to fight for etc. People were even happy just coding a plug-in for World of Warcraft using Lua. I still think the whole industry for computing has moved in the wrong direction.
- icemelt8 5y ago
  I owe my entire career to Flash.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    Me too, I was a vulnerability researcher =) (Not really, but the joke wrote itself)
- xmprt 5y ago
  There are still a ton of people learning how to make basic games using Processing or Python. Excel is also used a lot to automate things which can be a gateway to learning a more advanced programming language. Just people kids are learning in new ways doesn't mean they aren't learning. I do concur that it's sad that a lot of modern games and applications have gotten less hackable which has removed a door that a lot of old school programmers used to learn how to code.
  - hansworst 5y ago
    I started programming in Flash (after doing some basic html/css), and have later done some stuff in Processing as well. Flash was an infinitely better tool to get started with programming because it lets you actually draw and animate vector graphics, and then sprinkle in a tiny bit of code to make things interactive. Compare that to Processing, where even just using some images drawn in some other tool is more difficult than it should be. I don't think you can really even compare the two in terms of beginner productivity.
rendall 5y ago
I want to remind everyone what happened, here. By the beginning of 2010, it was clear that the App Store was likely to become a massive cash cow for Apple. Flash was direct competition, however. If one could play a game in a browser rather than buying it, Apple would lose out on that income. Everyone was clamoring for Apple to add Flash capability to its mobile iPhone browser. Adobe offered all help, yet Apple continued to drag its feet. It became obvious something was going on. In April, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter, "Thoughts on Flash", stating, among other things, that HTML5 could deliver a superior experience to Flash and that Flash had such inherent security and performance problems that they could never be rectified. These were lies, but Apple's henchmen in tech media, especially Wired and Gawker, repeated this lie endlessly, destroying a creative ecosystem and industry so that Apple could have its App Store. The web is still to this day unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to.
- andai 5y ago
  >The web is unable to deliver an experience like Flash could I think the browser has been on par with Flash Player for a while, but Flash-the-authoring-tool (to my knowledge) does not yet have an equal. (I'm told Adobe Animate, the rebranded Flash authoring tool, is somehow unsuitable for creating games, despite HTML5 export features.) To put it another way, I think we've more or less replaced the Flash Player, but we haven't replaced Flash Professional. (As others have mentioned, Unity kind of covers the same ground, but not really.)
  - rendall 5y ago
    You cannot find Flash experiences on the web, nor even Flash-like experiences on the web. There has been no replacement. This post seems to confuse capability with actuality. Sure, we have the technical capability for a Flash-like player and authoring tool, but it does not exist.
    - nicholsonpk 5y ago
      Maybe I misunderstand what experiences you are looking for, but if you go to itch.io and choose HTML5 do you not see the things that used to be made in Flash?
hamdouni 5y ago
I am still maintaining a professional application written in flex for one of my client which serve to manage his warehouse stock. The big pain was to use an old portable Firefox version and block its update so the flash plugins would not be nuked. Legacy code is not simple.
taylorius 5y ago
I used to love developing in Actionscript 3 / Flash. I've yet to find a language / environment I like more. There was an interesting point in an interview that Lex Friedman did with Brendan Eich, where Eich mentioned that Actionscript 3 was in fact based on a proposed "Javascript 2" language, which otherwise never saw the light of day, due to whatever corporate manoeuvring was occurring at the time. I wish it had been adopted for the browser!
jorl17 5y ago
I recently ported a ~9-year-old game from Flash/AS3 to Haxe. It was an amazing experience, plus I got it to run on all kinds of crazy platforms and added a bunch of new features. I'd advise anyone wanting to scratch the Flash itch to see if it is a feasible thing. Won't be straightforward for all applications, but I found it almost cathartic. Haxe is a gem of a hidden language. It's just too bad the community isn't gigantic and the tooling support (IDE) is rather lackluster. I've become quite fond of it (especially after working with it nonstop for months in my free time). I recommend everyone check it out!
- devtailz 5y ago
  I've written a few things in Haxe / OpenFL. This is probably the most likely option for a "simple" port. I may give this a shot when I have some spare time.
staticman2 5y ago
Flash on Android ended up running pretty badly. They couldn't even come up with a way to make old apps playable without a keyboard and mouse, if I recall correctly. Then Adobe gave up and discontinued it.
fleddr 5y ago
I'll say one positive thing about flash: the idea of semi-visual programming on the web being gone is a loss. Not only is it a much more accessible way to develop things for a much wider audience, it's also a relatively productive way to develop. Before that, Java applets failed and after that, Silverlight failed. 25 years ago I was visually programming desktop apps in Delphi. Drag and drop, advanced layout mechanisms, rich library of standardized UI controls, advanced data binding, you name it. It's quite ridiculous how we anti-progressed since then. Now we're back to text files and terminals. Weird frameworks to fill the gaps of the web but none really have batteries included. There's no language library in JS, nor is there a UI library. You all have to glue it together and hope it works. Not even the development flow is standardized, it's multiple tools stitched together each of which having 7,000 dependencies. Knowledge is also not portable, nobody is able to maintain that 7 year old Angular project and newbies have no idea where to start. It adds up to the #1 issue in our industry: low productivity. We've positioned ourselves into a garbage development ecosystem that is very hard to understand whilst outputting little, both in quantity and quality. This issue is much bigger than poor tools. These poor tools means billions are wasted on an ongoing basis reinventing the exact same thing over and over. It means knowledge is not sticky, so there's a huge cost in re-learning things. It means a lot of creative people are locked out of development, as it's too intimidating to them. "See, this tree-shaken bundle gets loaded and then rehydrates the server response, after which state is in the store and you just work on your component but be mindful of its side effects and dependencies as your re-render has to be a pure function, kind of like the reducers in your store, which are similar to actions but not really. Told you it was easy."
devtailz 5y ago
I've updated the post as auriplane has gotten me quite close to a solution. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583307. They are able to run it after building, but I'm still running in to issues, which is probably just a small configuration issue on my end. I've added a Github Issue to track the progress of this: https://github.com/adamjberg/i_solated/issues/4 https://github.com/adamjberg/i_solated/issues/4 . Finally hopeful that there's a solution to be found!
- devtailz 5y ago
  With a couple of code changes I'm successfully able to build and run the project again!! Thanks everyone for thoughts and suggestions.
jasmaa 5y ago
Late but I saw this in the morning and was gonna try my hand at compiling it but looks like someone already figured it out (congrats!). I have a bunch of old Flash games from back in HS. Been watching Ruffle for a while as well since I've been wanting to make a page to preserve them but AS3 functionality just isn't there yet...

189 points by devtailz 5y ago

I don't know what it can do exactly but I had a very good experience modifying an SWF with FFDEC: https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler

ajcoll5 5y ago
FFDEC is pretty good - better in some cases than commercial solutions. I've been using it to fix some of the Flash based Rockstar Games websites that are no longer available before throwing them up on my 'museum' site that uses Ruffle to display them.
- andai 5y ago
  Could you link the museum? Tried Ruffle a long time ago, would love to see how well it works now. Also curious what kind of fixes you had to apply. Once you patched the source, did you use the same tool FFDec to compile them again?
  - ajcoll5 5y ago
    https://museum.rockstarnexus.com/ https://museum.rockstarnexus.com/ The majority of the sites in the museum I captured using Charles proxy back in 2011. I have also included a few sites that Internet Archive had captured, but weren't functioning properly in the Wayback Machine due to either scripting or Flash requirements. The changes vary. There are a number of instances of direct linking to content instead of using relative paths, which can usually be fixed pretty easily using FFDEC's in-place Action Script editor. Toward the last 8 or so years these sites were accessible, Rockstar started to remove certain trailers - likely due to music licensing. For these I've had to dig into Internet Archive and see if I can find the original SWF files before changes were made. If I cannot, I then decompile sites back into Flash projects and use an old copy of Creative Suite 6 I have access to in order to restore certain buttons and elements. Ruffle still needs work but definitely has been improving. The project has been mainly focused on AS1&2 and has little/not-yet-working AS3 support. Sites like Vice City mostly work, but the background colors are off and sounds like the radio won't stop playing once started. Sites that Rockstar developed onward from 2006 like Liberty City Stories are a lot more broken at the moment unfortunately.

atum47 5y ago

Your game looks beautiful. Love the artwork

marcodiego 5y ago

I'd be impressed if someone could still run it. Actually not that much, ruffle compatibility is quite good these days.

andai 5y ago
I followed the instructions in the post (git clone repo, open Main.swf in Flash Player Projector. You really do need the repo, the swf file won't work by itself) and the game worked fine. (I did get stuck on level one, but I reckon that's a "user problem" ;)

song 5y ago

I tried downloading Flash Player standalone and run it but all I get is a grey screen. There's a lot of great flash games out there, not sure if there's a good solution (opensource or otherwise) to run them

andai 5y ago
I had the same issue, turns out you have to clone the whole repo first, swf won't work by itself.
psyc 5y ago
I recently had a reason to play a couple of old flash games. One of them I found a player that would run it. The other, I could not find any player that would run it. I can understand Adobe discontinuing Flash - that's normal. I really hate that Flash has been, like, forensically erased from history though. I'm surprised there's not more open-source effort than there is to preserve it.
- Shared404 5y ago
  There is https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ , which I think has pretty good compatibility these days.
- __s 5y ago
  Checkout Flashpoint: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint

deckarep 5y ago

I know this doesn’t satisfy compilation issues but for playing Flash content using a modern engine try out: https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ It’s written in Rust (don’t shoot the messenger) and was able to play some flash content I had produced around 1999… Ok I’m going to go crawl back under my rock.

kingcharles 5y ago
I tried my old startup from here: http://dudefactory.com/ http://dudefactory.com/ And it boots to the title screen, but I guess there is some sort of check inside the SWF to make sure it is running inside the right domain, because then it tries to redirect the browser back to the main URL and won't load the main avatar creation screen. Bummer. (I downloaded Adobe's Flash Projector and the behavior is the same) EDIT: I installed the Chrome browser extension instead and it booted up fine. Some rendering issues to do with stroke widths that make it reasonably unusable, but it worked and when you click to download you get the actual proper file since it is rendered using .NET on the back end.
- deckarep 5y ago
  I had a similar problem. My flash content was several modules where the main module swapped in and loaded in sub-modules. The main screen would loaded but when clicked wouldn’t resolve the sub-modules correctly but I was able to just play the sub-modules and individually and see the old content in all its cheesy glory.
Shank 5y ago
Ruffle is an awesome project, but there's a huge amount of work that has to be done to support the entire catalog of Flash content. > AVM2 is ActionScript 3, which was introduced with Flash Player 9 (June 2006). After the release of Flash Professional CC (2013), authors are required to use ActionScript 3 - making any movie made after that date very likely to fall under this category. > Ruffle is still working on the foundational support for AVM 2, and does not yet support any content that requires it. A warning will be placed in the log when you attempt to play AVM 2 content, for this reason. We do plan on supporting this soon!

auriplane 5y ago

Try something like this? fcsh-wrap -static-link-runtime-shared-libraries -benchmark=false -debug=false -o tmp.swf -source-path=src -library-path+=lib/as3-signals-v0.8.swc -- src/core/Main.as It almost builds for me, but I think since my Flash projects were older than yours my copy of the Flex SDK might be too old.

mst 5y ago
I dearly hope something along these lines works, especially given the author has a repository and thinks the last set of optimisations may have been what introduced a bunch of the current bugs - if that's so, backing out those patches and relying on modern machine's performance to make the optimisations not matter might work out really nicely. Yeah, I'm being hopeful from a complete lack of expertise here. But it'd still be -really- cool if it worked out.
- auriplane 5y ago
  It turns out it does build with a newer Flex SDK, but all I get when I run the resulting .swf is a grey screen.
  - auriplane 5y ago
    The grey screen thing, it turns out, is just because I didn't run the .swf from the bin/ directory. It runs just fine once I put the output file there! For what it's worth, I built it with 4.6.0 of the Flex SDK, which Adobe is still hosting: https://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/flex/sdk/builds/flex4.6/flex_sdk_4.6.0.23201B.zip https://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/flex/sdk/builds/flex4.6/fle... So yeah, problem solved, I guess?
    - devtailz 5y ago
      Thanks for this. Just to confirm https://github.com/Draknek/fcsh-wrap https://github.com/Draknek/fcsh-wrap is what you are referring to? When I tried the Flex SDK I had troubles getting it configured and pointing to the correct files. I'll see if I can give this a try this evening

caslon 5y ago

For anyone with some extra time on their hands, Flash games still work on Pale Moon.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
They also work outside of any browser in Flash Projector, provided you download the actual .swf file.

derefr 5y ago

Kind of confused why people would try to run/compile/etc. Flash games on modern platforms. If this game were a native app from that era, you'd think nothing of whipping out a Windows XP VM and installing an era-appropriate toolchain in it. And really, the same applies not only for native executables, but to any proprietary / non-standards-based format from a previous era that's since been left to the wayside. Want to use a website that embeds a Java applet? You'd better (effectively) time-travel to 2005. IMHO, at this point, a Flash game (for which the source code is not available) should really be "modernized" similarly to the way the Internet Archive makes old Windows and Mac software available — by wrapping them up into their own little standalone VM images. Like this: https://archive.org/details/chips_challenge_windows_3.x https://archive.org/details/chips_challenge_windows_3.x

hajile 5y ago
https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle A flash VM running in safe WebAssembly sounds like an awesome idea for preserving a lot of older web content.
Retric 5y ago
Most native windows applications from 2005 still work on modern systems, though they might not work well with higher resolutions etc.
- derefr 5y ago
  Yes, because Windows still exists and has a team that cares about backward compatibility. Adobe Flash does not still exist. (Adobe Animate does, yes, but the SWF export format, no.) Also, even living software calls its compatibility somewhere. Windows programs from 1995 do not work on modern systems. Mostly because many of them still had 16-bit components at that point (e.g. a 16-bit installer), and 64-bit Windows doesn't run 16-bit executables.
  - Laforet 5y ago
    It does not have to be 16 bit. A lot of 32 bit programs I wrote in Virtual Basic 5 or 6 does not work properly in Windows 7 or later. This is not for a lack of runtime files, but the program will either exit early with cryptic error messages or have extremely glitchy UI that makes them unusable.

nevster 5y ago

I recently had a similar experience updating an old iphone app that was written in Swift 2. I had to use an old 2009 iMac with a copy of Xcode 8 to migrate to Swift 3, then a 2016 MacBook Pro with Xcode 10 to migrate to Swift 4. Then I could finally perform the final migration and compile/deploy on my M1 Macbook Pro. It was ridiculous!

xuki 5y ago
You kinda did this to yourself by using Swift when it was not stable yet. Meanwhile old Objective-C code continues to work just fine on iOS 15.
- mst 5y ago
  I agree wrt Obj-C but as a non-Mac developer it would not have been obvious to me a priori that something that was declared version 2 already wasn't stable. (I would absolutely assume that if it was officially still unstable that would have been documented somewhere ... I would absolutely not assume that I would have noticed)
  - nevster 5y ago
    Agree - 99.9% of Java 1 apps will still compile and run just fine on Java 17
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Unless you used XML.
      - mlyle 5y ago
        Are you talking about jaxp? Don't old jaxp jars still work?
        cesarb 5y ago
        The parent comment is probably talking about the J2EE packages which used to come with the JRE before Java 11; a lot of code which used to run on Java 8 and earlier no longer runs on Java 11 and later unless you manually add a couple of extra JARs to the classpath (and good luck knowing which ones are needed when reflection is involved). However, the grandparent comment is talking about Java 1, which is before J2EE; the thing which would break code from that time is probably not going to be XML, but instead things like Applet support. There's a good chance that a Java 1 app is in fact an applet designed to run within a browser, and no longer runs fine on Java 17 since the Java plugin is no longer supported.

ransom1538 5y ago

Flash died because Jobs wanted it to die. He was worried about AS3s extremely fast development rate (the vector art in fla was years ahead). If iphones supported flash they could develop their own stores and push out games -- all going around apples gating. Security! Glitches! those are all lies - that could have been fixed.

kelnos 5y ago
> Security! Glitches! those are all lies - that could have been fixed. How many years did Adobe have to make those security fixes, though? And yet Flash was probably the #1 security threat for people using a web browser. I agree that Jobs' reasons for wanting to kill Flash were not particularly altruistic, but it either needed to die, or Adobe should have completely open-sourced it and/or documented everything so people could write compatible (and open) compilers and runtimes. Depending on proprietary software for things you want to keep runnable for years and years is just a bad idea. If Jobs hadn't been the catalyst, Flash would have died for some other reason, eventually. I can understand that OP perhaps didn't see that at the time (I'm sure I've made the same mistake myself long ago), but that would seem to be inevitable.
b112 5y ago
It took almost a decade for flash to even work in a 64bit userland for Linux. I recall the sole dev at the time, complaining that he codebase was a spaghetti mess of undocumented garbage. So I think Jobs was right here. Anyhow, Adobe is famous for dead end, junky stuff. Their early days were golden, but they rested on old IP, milking it. EG, flash, cold fusion, their licensing garbage. These days they do all sorts of weird stuff, and due to their name even banks are silly enough to trust their fraud detection business. First time I've ever pitied banks.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  Unfortunately Adobe is deeply anchored in the design industry with tools like InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effect(no competition on PC),... so they have a solid foothold they are going to milk for a very long time. However, most of their newer UX products do not seem to beat the competition, which is a good thing at least.

Laforet 5y ago

I teach high school students from time to time and over the years I have accumulated a large library of STEM training material. Of which there are a lot of PowerPoint slides with interactive Flash content embedded. When MS and Adobe turned off Flash for Windows, the MS Office flash plugins also stopped working. I had to set up a VM running windows 7 to be able to use them again. It is not as smooth as running powerpoint natively but it's good enough for classroom demonstrations. However when students ask me to share the slides I have to tell them that while they are welcome to have it, about half of the stuff won't work properly because of a rich media plugin they are too young to have heard about. Besides, I don't want to teach them how to set up their own VM, and I doubt they are willing to go that far. I have spent some time looking into this problem and have not found any third party tools that will allow embedded flash to work again. So much for the digital dark age.

alexjurkiewicz 5y ago
That content must be teen years old now. It seems ok for training materials to be refreshed once a decade.
- ls15 5y ago
  Some flash content is incredibly creative and complex. Chances are that it just gets replaced with less interesting content.
jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
15 year old students are too young to know flash? Damn, I'm actually getting old
- bombcar 5y ago
  Homestar Runner is old enough to buy you cold ones.
- hajile 5y ago
  Steve Job's letter on flash is 12 years old now. https://www.statista.com/chart/3796/websites-using-flash/ https://www.statista.com/chart/3796/websites-using-flash/ Flash lost half of its marketshare down to 15% by 2014. I'd wager that most of the remaining sites were more niche or legacy and probably not seen by a 7 year old kid under general circumstances.

tokumei 5y ago

Flash is terrible in retrospect, but I used to love making Flash games in high school by myself. Amazing experience.

throw_m239339 5y ago
> Flash is terrible in retrospect, but I used to love making Flash games in high school by myself. Amazing experience. Flash isn't terrible. Flash as a browser plugin was terrible and insecure indeed. Flash was no more terrible than Java or .net on the desktop as a multimedia app platform. In fact it made it easy not only to create interactive "experiences", games, but also artist authoring tools. Alchemy allowed to incorporate C/++ code into Flash, and Flash also had its own shader editor for effects. Adobe threw the baby with the bath water.
assemblylang 5y ago
> Flash is terrible in retrospect Actually it has a good use case for videos and animation. Flash animation uses vector graphics, saving huge amounts of space for basic animations and allowing the animation to scale to any screen size without degrading resolution. Part of the reason Flash took off on the web was due to small size (useful when network throughput was more limited).
rightbyte 5y ago
The tooling was excelent. In a way tooling is more important than the underlying tech. Especially for amatour projects.

a_shovel 5y ago

> This is made more frustrating by the fact that something about newer standalone flash players causes one of the levels to be near unplayable. It might be something else. I replayed Nitrome's Mutiny a while back, and though BlueMaxima's Flashpoint could get me around the site lock, whenever an enemy used the anchor weapon, the game would lock up for about half a minute, with the anchor at the top of the screen but still waiting to fall. This never happened back in the day. I bring this up because Flashpoint comes with a few dozen different versions of Flash, and none of them fixed the bug. So it's probably not the Flash player version. Maybe it's something in the OS, I dunno.

hoten 5y ago
Didn't Flash games sometimes employ DRM-type stuff to prevent swf jacking? Check the domain, and if it isn't an approved on, fail to run / do something devilish like make the game unwinnable with a note about it being stolen. EDIT: Oh, you were saying Flashpoint got around some initial domain check. Perhaps the developer added multiple, one obvious, loud one upfront and a few more later in the game.
- a_shovel 5y ago
  It wasn't DRM. The game was still playable, this one attack would just take much longer than normal. It was unfortunate, since I was planning to try speedrunning the game, and the bug just ruined the flow and the pace.

naikrovek 5y ago

would Adobe Animator not work? fairly sure it is the old Flash with a new name and new ways to publish your stuff.

kmeisthax 5y ago
Lots of AS3 developers never actually touched Flash Professional, in fact CS3 was outright broken in AS3 because they expected you to use Flash Builder / Flex. This was the point where Flash stopped being the way you wrote Flash games.

noduerme 5y ago

The only reason I still subscribe to Adobe, who I hate, is to be keep a working version of Flash Builder around in case I ever want to recompile old AIR games I wrote that no one will ever see now. Sad times.

andai 5y ago
You may be interested in https://airsdk.harman.com/ https://airsdk.harman.com/ https://airsdk.dev/ https://airsdk.dev/ https://github.com/airsdk https://github.com/airsdk It's still actively being supported (and developed?) after Adobe transferred it to HARMAN. "The SDK is free for personal use and for low-income companies." Update: upon further digging I found a link to a different company developing "CheerpX for Flash", a WASM runtime that runs SWFs in the browser. Also nonfree, no pricing info, but they seem to be generous to nonprofits and education. https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/ https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Meh. The implementation is not the game

abetusk 5y ago

A reminder to invest in libre/free/open infrastructure folks. It's not just widening the tent and lowering the barrier to entry for people today, it's also making it accessible to all of our future selves.

wiz21c 5y ago
Well, free software also do die sometimes. But sure, it's by far the best option. All the things I do with a computer is based on free or open source software or open standard. Curiously, everything still works 20 years after... Watching movies, listening music, text/calc, coding, mail, internet,... (not playing game though, the kids have their console but they don't create anything with it, so I don't care if it gets obsoleted)
- praptak 5y ago
  Free software dies but usually because of lack of interest. Case in point: Ruffle. Flash died, free software picked up the torch.
ant6n 5y ago
Free software won't mean that operating systems won't disable software by retiring APIs. For example on Linux, at some point somebody deprecated some systray icon Api. And some linuxes, like elementary OS just full on disabled systray icons, with some arguments about this having been deprecated years ago, and u shouldn't use software that depends on systray icons. This doesn't just disable old software, but also current software - for example the Dropbox client doesn't work out of the box, and caffeine/caffeinate doesn't work either.
- abetusk 5y ago
  You bring up valid points about engineering practices and backwards comparability in general. I do think you're nitpicking a bit when it comes to the issue at hand. For example, in you grievance, is there a way to provide a Docker solution to run the working code under 'emulation'? Is there a way to compile an older version of the kernel to run these programs in the way you want? I don't know but my bet is that the answer is 'yes' to both of those. My point is that this wouldn't even really be possible without a FOSS ecosystem. It requires labor from someone who cares enough to fix it but at least the avenue is open enough in the form of accessible standards and code. Under a proprietary standard or source these would need to be reverse engineered or, in maybe an extreme case, be illegal.

thorncorona 5y ago

I'm honestly really sad that there's no simple way to get Flash games working anymore. Flash games were a huge part of my childhood and now all of them are basically unplayable without spinning up a VM.

assemblylang 5y ago
Check out both Ruffle[0] and Flashpoint[1]. Ruffle is an open source flash player emulator that compiles to WASM and has a browser plugin you can add that will allow you to run embedded flash content on a web page (although its not needed if the server serves up a copy of Ruffle). Flashpoint is a collection of thousands of flash games with an easy interface to play them through flash player. [0] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle [1] https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/downloads/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/downloads/
imtringued 5y ago
I have used the standalone flash player by adobe on linux. I don't know what you are talking about.
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
This situation sucks, but this is one of the big reasons why so many devs will warn you against having closed-source proprietary dependencies. The day the company behind it kills support, all your projects are dead. And it's always a matter of time. If your wifi card has proprietary firmware, you can replace the card eventually. If the language compiles is proprietary, it's only a matter of time. If flash had been open source, I'm sure there's be some small group of passionate devs keeping it alive. But as it is, this is simply not possible. Let this be a warning if future choices.

baby 5y ago

I have the same problem with a bunch of flash animations I made a long time ago. This makes me really sad :(

hutrdvnj 5y ago

> I remember using FDT for development, but this program crashes upon opening. I’ve tried installing the Flex SDK, but running the compiler throws errors about finding the location of certain required files (why these aren’t a part of the SDK is beyond me). There's likely some breaking changes in the past decade of Flex SDK. Try to use a VM or Container with something like Ubuntu 12.04 or Debian old-stable and use old versions of the Flex SDK, this will give you a higher chance to compile successfully.

FounderBurr 5y ago

Always preserve your tool chain. If you can’t, anything you develop will never really belong to you.

ksec 5y ago

Unpopular opinion. Flash ( its runtime and the Dev Environment ), HyperCard, and arguably Visual Basic 6.0 These three in my opinion bring a lot of people into coding. I guess the word programming would be too prestige to be used to describe them and may anger those in Silicon Valley. But for the 99% of people out there, all they wanted was their computer somehow do what they tell them to do without being shown all these functional / object oriented programming and which programming language to fight for etc. People were even happy just coding a plug-in for World of Warcraft using Lua. I still think the whole industry for computing has moved in the wrong direction.

icemelt8 5y ago
I owe my entire career to Flash.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  Me too, I was a vulnerability researcher =) (Not really, but the joke wrote itself)
xmprt 5y ago
There are still a ton of people learning how to make basic games using Processing or Python. Excel is also used a lot to automate things which can be a gateway to learning a more advanced programming language. Just people kids are learning in new ways doesn't mean they aren't learning. I do concur that it's sad that a lot of modern games and applications have gotten less hackable which has removed a door that a lot of old school programmers used to learn how to code.
- hansworst 5y ago
  I started programming in Flash (after doing some basic html/css), and have later done some stuff in Processing as well. Flash was an infinitely better tool to get started with programming because it lets you actually draw and animate vector graphics, and then sprinkle in a tiny bit of code to make things interactive. Compare that to Processing, where even just using some images drawn in some other tool is more difficult than it should be. I don't think you can really even compare the two in terms of beginner productivity.

rendall 5y ago

I want to remind everyone what happened, here. By the beginning of 2010, it was clear that the App Store was likely to become a massive cash cow for Apple. Flash was direct competition, however. If one could play a game in a browser rather than buying it, Apple would lose out on that income. Everyone was clamoring for Apple to add Flash capability to its mobile iPhone browser. Adobe offered all help, yet Apple continued to drag its feet. It became obvious something was going on. In April, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter, "Thoughts on Flash", stating, among other things, that HTML5 could deliver a superior experience to Flash and that Flash had such inherent security and performance problems that they could never be rectified. These were lies, but Apple's henchmen in tech media, especially Wired and Gawker, repeated this lie endlessly, destroying a creative ecosystem and industry so that Apple could have its App Store. The web is still to this day unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to.

andai 5y ago
>The web is unable to deliver an experience like Flash could I think the browser has been on par with Flash Player for a while, but Flash-the-authoring-tool (to my knowledge) does not yet have an equal. (I'm told Adobe Animate, the rebranded Flash authoring tool, is somehow unsuitable for creating games, despite HTML5 export features.) To put it another way, I think we've more or less replaced the Flash Player, but we haven't replaced Flash Professional. (As others have mentioned, Unity kind of covers the same ground, but not really.)
- rendall 5y ago
  You cannot find Flash experiences on the web, nor even Flash-like experiences on the web. There has been no replacement. This post seems to confuse capability with actuality. Sure, we have the technical capability for a Flash-like player and authoring tool, but it does not exist.
  - nicholsonpk 5y ago
    Maybe I misunderstand what experiences you are looking for, but if you go to itch.io and choose HTML5 do you not see the things that used to be made in Flash?

hamdouni 5y ago

I am still maintaining a professional application written in flex for one of my client which serve to manage his warehouse stock. The big pain was to use an old portable Firefox version and block its update so the flash plugins would not be nuked. Legacy code is not simple.

taylorius 5y ago

I used to love developing in Actionscript 3 / Flash. I've yet to find a language / environment I like more. There was an interesting point in an interview that Lex Friedman did with Brendan Eich, where Eich mentioned that Actionscript 3 was in fact based on a proposed "Javascript 2" language, which otherwise never saw the light of day, due to whatever corporate manoeuvring was occurring at the time. I wish it had been adopted for the browser!

jorl17 5y ago

I recently ported a ~9-year-old game from Flash/AS3 to Haxe. It was an amazing experience, plus I got it to run on all kinds of crazy platforms and added a bunch of new features. I'd advise anyone wanting to scratch the Flash itch to see if it is a feasible thing. Won't be straightforward for all applications, but I found it almost cathartic. Haxe is a gem of a hidden language. It's just too bad the community isn't gigantic and the tooling support (IDE) is rather lackluster. I've become quite fond of it (especially after working with it nonstop for months in my free time). I recommend everyone check it out!

devtailz 5y ago
I've written a few things in Haxe / OpenFL. This is probably the most likely option for a "simple" port. I may give this a shot when I have some spare time.

staticman2 5y ago

Flash on Android ended up running pretty badly. They couldn't even come up with a way to make old apps playable without a keyboard and mouse, if I recall correctly. Then Adobe gave up and discontinued it.

fleddr 5y ago

I'll say one positive thing about flash: the idea of semi-visual programming on the web being gone is a loss. Not only is it a much more accessible way to develop things for a much wider audience, it's also a relatively productive way to develop. Before that, Java applets failed and after that, Silverlight failed. 25 years ago I was visually programming desktop apps in Delphi. Drag and drop, advanced layout mechanisms, rich library of standardized UI controls, advanced data binding, you name it. It's quite ridiculous how we anti-progressed since then. Now we're back to text files and terminals. Weird frameworks to fill the gaps of the web but none really have batteries included. There's no language library in JS, nor is there a UI library. You all have to glue it together and hope it works. Not even the development flow is standardized, it's multiple tools stitched together each of which having 7,000 dependencies. Knowledge is also not portable, nobody is able to maintain that 7 year old Angular project and newbies have no idea where to start. It adds up to the #1 issue in our industry: low productivity. We've positioned ourselves into a garbage development ecosystem that is very hard to understand whilst outputting little, both in quantity and quality. This issue is much bigger than poor tools. These poor tools means billions are wasted on an ongoing basis reinventing the exact same thing over and over. It means knowledge is not sticky, so there's a huge cost in re-learning things. It means a lot of creative people are locked out of development, as it's too intimidating to them. "See, this tree-shaken bundle gets loaded and then rehydrates the server response, after which state is in the store and you just work on your component but be mindful of its side effects and dependencies as your re-render has to be a pure function, kind of like the reducers in your store, which are similar to actions but not really. Told you it was easy."

devtailz 5y ago

I've updated the post as auriplane has gotten me quite close to a solution. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583307. They are able to run it after building, but I'm still running in to issues, which is probably just a small configuration issue on my end. I've added a Github Issue to track the progress of this: https://github.com/adamjberg/i_solated/issues/4 https://github.com/adamjberg/i_solated/issues/4 . Finally hopeful that there's a solution to be found!

devtailz 5y ago
With a couple of code changes I'm successfully able to build and run the project again!! Thanks everyone for thoughts and suggestions.

jasmaa 5y ago

Late but I saw this in the morning and was gonna try my hand at compiling it but looks like someone already figured it out (congrats!). I have a bunch of old Flash games from back in HS. Been watching Ruffle for a while as well since I've been wanting to make a page to preserve them but AS3 functionality just isn't there yet...