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Beyond ... everything, sometimes people just want a thing to work. A thing that previously worked, and ... supposedly, was kind of a solved problem with stuff l

by rtpg 5y ago

Beyond ... everything, sometimes people just want a thing to work. A thing that previously worked, and ... supposedly, was kind of a solved problem with stuff like Pepper. I understand that big surface areas are a thing, but there's just loads of content that exists as Flash and is fine. An extra layer here, Flash CS3 Professional is better as a quick iterating game tool than basically everything out there for people nowadays (Game Maker Studio is up there but still...). I think that making _new_ content in Flash is justifiable except for the whole "can't get it to run anywhere" issue.

derefr 5y ago
> I understand that big surface areas are a thing, but there's just loads of content that exists as Flash and is fine. Well, yeah; and there's loads of Win95 games that run fine under WINE. But if you want to guarantee that an arbitrary Win95 game will work, without knowing anything about it (as is the case with a content-blind bulk archivist like the Internet Archive), then you'd better wrap it in a real Win95 VM, rather than assuming it's one of the easy cases. In the case of SWF files, though, it's not that the files themselves have heavy/weird requirements; it's that their abstract machine / runtime itself makes some extremely dated assumptions about a wide-ranging set of platform APIs. It's a bit like how RPG Maker 95 games are hard to run on Windows 10. To run arbitrary games, you could in theory "just" make a 100%-coverage reimplementation of the RPG Maker 95 runtime, build it for Windows 10, and it would run just fine. But as it stands, the only 100%-coverage implementation of said runtime is RPG Maker 95 itself; and so the only good way to run RM95 games, is in a Windows 9x VM, where all the particular APIs RM95 is looking for exist. > An extra layer here, Flash CS3 Professional is better as a quick iterating game tool than basically everything out there for people nowadays You know that Adobe Animate (nee Flash Professional) still exists, right? And that you can still make games in it, not just animations? It just exports to HTML5 now, rather than to SWF.

by rtpg 5y ago

derefr 5y ago

> I understand that big surface areas are a thing, but there's just loads of content that exists as Flash and is fine. Well, yeah; and there's loads of Win95 games that run fine under WINE. But if you want to guarantee that an arbitrary Win95 game will work, without knowing anything about it (as is the case with a content-blind bulk archivist like the Internet Archive), then you'd better wrap it in a real Win95 VM, rather than assuming it's one of the easy cases. In the case of SWF files, though, it's not that the files themselves have heavy/weird requirements; it's that their abstract machine / runtime itself makes some extremely dated assumptions about a wide-ranging set of platform APIs. It's a bit like how RPG Maker 95 games are hard to run on Windows 10. To run arbitrary games, you could in theory "just" make a 100%-coverage reimplementation of the RPG Maker 95 runtime, build it for Windows 10, and it would run just fine. But as it stands, the only 100%-coverage implementation of said runtime is RPG Maker 95 itself; and so the only good way to run RM95 games, is in a Windows 9x VM, where all the particular APIs RM95 is looking for exist. > An extra layer here, Flash CS3 Professional is better as a quick iterating game tool than basically everything out there for people nowadays You know that Adobe Animate (nee Flash Professional) still exists, right? And that you can still make games in it, not just animations? It just exports to HTML5 now, rather than to SWF.