6 ms·

Ruffle: WebAssembly Flash Player Emulator

217 points by tux1968 4y ago

hn_ltl-ftc 4y ago
According to their compatability section (see: https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ then scroll down), it looks like, after years of work, that they're only up to supporting 10% of the AS3 language, and only 5% of the AS3-based API. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be regretting all those expensive Flex development books that I recycled a while back. Flash/Flex: it's not coming back, just let it fade away?
dylan604 4y ago
after all of the bad experiences with Flash only websites for UI/X and games developed for FB distribution, I had almost forgotten about all of the animated shorts and what not other clever use of Flash
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  Charlie the Unicorn was done in Flash, that is at least the initial episode. All of Stone Trek (a superb Star Trek TOS/Flintstones crossover parody – https://www.angelfire.com/fl/sapringer/STDOTCOM.html https://www.angelfire.com/fl/sapringer/STDOTCOM.html) was done in Flash. All the work of Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES up until 2018 or so was in Flash (last version of their page before they switched to video files: https://web.archive.org/web/20180109044355/https://www.yhchang.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180109044355/https://www.yhcha...).
- Brajeshwar 4y ago
  If my memory is correct, the entire Peppa Pig[1] TV Series was done in Flash. Many other popular TV series were done entirely in Flash. A good friend and fellow Flash champion, Chris Georgenes[2], did quite a lot of good animations during the early days of Flash. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppa_Pig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppa_Pig 2. https://www.youtube.com/user/chrisgeorgenes https://www.youtube.com/user/chrisgeorgenes
  - khaaaaaaaaaan 4y ago
    Hey Duggee is animated in Flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Duggee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Duggee http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tv/interview-hey-duggee-creator-grant-orchard-creating-unconventional-preschool-show-149069.html http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tv/interview-hey-duggee-creator-g...
    - aeontech 4y ago
      This show is a masterclass in animation, I have to say. Everything is built out of essential geometric shapes, yet has an incredibly strong character. Brilliant stuff.
      - IshKebab 4y ago
        I think it looks kind of terrible to be honest. I'm not surprised at all it's made with flash. It looks like the sort of thing a talentless non-artist who can only make basic shapes like me could manage. Peppa Pig is much better animated IMO. Or should I say much better drawn. It doesn't have much animation either but the people that do the drawing are clearly better artists.
  - eric__cartman 4y ago
    My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was done in Flash. And that show went on for nine seasons. Also afaik the first season of Bob's Burgers was done in Flash.
  - clouddrover 4y ago
    Some episodes of Harvey Birdman were done with Flash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Birdman,_Attorney_at_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Birdman,_Attorney_at_La...
    - cwyers 4y ago
      I think some of the early Venture Bros. eps were too.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4y ago
My favourite thing about Ruffle is that it can be installed as a browser extension, which allows to seamlessly view flash animations on old websites with a modern browser.
- cglong 4y ago
  Last time I looked at Ruffle, you had to sideload the extension. Looks like they're in the Stores now!
hoten 4y ago
Looking at the sponsors, there are some big players in the old Flash world supporting this (Newsground, ArmorGames... even NYT?). What I can't understand is why Kongregate isn't among them. They would benefit greatly from a new Flash player, yet it seems they are content with having their users figure it out themselves ( https://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/1932807-here-are-ways-to-continue-playing-flash-games-in-2021 https://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/193280... ). Maybe I'm overestimating the money a site like Kongregate pulls in. I've assumed they'd have cash to throw at something that could resuscitate their catalog, so it's odd to see them not doing anything in the WASM space.
- larsiusprime 4y ago
  Modern kongregate is a shell of its former self. The vast majority of the people I knew who made it great back in the day, including the founders, have long since departed.
_pob 4y ago
Ruffle is fantastic. For the first time in ~8 years I was able to watch old flash content I had lying around and all I needed to do was link to the ruffle JS library. Worked flawlessly. Thanks for letting those videos live again, Ruffle team!
- sammorrowdrums 4y ago
  I was a drive-by contributor of a few PRs to Ruffle out of love for old flash videos and one of my favourite users is The Internet Archive. It’s wonderful that this stuff is preserved in the active sense and that you no longer need to view YouTube/video renders of flash content to see all the old animations. Obviously the vector graphics is both lightweight and scales beautiful, but somehow the loading screens and various bits of interactivity in primarily video content are almost as important to me at least. This has saved parts of my childhood from the brink of extinction.
- tetris11 4y ago
  An issue is that only the old stuff works, because AS2 has been implemented. The newer (imo) creative stuff still doesn't work due to spotty AS3 support
  - sterlind 4y ago
    yeah, I was excited to revive Homestuck's interactive parts, but they were all AS3. I hacked around with Ruffle to see if I could add enough to get them working, but at the time AS3 support was an empty skeleton. have they gotten some AS3 working? if so I might revisit.
    - nindalf 4y ago
      ActionScript 1 & 2 - Language 85%, API 50%. ActionScript 3 - Language 10%, API 5%. I don't know if that's enough for your use case. On the bright side, this project has a lot of sponsors so we might see AS3 supported at some point.
solardev 4y ago
Gulp. Is this going to spawn new waves of security issues?
- mind-blight 4y ago
  This is mainly for keeping Internet history accessible. Flash had tons of problems, but a lot of amazing content was created on the platform. Now that it's gone, it's difficult or impossible to access the historical content. I don't expect anyone to be making new flash content, but I'm really excited that all this work is going in to make sure we don't lose a really cool slice of Internet history
- praptak 4y ago
  It's done in wasm, so we have a much bigger problem if it does.
- brundolf 4y ago
  No, WASM was specifically designed to allow running native-like code without any of the security issues that plugins like Flash had
SLWW 4y ago
I tried running the demo with Learn To Fly (the penguin flying/distance game); the physics in the game is a bit broken (slowly rising off the ground) and there is no controller input. But overall a really cool project; i'm not bashing it ofc, it just needs some more work but it seems pretty capable in other games. Future Edit: After spending too much time trying to install the addon for firefox from their site (as i don't like the idea of only installing validated addons) I was able to go into about:config and change "xpinstall.signatures.required" to false. Leaving this here if anyone else runs into this problem.
lxe 4y ago
I think all of newgrounds is now on ruffle, which is nice.
hey2022 4y ago
I still don’t quite understand why we don’t have a successful IDE / editor based on web technologies that would be anywhere close to Flash in terms of popularity. Is the problem rooted not just in web technologies but in the fact that we live in a different era and creators don’t really express themselves in this way anymore?
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Newer generations aren't willing to put in the money for them. They do exist, though.
- c0balt 4y ago
  From my point of view the next thing that fills that role would be unity. Though a big part of unitys strength is not being bound to one platform (web) but instead being cross-platform (web, mobile app, desktop, ...). Iirc it has been used by artists for both "advanced" topics like movies as well as for small games.
  - hey2022 4y ago
    I am not sure if Unity will ever fill the gap left by Flash. Flash IDE was easy to use even for very novice creators (at least at a basic level, not talking about ActionScript). So there was a ton of simple animations, silly games, just weird experiments without any purpose or meaning. Many people were just having fun with it and sharing their creations. When Flash died, this whole ecosystem somehow disappeared instead of migrating to a clear successor. I might also be getting the timing of it all wrong. Perhaps when Flash was slowly being deprecated it wasn’t that popular anymore and by that time most creators moved on to different—more fractured?—ecosystems.
- graiz 4y ago
  Most purists insist on coding things in HTML/CSS and this stack is fairly unworkable for a good visual editor. Anyone who has built a robust visual editor ends up building one using canvas. (Figma is a great example) Figma is great but it's not using classical tags to express fonts, tables, layout. Similarly Flash got it's layout and animation right... it just wasn't a web standard. A Canvas based editor/builder/WYSIWYG approach would be fantastic but it required us to move past HTML/CSS in the traditional and compatible model. Said another way - if you try to use HTML/CSS to build a layout tool, you end up having to re-create browser layout and rendering engine. Developers could build a design/tool similar to flash using canvas and I've actually prototyped elements of a tag/based design language that gets rid of the traditional HTML layout engine. It's significantly faster (1000x) to render/send over the wire but the moat of HTML/CSS is so large that I'm not sure there's interest in such approaches.
davidhay 4y ago
Oh man, Alien Homonid. Blast from the past right there.
jagger27 4y ago
I love how my phone runs this better than Flash on Android ever did natively.
ianberdin 4y ago
Video. YouTube. That's is the successor of Flash. Not fully, yet, it is. But yeah, with Flash, web was like a magic. It was much easier to do something extraordinary and UI like games have.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Video. YouTube. That's is the successor of Flash Flash is interactive.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    I'm assuming what they meant is that video has become the new "casual, accessible, vibrantly creative" medium on the internet, thanks to platforms like TikTok and all the powerful editing tools they include. Not a direct replacement but a spiritual successor
    - spicybright 4y ago
      I agree, but it's sad that's the case. Media has become so passive since the rise of smartphones.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  It can't be a full successor as YouTube doesn't do games. Due to Web's failure to provide a proper alternative, everyone went to native mobile games.
frankzander 4y ago
Flash ... like zombie which didn't want to remain buried forever. Why does anyone sit down and even think about coding something for that abandoned technology fart? I don't get it.
- Shared404 4y ago
  The sheer amount of history and nostalgia that somewhere from 1 - 2 generations have tied up in flash is immense. That history is worth preserving as much as possible, same as any other emulation/implementation. Not too mention however many "Business critical and you must use this flash app" applications there are, which is presumably non 0.
  - frankzander 4y ago
    Maybe preserving history has one good use ... as a warning example to never do that again or "how the web headed in a proprietary direction".
    - Shared404 4y ago
      I would say that Ruffle is my generations equivalent of Mupen64, or many devices on libretro. Why isn't us preserving our childhood games seen as reasonable? Don't get me wrong - I'm glad flash is dead. But I'm also glad what flash programs are out there can be preserved, and that there's a possibility for new, libre, action in that space.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    When Adobe triggered the unanticipated total shutdown of Flash player which they had inserted as a time bomb, I found myself rewriting crucial business software, and an entire city rail system in China had to shut down... https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/end-adobe-flash-broke-chinese-001715924.html https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/end-adobe-flash-broke-chines...
- astrobe_ 4y ago
  WASM bringing back Flash from the dead... Oh, the irony...
junon 4y ago
Yeah the second I heard webassembly was a thing, I knew it was just a matter of time before someone implemented flash in it. Cool stuff!!
LelouBil 4y ago
Wasted Sky is really fun !
Lanz 4y ago
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ruffle/donbcfbmhbcapadipfkeojnmajbakjdc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ruffle/donbcfbmhbc... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/ruffle_rs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/ruffle_rs/

217 points by tux1968 4y ago

According to their compatability section (see: https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ then scroll down), it looks like, after years of work, that they're only up to supporting 10% of the AS3 language, and only 5% of the AS3-based API. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be regretting all those expensive Flex development books that I recycled a while back. Flash/Flex: it's not coming back, just let it fade away?

dylan604 4y ago

after all of the bad experiences with Flash only websites for UI/X and games developed for FB distribution, I had almost forgotten about all of the animated shorts and what not other clever use of Flash

iggldiggl 4y ago
Charlie the Unicorn was done in Flash, that is at least the initial episode. All of Stone Trek (a superb Star Trek TOS/Flintstones crossover parody – https://www.angelfire.com/fl/sapringer/STDOTCOM.html https://www.angelfire.com/fl/sapringer/STDOTCOM.html) was done in Flash. All the work of Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES up until 2018 or so was in Flash (last version of their page before they switched to video files: https://web.archive.org/web/20180109044355/https://www.yhchang.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180109044355/https://www.yhcha...).
Brajeshwar 4y ago
If my memory is correct, the entire Peppa Pig[1] TV Series was done in Flash. Many other popular TV series were done entirely in Flash. A good friend and fellow Flash champion, Chris Georgenes[2], did quite a lot of good animations during the early days of Flash. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppa_Pig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppa_Pig 2. https://www.youtube.com/user/chrisgeorgenes https://www.youtube.com/user/chrisgeorgenes
- khaaaaaaaaaan 4y ago
  Hey Duggee is animated in Flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Duggee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Duggee http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tv/interview-hey-duggee-creator-grant-orchard-creating-unconventional-preschool-show-149069.html http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tv/interview-hey-duggee-creator-g...
  - aeontech 4y ago
    This show is a masterclass in animation, I have to say. Everything is built out of essential geometric shapes, yet has an incredibly strong character. Brilliant stuff.
    - IshKebab 4y ago
      I think it looks kind of terrible to be honest. I'm not surprised at all it's made with flash. It looks like the sort of thing a talentless non-artist who can only make basic shapes like me could manage. Peppa Pig is much better animated IMO. Or should I say much better drawn. It doesn't have much animation either but the people that do the drawing are clearly better artists.
- eric__cartman 4y ago
  My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was done in Flash. And that show went on for nine seasons. Also afaik the first season of Bob's Burgers was done in Flash.
- clouddrover 4y ago
  Some episodes of Harvey Birdman were done with Flash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Birdman,_Attorney_at_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Birdman,_Attorney_at_La...
  - cwyers 4y ago
    I think some of the early Venture Bros. eps were too.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4y ago

My favourite thing about Ruffle is that it can be installed as a browser extension, which allows to seamlessly view flash animations on old websites with a modern browser.

cglong 4y ago
Last time I looked at Ruffle, you had to sideload the extension. Looks like they're in the Stores now!

hoten 4y ago

Looking at the sponsors, there are some big players in the old Flash world supporting this (Newsground, ArmorGames... even NYT?). What I can't understand is why Kongregate isn't among them. They would benefit greatly from a new Flash player, yet it seems they are content with having their users figure it out themselves ( https://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/1932807-here-are-ways-to-continue-playing-flash-games-in-2021 https://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/193280... ). Maybe I'm overestimating the money a site like Kongregate pulls in. I've assumed they'd have cash to throw at something that could resuscitate their catalog, so it's odd to see them not doing anything in the WASM space.

larsiusprime 4y ago
Modern kongregate is a shell of its former self. The vast majority of the people I knew who made it great back in the day, including the founders, have long since departed.

_pob 4y ago

Ruffle is fantastic. For the first time in ~8 years I was able to watch old flash content I had lying around and all I needed to do was link to the ruffle JS library. Worked flawlessly. Thanks for letting those videos live again, Ruffle team!

sammorrowdrums 4y ago
I was a drive-by contributor of a few PRs to Ruffle out of love for old flash videos and one of my favourite users is The Internet Archive. It’s wonderful that this stuff is preserved in the active sense and that you no longer need to view YouTube/video renders of flash content to see all the old animations. Obviously the vector graphics is both lightweight and scales beautiful, but somehow the loading screens and various bits of interactivity in primarily video content are almost as important to me at least. This has saved parts of my childhood from the brink of extinction.
tetris11 4y ago
An issue is that only the old stuff works, because AS2 has been implemented. The newer (imo) creative stuff still doesn't work due to spotty AS3 support
- sterlind 4y ago
  yeah, I was excited to revive Homestuck's interactive parts, but they were all AS3. I hacked around with Ruffle to see if I could add enough to get them working, but at the time AS3 support was an empty skeleton. have they gotten some AS3 working? if so I might revisit.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    ActionScript 1 & 2 - Language 85%, API 50%. ActionScript 3 - Language 10%, API 5%. I don't know if that's enough for your use case. On the bright side, this project has a lot of sponsors so we might see AS3 supported at some point.

solardev 4y ago

Gulp. Is this going to spawn new waves of security issues?

mind-blight 4y ago
This is mainly for keeping Internet history accessible. Flash had tons of problems, but a lot of amazing content was created on the platform. Now that it's gone, it's difficult or impossible to access the historical content. I don't expect anyone to be making new flash content, but I'm really excited that all this work is going in to make sure we don't lose a really cool slice of Internet history
praptak 4y ago
It's done in wasm, so we have a much bigger problem if it does.
brundolf 4y ago
No, WASM was specifically designed to allow running native-like code without any of the security issues that plugins like Flash had

SLWW 4y ago

I tried running the demo with Learn To Fly (the penguin flying/distance game); the physics in the game is a bit broken (slowly rising off the ground) and there is no controller input. But overall a really cool project; i'm not bashing it ofc, it just needs some more work but it seems pretty capable in other games. Future Edit: After spending too much time trying to install the addon for firefox from their site (as i don't like the idea of only installing validated addons) I was able to go into about:config and change "xpinstall.signatures.required" to false. Leaving this here if anyone else runs into this problem.

lxe 4y ago

I think all of newgrounds is now on ruffle, which is nice.

hey2022 4y ago

I still don’t quite understand why we don’t have a successful IDE / editor based on web technologies that would be anywhere close to Flash in terms of popularity. Is the problem rooted not just in web technologies but in the fact that we live in a different era and creators don’t really express themselves in this way anymore?

pjmlp 4y ago
Newer generations aren't willing to put in the money for them. They do exist, though.
c0balt 4y ago
From my point of view the next thing that fills that role would be unity. Though a big part of unitys strength is not being bound to one platform (web) but instead being cross-platform (web, mobile app, desktop, ...). Iirc it has been used by artists for both "advanced" topics like movies as well as for small games.
- hey2022 4y ago
  I am not sure if Unity will ever fill the gap left by Flash. Flash IDE was easy to use even for very novice creators (at least at a basic level, not talking about ActionScript). So there was a ton of simple animations, silly games, just weird experiments without any purpose or meaning. Many people were just having fun with it and sharing their creations. When Flash died, this whole ecosystem somehow disappeared instead of migrating to a clear successor. I might also be getting the timing of it all wrong. Perhaps when Flash was slowly being deprecated it wasn’t that popular anymore and by that time most creators moved on to different—more fractured?—ecosystems.
graiz 4y ago
Most purists insist on coding things in HTML/CSS and this stack is fairly unworkable for a good visual editor. Anyone who has built a robust visual editor ends up building one using canvas. (Figma is a great example) Figma is great but it's not using classical tags to express fonts, tables, layout. Similarly Flash got it's layout and animation right... it just wasn't a web standard. A Canvas based editor/builder/WYSIWYG approach would be fantastic but it required us to move past HTML/CSS in the traditional and compatible model. Said another way - if you try to use HTML/CSS to build a layout tool, you end up having to re-create browser layout and rendering engine. Developers could build a design/tool similar to flash using canvas and I've actually prototyped elements of a tag/based design language that gets rid of the traditional HTML layout engine. It's significantly faster (1000x) to render/send over the wire but the moat of HTML/CSS is so large that I'm not sure there's interest in such approaches.

davidhay 4y ago

Oh man, Alien Homonid. Blast from the past right there.

jagger27 4y ago

I love how my phone runs this better than Flash on Android ever did natively.

ianberdin 4y ago

Video. YouTube. That's is the successor of Flash. Not fully, yet, it is. But yeah, with Flash, web was like a magic. It was much easier to do something extraordinary and UI like games have.

andsoitis 4y ago
> Video. YouTube. That's is the successor of Flash Flash is interactive.
- brundolf 4y ago
  I'm assuming what they meant is that video has become the new "casual, accessible, vibrantly creative" medium on the internet, thanks to platforms like TikTok and all the powerful editing tools they include. Not a direct replacement but a spiritual successor
  - spicybright 4y ago
    I agree, but it's sad that's the case. Media has become so passive since the rise of smartphones.
pjmlp 4y ago
It can't be a full successor as YouTube doesn't do games. Due to Web's failure to provide a proper alternative, everyone went to native mobile games.

frankzander 4y ago

Flash ... like zombie which didn't want to remain buried forever. Why does anyone sit down and even think about coding something for that abandoned technology fart? I don't get it.

Shared404 4y ago
The sheer amount of history and nostalgia that somewhere from 1 - 2 generations have tied up in flash is immense. That history is worth preserving as much as possible, same as any other emulation/implementation. Not too mention however many "Business critical and you must use this flash app" applications there are, which is presumably non 0.
- frankzander 4y ago
  Maybe preserving history has one good use ... as a warning example to never do that again or "how the web headed in a proprietary direction".
  - Shared404 4y ago
    I would say that Ruffle is my generations equivalent of Mupen64, or many devices on libretro. Why isn't us preserving our childhood games seen as reasonable? Don't get me wrong - I'm glad flash is dead. But I'm also glad what flash programs are out there can be preserved, and that there's a possibility for new, libre, action in that space.
- noduerme 4y ago
  When Adobe triggered the unanticipated total shutdown of Flash player which they had inserted as a time bomb, I found myself rewriting crucial business software, and an entire city rail system in China had to shut down... https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/end-adobe-flash-broke-chinese-001715924.html https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/end-adobe-flash-broke-chines...
astrobe_ 4y ago
WASM bringing back Flash from the dead... Oh, the irony...

junon 4y ago

Yeah the second I heard webassembly was a thing, I knew it was just a matter of time before someone implemented flash in it. Cool stuff!!

LelouBil 4y ago

Wasted Sky is really fun !

Lanz 4y ago

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ruffle/donbcfbmhbcapadipfkeojnmajbakjdc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ruffle/donbcfbmhbc... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/ruffle_rs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/ruffle_rs/