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An important detail that isn't touched on here: the Flash authoring tools were proprietary and much too expensive for hobbyists to afford. While many users simp

An important detail that isn't touched on here: the Flash authoring tools were proprietary and much too expensive for hobbyists to afford. While many users simply pirated the tools, there was still a vast gulf between authors and the much larger audience of players. The web today is a much more capable ecosystem than "HTML5" was for the original iPhone, and while many web developers crinkle their projects into minified source or opaque WASM blobs, every user has browser developer tools at their fingertips for peeking behind the curtain and making changes live. It is perhaps most surprising that in the post-Flash world no comparable development environments have sprung up to replace its end-to-end animation and interactivity workflow. Game "engines" like Unity and Godot have captured much of the game development audience for Flash, but their ability to produce web exports is clearly an afterthought, producing huge files, glacial load times, and often simply crashing in any browser that isn't a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome.

notatoad 2y ago
everybody and their dog had a pirated copy of flash back in the day. i'd bet that there were more users of pirated flash back in the flash gaming heyday than there are unity users today.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  I do remember a few kids in high school that were Flash pros pretty early on (as early as 14). I don't recall those kids moving on to actual game development tools. There must have been something very friendly about Flash's onboarding. I'd be curious to know what the equivalent is for kids now days (would be surprising if its Unity/Unreal/Godot). Sort of asking for myself here because I can't for the life of me grasp the UI driven development of Unity/Unreal/Godot.
  - anewhnaccount2 2y ago
    The onboarding was that you just start key frame animating and pasting in actionscripts.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    I think the fact that it was (acquired early and) developed by the PDF company must have had to do with it. Stupid Flash files were everywhere, but Flash contents that are seriously disappointing from artistic perspectives were rare.
  - notatoad 2y ago
    14 would have been about the age i was playing with it too. in my memory, the magic of flash studio was that you could make something so immediately. it worked well for simple things, you didn't have to make a full-on game, a bunch of kids in jr high computer class could actually make something cool in the length of one class.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
>It is perhaps most surprising that in the post-Flash world no comparable development environments have sprung up to replace its end-to-end animation and interactivity workflow. Game "engines" like Unity and Godot have captured much of the game development audience for Flash, but their ability to produce web exports is clearly an afterthought, producing huge files, glacial load times, and often simply crashing in any browser that isn't a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome. This is opportunity. For a startup.
mock-possum 2y ago
I forget what it was called and I’m too lazy to look it up, but there was a non Adobe IDE for writing and compiling flash apps using AS3 - it was fine, and it was free, I remember using it for a couple projects, though ultimately I preferred how comprehensive adobe’s software was for publishing .swf
- Drakim 2y ago
  There was also the programming language Haxe which was like a slightly improved version of AS3/JavaScript that could output to .swf
- crabbone 2y ago
  There were many. Some commercial, some opensource. The most popular opensource one was FlashDevelop. At the time, I even wrote some plugins for it. The most popular commercial competitor of FB was FDT (Eclipse-based plugin, just like Flex Builder).
AshleysBrain 2y ago
I think a few comparable development tools have sprung up, including ours, Construct [1], which is very much web-first. I think the reason people say nothing replaced Flash is because now there are lots of tools instead of just one, as anyone can target HTML5, so the market has fragmented; and the market has changed, as people develop for app stores and platforms like Steam, so the web isn't as big a focus as it used to be (although it's still important). [1] https://www.construct.net https://www.construct.net
- underwater 2y ago
  Construct is great. I used it to make a game with my daughter. The way it jumps straight to the fun bits and then gives opportunities to learn about programming concepts is great. I couldn’t bring myself to pay the hefty monthly fee though, knowing my kid’s interest would wane and then her creation would be forever inaccessible unless I continued to pay. One thing I would have gladly paid for is asset packs, being able to adapt some great sprites and background art would have been a killer feature.
  - AshleysBrain 2y ago
    Just to be clear, you can still access your projects without a subscription - it's only editing that a subscription unlocks. We also have a full asset store here: https://www.construct.net/en/game-assets https://www.construct.net/en/game-assets
vr46 2y ago
The proprietary tools were only an issue for people who needed the timeline. Games-wise, Both Actionscript 2 and 3 were perfectly usable without Flash. The MTASC compiler was a massive game-changer, and then Adobe released the AS3 compiler themselves, and certainly when I was at a consultancy working on a massive, expensive game, none of us were authoring anything in Flash. Even the designers and artists simply provided image assets. A few years later, I did use Flash to teach students interactivity (in 2016, I was wondering why myself, but hey, university courses are hardly up-to-date) but there was little other reason to use it. Today, I still rate AS3 and if there was an LLVM project to output, I don't know, WASM, or similar, I'd try it. Oh, there are? - https://github.com/bvibber/wasm2swf https://github.com/bvibber/wasm2swf - https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ Of course, MTASC wunderkind Nicolas Cannasse went off to create https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/, which was used quite well on Smart TVs and the like for a while, still used in games. Maybe we already have the answer, but the web is too boring for this stuff.
- crabbone 2y ago
  Macromedia released the AS3 compiler. Adobe inherited it as OSS. Adobe were really reluctant to engage with the community on open-source development issues. They always dragged their feet on Linux support. Eventually, Adobe closed Flex Framework to external contributors, and after they donated it to Apache they undermined the community effort by not releasing the player API library, something that made automatic builds a problem (because the user had to interactively accept EULA to download that SWC).
nosioptar 2y ago
Eventually, adobe put out the mxmlc tool for compiling as3. I always used it instead of flash.
QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
Historically, closed source, expensive corporate software for power users can excel at just grinding out the flaws in user experience until every tiny thing you want to do with it is doable, not because of any elegance in design, generalization, or compositionality, but because a developer sat down and made that specific workflow usable. Matlab, excel, and photoshop are the exemplars of this, the flash editor was up there too.

notatoad 2y ago

everybody and their dog had a pirated copy of flash back in the day. i'd bet that there were more users of pirated flash back in the flash gaming heyday than there are unity users today.

bloomingkales 2y ago
I do remember a few kids in high school that were Flash pros pretty early on (as early as 14). I don't recall those kids moving on to actual game development tools. There must have been something very friendly about Flash's onboarding. I'd be curious to know what the equivalent is for kids now days (would be surprising if its Unity/Unreal/Godot). Sort of asking for myself here because I can't for the life of me grasp the UI driven development of Unity/Unreal/Godot.
- anewhnaccount2 2y ago
  The onboarding was that you just start key frame animating and pasting in actionscripts.
- numpad0 2y ago
  I think the fact that it was (acquired early and) developed by the PDF company must have had to do with it. Stupid Flash files were everywhere, but Flash contents that are seriously disappointing from artistic perspectives were rare.
- notatoad 2y ago
  14 would have been about the age i was playing with it too. in my memory, the magic of flash studio was that you could make something so immediately. it worked well for simple things, you didn't have to make a full-on game, a bunch of kids in jr high computer class could actually make something cool in the length of one class.

ninetyninenine 2y ago

>It is perhaps most surprising that in the post-Flash world no comparable development environments have sprung up to replace its end-to-end animation and interactivity workflow. Game "engines" like Unity and Godot have captured much of the game development audience for Flash, but their ability to produce web exports is clearly an afterthought, producing huge files, glacial load times, and often simply crashing in any browser that isn't a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome. This is opportunity. For a startup.

mock-possum 2y ago

I forget what it was called and I’m too lazy to look it up, but there was a non Adobe IDE for writing and compiling flash apps using AS3 - it was fine, and it was free, I remember using it for a couple projects, though ultimately I preferred how comprehensive adobe’s software was for publishing .swf

Drakim 2y ago
There was also the programming language Haxe which was like a slightly improved version of AS3/JavaScript that could output to .swf
crabbone 2y ago
There were many. Some commercial, some opensource. The most popular opensource one was FlashDevelop. At the time, I even wrote some plugins for it. The most popular commercial competitor of FB was FDT (Eclipse-based plugin, just like Flex Builder).

AshleysBrain 2y ago

I think a few comparable development tools have sprung up, including ours, Construct [1], which is very much web-first. I think the reason people say nothing replaced Flash is because now there are lots of tools instead of just one, as anyone can target HTML5, so the market has fragmented; and the market has changed, as people develop for app stores and platforms like Steam, so the web isn't as big a focus as it used to be (although it's still important). [1] https://www.construct.net https://www.construct.net

underwater 2y ago
Construct is great. I used it to make a game with my daughter. The way it jumps straight to the fun bits and then gives opportunities to learn about programming concepts is great. I couldn’t bring myself to pay the hefty monthly fee though, knowing my kid’s interest would wane and then her creation would be forever inaccessible unless I continued to pay. One thing I would have gladly paid for is asset packs, being able to adapt some great sprites and background art would have been a killer feature.
- AshleysBrain 2y ago
  Just to be clear, you can still access your projects without a subscription - it's only editing that a subscription unlocks. We also have a full asset store here: https://www.construct.net/en/game-assets https://www.construct.net/en/game-assets

vr46 2y ago

The proprietary tools were only an issue for people who needed the timeline. Games-wise, Both Actionscript 2 and 3 were perfectly usable without Flash. The MTASC compiler was a massive game-changer, and then Adobe released the AS3 compiler themselves, and certainly when I was at a consultancy working on a massive, expensive game, none of us were authoring anything in Flash. Even the designers and artists simply provided image assets. A few years later, I did use Flash to teach students interactivity (in 2016, I was wondering why myself, but hey, university courses are hardly up-to-date) but there was little other reason to use it. Today, I still rate AS3 and if there was an LLVM project to output, I don't know, WASM, or similar, I'd try it. Oh, there are? - https://github.com/bvibber/wasm2swf https://github.com/bvibber/wasm2swf - https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ Of course, MTASC wunderkind Nicolas Cannasse went off to create https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/, which was used quite well on Smart TVs and the like for a while, still used in games. Maybe we already have the answer, but the web is too boring for this stuff.

crabbone 2y ago
Macromedia released the AS3 compiler. Adobe inherited it as OSS. Adobe were really reluctant to engage with the community on open-source development issues. They always dragged their feet on Linux support. Eventually, Adobe closed Flex Framework to external contributors, and after they donated it to Apache they undermined the community effort by not releasing the player API library, something that made automatic builds a problem (because the user had to interactively accept EULA to download that SWC).

nosioptar 2y ago

Eventually, adobe put out the mxmlc tool for compiling as3. I always used it instead of flash.

QuadmasterXLII 2y ago

Historically, closed source, expensive corporate software for power users can excel at just grinding out the flaws in user experience until every tiny thing you want to do with it is doable, not because of any elegance in design, generalization, or compositionality, but because a developer sat down and made that specific workflow usable. Matlab, excel, and photoshop are the exemplars of this, the flash editor was up there too.