Internet Archive expands Flash support

https://mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles/110697893762381822

by sogen • 3 years ago

529 224 3 years ago

mastodon.archive.org

vsnf• 3 years ago

I couldn't find any easily available official notice, but they seem to be using Ruffle[0]

[0] https://ruffle.rs/

jazzyjackson• 3 years ago

Well when you load an emulator on the archive there is a ruffle splash page before the animation starts, so a good bet!

textfiles• 3 years ago

It's certainly a firm hint!

lucgommans5• 3 years ago

Announcement: https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-fo...

Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed

I had trouble when adding e.g. https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit because there's literally zero documentation on this system that I could find, but the way that it works is that you edit metadata tags (key-value list) and there is some magic/special tags that have an effect on how the item is displayed on the site, like whether to show you the emulator. What you need to set is:

    emulator = ruffle-swf
    emulator_ext = swf

You can find out what others have set by clicking on 'show all' at the download options and choosing the <itemname>_meta.xml file.

db48x• 3 years ago

If you prefer JSON you can also visit <https://archive.org/metadata/gravityrunner-nolimit>.

nosamu2• 3 years ago

The Flashpoint project has some great documentation here:

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for...

haunter4• 3 years ago

Highly recommend "Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby". It's the Dark Souls of flash games

https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en

The japanese version is here (no difference) https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126

They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)

samketchup• 3 years ago

I just struck out 5 times in a row, finally made solid contact and the game crashed.

Thank you, lol

haunter4• 3 years ago

Try not to play fullscreen. Started crashing some months ago. Or download the sfw file and play with the standalone Ruffle.rs client

gjsman-1000• 3 years ago

What a mystery for how that ever got approved...

(For context, there is a video of a YouTuber trying to beat it... and he did, 7 1/2 hours later. He was mostly stuck on the "Christopher Robin" level which basically requires perfect to-the-frame timing.)

haunter4• 3 years ago

Yeah that’s Ludwig. One of the better streams ever. The final boss is crazy because every pitch is random so you have to guess instantly + perfect hit it too

There is some lore behind the game. It was a Yahoo Japan title https://www.siliconera.com/winnie-the-poohs-home-run-derby-s...

mynameishere• 3 years ago

Well now I've got that crappy music stuck in my head.

That brings up a real mystery from 15 years ago that I never did solve. Back in the day you could go on kongregate or whatever and play these awful flash games that clearly took 30 minutes or less to make. Just junky, copy-paste stuff. (Much worse than the "home run derby" game above.)

And yet...

And yet they all seemed to have original sound tracks of more-or-less passable game music. Where were they getting this from? Did adobe give everybody a huge catalog of tunes to pick from?

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

a lot of people tended to get CC0 music, free, and didn't need to make their own though most of the actually good flash games had an artist make music specifically for the game

ilayn• 3 years ago

It was mostly from https://www.newgrounds.com/

Click the audio tab

kmeisthax8• 3 years ago

Newgrounds had the Audio Portal, a repository of free-to-use music specifically intended for use by people creating movies and games for their Flash Portal.

That being said, this sort of licensed tie-in webgame probably would have just bought a royalty-free stock music track from Audiojungle[0] or whatever.

There was also a huge market for licensing custom-branded versions of whole Flash games, too. That's why every mid-2000s official site for any sort of media property had Flash games on it.

[0] Audiojungle.

swilliamsio• 3 years ago

A shockingly large amount of music used in old flash games and in old YouTube videos is by Kevin MacLeod, whose released thousands of high quality tracks of all styles under CC-BY.

https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html

jdjdjdhhd• 3 years ago

Indeed, it crashed Firefox mobile for me in full screen

But either way, I played twice and that's enough for me

112233• 3 years ago

The reviews on the english version archive.org entry are a piece of art, memorial for the victims and something else altogether. Have not seen such reviews on anything else, not even close.

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

huh, so the Ruffle technology is actually something to consider. Much better than the last 5+ years of flash 'alternatives' tried some games out, most look identical to FP somehow.

anticensor• 3 years ago

I misread as "Internet Explorer expands Flash support" for a moment.

NelsonMinar• 3 years ago

Compare with ooooooooo.ooo, recently discussed on Metafilter in great detail: https://www.metafilter.com/199981/Friday-Flash-Fun-Forever

CSMastermind• 3 years ago

I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE

I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it.

In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure stories.

He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.

But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience choose a character's hair color and have that effect the animation for the rest of the story.

The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are making that possible.

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

yeah, lots of Flash games were actually innovative. plenty of developers got their start on NG with flash before moving on to make console or steam games. flash had plenty of shovelware, but you can still make incredible stuff with it.

klenwell• 3 years ago

Good example here: https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash

It works! It had been effectively defunct for years:

https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/

TillE• 3 years ago

Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just fine on YouTube.

It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.

derefr5• 3 years ago

Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime. (You could still download them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1/RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire. It was not a "click to play" experience.)

This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started until 2005 — that was about when at least some people were starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video over their Internet connections, without needing to make a big production of it.

Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos — a Flash animation wasn't a video, it was an ActionScript program that rendered a video when executed. So a Flash animation could be arbitrarily lightweight on the wire — as long as the author was clever about composing things out of vector bits and small reusable textures.

Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway.

Flash as a distribution format for games stuck around a few more years, because HTML5 wasn't fully there to replace it yet. And the authoring tool (now Adobe Animate) is around to this day, because it's still an excellent tool for creating vector-based cartoons... that you render out to bitmapped video.

echelon• 3 years ago

Flash made it easy for any kid or creative to do amazing things.

Homestar, Weebl, Salad Fingers, Charlie the Unicorn, Ultimate Showdown, Xiao Xiao, Albino Black Sheep, Newgrounds, YTMND...

It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck.

derefr5• 3 years ago

He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.

I mean, that's not a distinction of Flash as a format; that's a distinction between animation and film. Netflix could certainly do a CYOA for a cartoon series.

Cerium• 3 years ago

It is not a distinction between animation and film, it is around when the content is generated. A CYOA series needs the content generated in realtime. Each binary decision that impacts basic facts about the series (hair color in this example, or which character has something happen to them, etc) in the entire series doubles the number of possible versions.

themagician2• 3 years ago

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow.

Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping for touch input. Apparently they showed this garbage to Steve Jobs several times and he shot it down, and I can't blame him.

Tragic, really. Even still, today, if Adobe open sourced Flash and Flash CS4 I think it be a huge hit. Homestar Runner and Newgrounds. Such an interesting space for creators. I can't even imagine the things people might create if it was still around today.

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot.

I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby

bsimpson2• 3 years ago

Flash was epic for creative coding, and I haven't seen another software environment come close. We lost a really great onramp to UI development when Flash died.

I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts they owned free-and-clear.

nolok• 3 years ago

I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow.

Same way pdf does, because the money was in the authoring tools and they had the best ones around.

But adobe mostly inherited flash because they wanted the death of macromedia, so they didn't really care about it.

readyplayernull• 3 years ago

Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe...

I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory is that Macromedia's code base was just way too complex to be fixed or ported, and so they started working from scratch on the successor of Flash: Adobe AIR, but took some wrong decisions and never got as popular.

noduerme4• 3 years ago

I was running a huge flash-based game site at the time and was able to test it on the dev Android Chrome plugin. The touch mapping was bad but there was clearly a way evolving around it (which worked well within a year for releasing AIR-based mobile games). To satisfy my own curiosity about performance, in 2010 I wrote my own JS/canvas engine[0] that was highly performant given the limitations of the JS engines at the time, and tested their frame rates side by side on the same interactive animations. Flash outperformed, but it ate more battery. I think in the end that was the reason Jobs decided to nix it.

It is tragic, mostly though because the Flash workflow was so great for working with animators and artists as you were refining 2D game assets. Along with the whole Away3D and Starling ecosystems leveraging GPUs it was extremely performant in ways that JS engines still can't quite touch, and there's nothing similar in terms of cross-platform deployment now (pixijs and threejs are both great, but they aren't integrated into a package non-coder designers can work with and you still can't compile them to a single piece of bytecode that runs anywhere).

[0] https://strikedisplay.blogspot.com/?m=0

experimenting• 3 years ago

I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple.

Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.

It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to localstorage.

babypuncher• 3 years ago

Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage.

Flash ran like garbage on every platform it supported, which is the reason Apple didn't allow it on the iPhone. And the Internet is a better place today because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology.

At the time I was a big Android fan, and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that while my phone and tablet could run flash unlike Apple's products, the experience was so incredibly shitty that it was not worth actually using. I don't think I ever made it through a full episode of South Park on southparkstudios.com without the player crashing and me needing to reload my browser at least once.

dumpsterdiver2• 3 years ago

I just deleted my response about how I didn't think it was so tragic due to the security issues that plagued Flash, but I deleted it because I don't think my point about past security issues cleanly relates to yours about the benefits of open sourcing. I apologize if anyone attempted to respond to my comment and found that it was deleted by the time they submitted - that was not my intent.

pyeri• 3 years ago

They also had a competitor in the form of Microsoft's Silverlight, right? What happened to that?

j459• 3 years ago

It's too bad Flash Lite which quietly was on so many devices didn't have the abilty to upscale either.

At the time iOS came out, there was no App store, let alone a desire to let other runtimes run on iOS directly or indirectly like there are in some parts/ways today with web apps.

At the time when Flash was prematurely ended, there was no suitable replacement for what it could do, and it kind of set of more than a few years of darkness of reinventing the wheel.

Since Flash's ActionScript was based on ECMAscript (which is also familar to the Javascriptians), I don't think Adobe's replacement for FlashBuilder equivalent that rendered in HTML/JS/SVG reached the world, or if it did, timed well, or in any meaningful capacity.

If anyone could create html equivalent tooling for what html could do equivalent to flash, it would have been Adobe.

Few platforms came close to the promise of one codebase on many platforms like Flash. Lots of good hopes on the horizon in WebAssembly, Rust, etc, and more concretely with the next-curve techs like Flutter.

goosedragons• 3 years ago

You can already experience them on homestarrunner.com thanks to ruffles. It emulates the flash player and the old toons seem to work fine. The site even has it built in so no need for an extension.

irrational• 3 years ago

Flash really was something special. We created all kinds of training content in it (all of which was completely replaced with static text and images after all of our customers adopted iPads for doing associate training - Which where it still is today, extremely boring). We all these animated characters, with their own backstories and personalities, that each had their own professional voice talent. Associates in Asia especially loved them. Another project was for people who repaired printers. All the printers this company produced were 3d models inside of flash that could be rotated on any access and disassembled to the smallest screw. A tech could choose something to repair and it would show them step by step how to do the repair. They could rotate/zoom the printer however they wanted to see the current step playing out. Neither video nor static text/images are a good replacement.

The best thing was, everything was vector graphics, so the file sizes were minuscule.

nemo44x• 3 years ago

Personally I’d rather read text and/or watch a human present slides/demo than watch an animated thing for training.

mwcampbell2• 3 years ago

We created all kinds of training content in it

How accessible was that training content for disabled people, particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better in some ways.

dylan6043• 3 years ago

He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.

Oh, how little credit you give to the magic of editing. If they needed the same footage to be reusable with minor differences in things like hair color, they could do it all in post. With the magic of m3u8 play lists, they could see where they even have the variations of videos to as minimum duplication of video as possible. It becomes much more of an asset management nightmare than content creation issue. As an aside, theatrical releases of movies were sometimes given "fingerprints" where small details in a scene would be changed like the adding/removing of a prop in the background, the color scheme of the books/towels/whatever in the background, etc. They didn't film all of those variations. They were modified in post.

lucgommans5• 3 years ago

They link to a collection called "Software Library: Flash". How do I add something there? I've uploaded gravityrunner years ago and recently (45 days ago, the site tells me) figured out how to activate the emulator for this swf file (not sure why not offer to emulate any .swf file but ok), but it's also not showing up¹ in things like Flash game collections. Is there any documentation on this?

Edit: wait, I think I found it. Below the About text, there is a filter for "AND primary_collection:softwarelibrary_flash". Probably I need to add that tag to my item. Now I wonder how I'm supposed to know of the relevant collections to put things in? Is there a list of all software categories?

¹ https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=grav... whereas it is on the site-wide search: https://archive.org/search?query=gravityrunner

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

not that I've seen. one thing you can try to do is add the Ruffle emulator flags to your metadata, and they'll probably pick it up and place it in that category whenever the next time they do a sweep. I guess you can also email them, hey are pretty prompt by email, usually.

ehPReth• 3 years ago

Try @textfiles on Twitter

Apocryphon• 3 years ago

Does this mean that previously archived sites that use Flash will now be viewable?

lucgommans5• 3 years ago

That would be nice. I was recently trying to play https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/scie... via archive.org, but it doesn't work. Also the swf file itself does not load in an old virtual machine. I don't know where to view error output besides the JavaScript console; it simply does nothing.

(Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2290936)

I still occasionally think back to this engine when the topic of human randomness comes up (I do computer security for a living, so that's not infrequent)

kmeisthax8• 3 years ago

Ruffle ships a browser extension that loads Ruffle into every tab you open, so Flash sites work as they were originally intended to. It's available for Chrome and Firefox. Safari works if you enable developer extensions and download our macOS app - we have to get into Mac App Store for it to work normally because apparently notarization isn't enough[0].

https://ruffle.rs/#downloads

[0] It was enough for the old extensions API :/

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

I think so. They had it before, but it worked kinda funky it should be better now.

codetrotter• 3 years ago

Hope this means that I can play Attak by Johnny Two Shoes again.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161126122429/http://www.johnny...

There was a time when I used to play that game every day.

justsomehnguy3• 3 years ago

At some point Flash emulation would solve all the biggest troubles of the original Flash and.. became a new standard for a web-based inter/animation? Of course, having a VM with XP with Macrmedia director would be a problem for Apple M1/2/3 owners, but nothing a modern emulation couldn't solve...

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

would it solve the problems? absolutely. would browser vendors pick it up for a standard? almost definitely not.

though, nothing is stopping anyone from creating new flash games, videos, etc. the software is out there, and NG already does flash game jams.

justsomehnguy3• 3 years ago

Well, the modern CSS + animations + SVG solves like 90% of things Flash could do, with HTML5 and canvas it solves the remaining 9%. but the biggest problem is the authoring tools and I if there were anything worthwile enough the web would had exploded already.

BenFranklin100• 3 years ago

This is encouraging news. These sorts of efforts help save information from being buried in the trash heap of history.

Is anyone aware of coordinated efforts beyond the internet archive to save data in old formats and media? I actually have information on 5.25 floppies I never copied over (my bad) that are almost certainly lost at this point. Also, I have docs in PFS Write format that will be PITA to recover at this point too. I’d have to dig out that old 486 that has been gathering dust in my basement the last 25 years to know for sure :) .

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

I don't know of too many, but there are some out there like https://hiddenpalace.org/ (though that is more related to video games).

xp846• 3 years ago

Look for platform-specific sites. For instance, 80s Mac stuff has at least a couple, like Macintosh Garden.

Alifatisk2• 3 years ago

Part of me feel sad that the big players deprecated flash before any good alternatives popped up, HTML5 wasn't exactly an alternative yet. Flash was waaay more powerful, I think we lost a bit of good technology there.

Hopefully we'll get it back soon.

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

yeah. the closest to getting flash back is Ruffle, which works pretty well, and Newgrounds does flash game jams still, so it ain't all dead

em3rgent0rdr• 3 years ago

Particularly for vector-based animated movies, can achieve much higher quality-per-bandwidth than compressed raster graphics, and are future-proofed to automatically handle higher video resolutions.

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

yeah, a lot of flash content that was SVG exclusive can go up past 4k and look stunning, and flash was the only one around then (and debatably, now) with an editor to let someone leverage that

xp846• 3 years ago

This part itself is probably a lost art forever. As are many things that required great efficiency. Apart from a few embedded specialties. I feel the same pain though, watching a HomestarRunner video or something by means of a 200MB video when I know the SWFs were like 100KB.

justinclift7• 3 years ago

I'm also interested in seeing what happens with Ruffle can eventually play all (or say 99%) of the Flash files out there.

Will they continue on, and make a "next generation flash" or something?

aka Flash Done Right :)

willio582• 3 years ago

The doors have been open for quite some time now for someone to build Flash Done Right. Some have tried. But they never catch on.

dayvid• 3 years ago

Xiao Xiao was a nostalgia kick: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=xiao...

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

amen.

a1o• 3 years ago

Does anyone how to do this? I could tie existing wasm runtimes to some binaries that supports it (mostly old abandon ware games there that aren't flash), but when I asked around in forums no one answered there - or I didn't understood how their communities worked.

jonplackett• 3 years ago

The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool.

It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites.

I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t.

I wish Adobe had done a better job with flash and just converted the Flash Player into html5. Surely that could have been done?

Website creation is far too complicated now compared to then and I think the level of experimentation - especially by lone artists - has plummeted since flash died.

johannes1234321• 3 years ago

Yes, I still haven't found a good alternative to easily build simple interactive animations for the web. Flash was fun, even with my limited artistic skills.

LadyMartel• 3 years ago

I fondly remember when I first discovered how to attach a goto action to a button and I went nuts with it making choose your own adventure type animations. Drawing was also really easy to make thing look decent even with a mouse. I haven't found (or admittedly looked for) a similar vector drawing tool like that ever since.

ftmch• 3 years ago

Yes, the generated brush strokes were really good. I was at one point just making static comics in Flash, using just a mouse because the brush strokes looked like they were drawn by someone way more skilled than myself.

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

nah, HTML5 was and still isn't good enough for a straight conversion, as years of flash ""alternatives"" have shown us.

xp846• 3 years ago

I feel like WebAssembly was the thing Flash was waiting for.

phendrenad22• 3 years ago

It's not just flash, all of web development has become very complex. In the early days, people would learn to make websites because they wanted to be web developers. They could make something in 5 minutes that was reasonably similar to what they would make if they achieved their goal of getting a job doing it. Now, in 5 minutes you can make a squarespace page, which is still impressive, but nowhere near something you could get a job doing. People either do this and give up, or they get lost in a maze of studying (bootstrap vs MUI??? Tailwind vs SASS??????) and emerge a fully-formed web designer (having made no cool personal site along the way).

kkarakk• 3 years ago

Now, in 5 minutes you can make a squarespace page, which is still impressive, but nowhere near something you could get a job doing.

there are tons of ppl who just need an interface that lets them efficiently gather money for their good/service. in that context the squarespace page is all they need.

most ppl STILL can't figure that out and pay someone to do it.

TazeTSchnitzel• 3 years ago

The creation tool still exists (it's been renamed to Adobe Animate) and even still lets you make interactive content with, I can only assume, a similar workflow. But what I really can't understand or forgive is that Adobe killed ActionScript, replacing it with a JavaScript library (CreateJS) that's similar but not quite the same AIUI. That meant you can't just re-export existing Flash content for HTML5, and Flash creators' existing skillsets aren't directly applicable to the new system…

There's no good technical justification for this. Adobe could have ported Flash Player to WebAssembly or asm.js, or they could have written an ActionScript to JavaScript compiler and a set of support routines. They could have gotten even very complex old Flash projects working on HTML5, they could have charged money for this feature, and many people would have forked out for it! Instead they were content to let their platform die. It makes no sense.

codethief• 3 years ago

So does that mean I get to play Winterbells and Yeti Sports again? :)

codedokode• 3 years ago

In case anyone is wondering how much CPU Flash emulator uses: "Isolated Web Co" - 12%, Firefox - 16%, gnome-shell - 25%.

nathants• 3 years ago

working on a game right now. the second to last attempt was in godot 4. it reminded me a lot of flash, especially in 2d mode.

to anyone missing flash go checkout godot!

hoten2• 3 years ago

PIXI.js also gives a similar framework.

andai• 3 years ago

Have you used Phaser? I was under the impression that Pixi is just the graphics part, while Phaser (which uses Pixi) handles everything else.

j4ah4n• 3 years ago

They certainly were fun days back with Macromedia at the helm. Full suite of tools that worked extremely well together.

I remember when Tim Burton put out various cartoons via Director (the same used for countless DVDs) that opened up more dramatic storytelling than the business “intros” offered at the time (I built these too mind you).

I was even Flash AS3 certified at one point, something I was very proud of in my early career.

Good times.

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

and then adobe spit on all of it. what a waste, and its all on adobe.

cempaka• 3 years ago

Went looking for a good old article about fanimutation, this is quite the walk down bored-college-dorm-session memory lane: https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2002-01-25/84480/

willhackett• 3 years ago

This is pure nostalgia

Propelloni• 3 years ago

Agreed. We hated Flash back in the day. It was a terrible proprietary format, impossible to search, unstable and prone to crashes. It was even worse than JavaScript today. And it required a plugin.

Obviously it did a lot of things right and we miss Flash for it. But it was almost universally despised in the early 2000s.

dmvdoug• 3 years ago

I was wondering about this because my only memory of it is just how much people hated it. That and security problems.

winstonprivacy• 3 years ago

Relevant:

https://archive.org/details/flash-is-dead

mikercampbell• 3 years ago

Pokémon Tower Defense??

diggernet2• 3 years ago

Sadly, flOw still doesn't work.

https://archive.org/details/flash_flow

In fact, the motion of the little bit that it does feels much less smooth than I remember from last time I checked.

justinclift7• 3 years ago

Just tried it here (using Firefox on Linux), and it seems to be running ok.

At least, the creature is smoothly turning and travelling towards wherever the mouse is.

There don't seem to be any stutters, slowness, or other hiccups.

diggernet2• 3 years ago

Thanks for checking. Same setup here. Feels a little jittery to me. I dunno, maybe it's in my head.

Of course, the important bit is the poor little guy never gets any food to eat. So, no game.

nineplay• 3 years ago

The orisinal games were one of my favorite things on the internet. I'm so happy to see them back.

https://archive.org/details/chicken-wings

WillAdams• 3 years ago

I hope this means that they will fix the site for the wonderful book _Bembo's Zoo_:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050204004955/http://www.bembos...

endgame• 3 years ago

Wow, there are a few animutations in their big "unsorted" collection: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_unsorted . Rewatching them brings back so many memories from High School.

phendrenad22• 3 years ago

I have a theory that Google killed flash so that they could index the web more effectively. There were many old websites that were entirely made in flash (or java applets), and the content that Google needed to scrape was buried inside a binary flash file. Flash had security vulnerabilities? News flash: So do javascript engines.

Bakingpotato24• 3 years ago

while that might be true, its probably more true that they want to own the internet (see: nonstandard changes within chrome, forcibly making chromium dominant, the AMP debacle) and adobe SWF files aint google

pests2• 3 years ago

They started to index flash software in 2008 and I even remember seeing flash in search results sometimes

https://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexin...

lhball• 3 years ago

I had en elementary school teacher that made a website dedicated to flags games appropriate for students. It was amazing, FULL of games from my childhood: https://web.archive.org/web/20050407011006/www.gamewing.com

If they can get that working I’d be ecstatic!

wiredbutburned2• 3 years ago

sweet!

slowhadoken• 3 years ago

Last time I checked BlueMaxima makes two flash emulators Flashpoint Ultimate and Flashpoint Infinity.

dumpsterdiver2• 3 years ago

Possibly an unpopular opinion:

Flash appears to have been a very capable medium for transporting intent, but the intent of that awesomeness was overshadowed by the shoddiness of the underlying implementation. Flash, in its various implementations, has always amounted "building a house upon sand". You don't have to search far to see this. It was an ignorantly thrown together security nightmare (ignorant in the sense that they had no idea how bad it actually was until the RCE's came raining down).

tagyro• 3 years ago

I have many fond memories of Flash. It was far from perfect, but it really brought together programming and art, to a level that I don't see today.

Around 2005(?) I remember a Flash conference in Turin, Italy where I saw many great interactive CDs and games from artists from all around the world. Tokyoflash, Yugo Nakamura and many more creators that were building experiences which I have a hard time finding these days. In the latter years, there was FWA (Favourite Website Award) full of great flash websites (still remember GotMilk).

And then came Flex and AIR, that made building "rich internet applications" fun.

I left web development when Flash died and coming back to it now, after almost 20 years, and honestly, I don't think we're any better.

Adobe being Adobe, never got to fix the security and performance of the Flash Player (a dedicated surfer can still find malware disguised as Flash Player).

romusha• 3 years ago

No reason to still use shitty technology

DaSHacka• 3 years ago

I agree, we should ditch JavaScript.

epa• 3 years ago

Im excited for this! So much is archived on flash that had thought to be lost

giovannibonetti• 3 years ago

Regarding a modern alternative to Flash, I just want to mention the Scrimba webdev learning platform [1], which leverages a custom built programming language [2] for making interactive courses and save the videos in an optimized vector format with a very small footprint.

It was released in a Launch HN 3 years ago [3]. Personally, I have used the platform to teach the basics of frontend web dev to my wife, and it was a great experience.

[1] https://scrimba.com/ [2] https://scrimba.com/learn/imba [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579699

temporallobe• 3 years ago

Great! Maybe now I can watch Stone Trek in all its original Flash animation glory!

Internet Archive expands Flash support

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