hackernews client

Building a new Flash

697 pointsposted a day ago

(bill.newgrounds.com)

226 Comments

cableshaft

a day ago

I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/

One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc.

That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file.

But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game.

Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.

qingcharles

15 hours ago

Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?

I remember trying to produce a Flash renderer in C# when we wrote DudeFactory to render out the characters after you used the Flash app to put all their clothes and accessories on. I think we cheated in the end and pre-rendered large PNGs of them all and used .NET to just layer them all with instructions sent from Flash.

https://dudefactory.com/

wongarsu

10 hours ago

SVG + CSS + JS was hailed as the Flash-killer. But authoring tools never materialized. The tech stack can render the same things, but the process of creating anything beyond a static image in SVG is night and day compared to making the same thing in Flash

ecocentrik

5 hours ago

Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS but it just took a knee because so many people hated flash for all of its warts by the time SVG and Canvas moved vector graphics rendering to the browser. Flash was a real pain the ass for most web users and Web 2.0 technologies did kill it.

Someone

5 hours ago

> Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS

Didn’t it? IIRC, Adobe had such a tool at some moment, and part of it seems to (somewhat) live on [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Flex:

“Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. […] Adobe donated Flex to the Apache Software Foundation

[…]

In 2014, the Apache Software Foundation started a new project called FlexJS to cross-compile ActionScript 3 to JavaScript to enable it to run on browsers that do not support Adobe Flash Player and on devices that do not support the Adobe AIR runtime. In 2017, FlexJS was renamed to Apache Royale. The Apache Software Foundation describes the current iteration of Apache Royale as an open-source frontend technology that allows a developer to code in ActionScript 3 and MXML and target web, mobile devices and desktop devices on Apache Cordova all at once”

[1] I may be wrong though. It’s not easy figuring out what Flash code ended up in which of Adobe’s Flash-like products over time.

hobofan

6 hours ago

I think Rive[0] is quite competitive with what was possible back then in covering the full authoring stack.

[0]: https://rive.app

KaiserPro

5 hours ago

> Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?

probably not. The only difference is that it'd be build once display everywhere. Flash meant that everything looked the same regardless of browser or platform.

Its a lot better nowadays, but its not as easy as flash was.

The _key_ thing thats missing is the flash IDE/designer. There are no compelling editors/environments that allows both artists and coders to work in the same space.

Sure I can use Illustrator to make graphics, but there are no animation systems out there that allow me to animate well (I can render a unity app to HTML/JS but thats not quite the same)

WillAdams

5 hours ago

Guaranteed deployment, and the lack of an IDE which works for both programmers and artists were definitely the two advantages Flash had.

I'd really like to find a replacement which clicks for me the way it did --- started out w/ its predecessor, Futurewave Smartsketch (used it on PenPoint, Mac and Windows, and for Windows, continued using through a succession of pen tablets, most notably my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 which I despair of replacing --- transflective displays went out of vogue).

leviathant

4 hours ago

>Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?

This has more or less been the line from the day Steve Jobs decided Flash would never be available on the iPhone. And it was readily apparent that no one who said that worked in the audio domain. Things are much, much better now, but I remember challenging myself by trying to build a drum machine in HTML, Javascript, and CSS (not wanting to muck about in Canvas at the time) and while I could make it look decent enough, there was no such thing as a solid, reliable clock in Javascript, for about a decade. Just the way you played audio files back varied from browser to browser on the same machine. It was absolute garbage.

In-browser capabilities have basically caught up or exceeded what Flash did - I don't keep up anymore - but to echo other replies, the authoring tools just aren't as accessible. Maybe vibe coding tools close that gap. But the forced sunsetting of Flash set online interactive multimedia back at least a decade. It was never my main career path, but I more or less abandoned that fun side quest, and as evidenced by my feeling the need to comment here, it still kind of bums me out.

andai

8 hours ago

Yeah, there's two approaches to rendering Flash vector art.

You can turn the curves into polygons, or render them to textures. Ruffle, I recall, makes everything polygons (so it's a little chunky if you zoom in?), and Super Meat Boy rendered everything to textures.

I'm not sure what the actual flash player did, which seems to have pretty decent performance relative to Ruffle in my testing.

Maybe they have some proprietary technique for rendering curves quickly on a GPU? (I read a paper on rendering curves, and there's OpenVG, which I think came later and nobody uses?)

mfabbri77

3 hours ago

OpenVG is just an API by Kronos group, that was never implemented by hardware vendors on desktop graphic cards (it was specifically created for mobiles, as OpenGL|ES).

Btw, there exists several implementations, with pure CPU rendering (like AmanithVG SRE) and others with GPU backends.

troupo

15 hours ago

> Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?

This sounds like a "is there anything you can do in C++ or Javascript that you couldn't do in Brainfuck?".

Flash was a complete authoring environment. Yes, you can replicste the output in JS+CSS (or more likely JS+Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU), but at what cost and with how much effort?

RobotToaster

11 hours ago

Technically you may not even need js, since SVG has integral support for SMIL.

lukan

8 hours ago

Have you ever tried that out? Last time I checked (some yeqrs ago) wide support (and performance) was not great but more importantly handling I found not great.

Support and performance might have improved, but I think the style is still ugly and good authoring tools non existent.

pjmlp

13 hours ago

2D and 3D games, with good developer and debugging tools.

rtpg

14 hours ago

It feels like we're fairly close yet so far. Lots of newer tools do have animation and tweening of arbitrary properties but then will just have bitmap image editors instead of a built-in vector editor for example. Or just make it really hard to tie all the stuff together.

The ease at which Flash CSx would just let you draw a circle in a spot, then click on it to get its script file and immediately add a little bit of behavior is magic for prototyping

nosrepa

a day ago

Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used to be fun.

fuzzy_biscuit

20 hours ago

Strawberry Clock is our king!

Dwedit

19 hours ago

I was in some instant-message conversations (Romhacking related I think) with CoolBoyMan before he told me that he was Strawberry Clock.

barbs

20 hours ago

notpushkin

17 hours ago

I feel we need a modular verdion of Flash: standalone editor that produces just the animations with Flash-like mechanics, SDKs for major OSS game frameworks, and possibly an editor component you can use in IDEs. You then drop in animation file(s) and track them in VCS like any other asset.

Edit: but of course, the standalone variant should work for non-game animations as well!

dizhn

11 hours ago

Before opening the comments I made a bet with myself that the top comment would be about how someone made flash games in the 2000s and nothing really replaced it in the coming years. :)

hrmtst93837

10 hours ago

In my experience what made Flash special wasn't the SWF runtime but teh FLA as a single editable file that bundled timeline, vectors, and code so an artist could hand over an animation and a developer could open the same file and tweak frames without a full rebuild. To recreate that loop I built a pipeline where artists export PNG sequences from Adobe Animate, TexturePacker packs them into atlases, a small tool emits a JSON timeline with frames as {spriteIndex,durationMs,easing}, and an AssetPostprocessor in Unity or an import plugin in Godot hot-reloads that JSON into AnimationClips so timing can be nudged in-editor. I've found the practical tradeoff is bigger assets and more import complexity, so make your timeline format human-readable for sensible git diffs, keep per-animation metadata minimal for easier merges, and accept that you'll be debugging the importer at 2am while an artist asks for 'one frame faster' but iteration speed pays off.

wink

10 hours ago

The versioning was indeed a bit of a pain, also anything with dynamic input.

I was pretty proud of a solution where we could feed a web CMS that had a flash and a html version with the same editable text fields. IIRC you could grab the input of some fields from a text file and Flash didn't care where these came from, so on save the CMS just spit out a bunch of text files in a folder. That must have been around 2001.

shminge

18 hours ago

I've tried Love2D and enjoyed it but just found the lack of support for Lua was tough - how do you handle debugging and things?

a1o

7 hours ago

I remember I could connect love2d to the IDE I used and debug lua just fine with it. Which IDE you were using?

dnpls

8 hours ago

Have you tried Rive? It seems to have a lot of potential for game development.

embedding-shape

7 hours ago

It's a UI authoring toolkit, you could do entire games in it I suppose, but you'd be fighting against it, rather than being helped by it.

Better to go the route of doing Spine2D animations then leverage a real game engine like Godot or Unity and load the animations there.

But then you're essentially back to "traditional game development" which is very different from what you could do with Macromedia's Flash back in the day.

hobofan

6 hours ago

> but you'd be fighting against it, rather than being helped by it

I think this was also true of doing game development in Flash. Some people here might be looking back at Flash with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.

0x1ceb00da

10 hours ago

Original adobe tools for flash should still work on windiws/wine. Why don't people use them to make things?

amenghra

8 hours ago

Flash died once people no longer had a flash player. The tooling might also need updating if the apps being built are targeting today’s touch devices.

andai

8 hours ago

Indeed they do, at least once a year :)

https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1554561/1

gf000

14 hours ago

> is an environment that both coders and artists could use.

Maybe Rive fits this well enough? (Not affiliated, just looked into it at a time from a render engine perspective)

dnpls

8 hours ago

I came here thinking the same. To me, it looks like Rive is the closest tool with the highest potential to be a Flash replacement.

wesammikhail

16 hours ago

God I love the look of those old school sites. Takes me back to a happier time. Whatever happened? :(

andai

8 hours ago

Remember how mobile sites were the same thing except with less personality? And then they figured out they could remove what little personality remained and call it progress? And then they realized they could do that on desktop too?

throawayonthe

12 hours ago

newgrounds is still around though

random3

a day ago

I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that.

We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place.

Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area.

The tool uncovered a ton of security issues.

It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.

adithyassekhar

a day ago

Thanks for sharing. It's stories like these I've read since childhood that got me into this. Those little adventures into remote places to work on some computers. This was my version of Indiana jones.

But everyone's in an AWS world right now.

random3

18 hours ago

It looks like there's a a bit of reversal in some areas (e.g. ML) and it may make sense to have more geographically distributed (edge) compute so maybe we'll get more diversity in the currently cloud-dominated space.

This said, it was always cool when we could control the entire stack, but the reality was that once we scaled things up, we had to throw things over the fence to IT, DevOps, SRE and whatever name evolutions there were and the reality is AWS/GCE/Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally.

viccis

14 hours ago

>we had to throw things over the fence to IT, DevOps, SRE and whatever name evolutions there were and the reality is AWS/GCE/Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally

Anyone who was a dev during the "everyone is devops" fad for a while knows the pain of building something with these kinds of dependencies. Being able to claw back my time from operations on my company's dime is enticing.

mmooss

20 hours ago

Very interesting. What was the objective?

random3

18 hours ago

This was around when we were trying to get Flash to work on the first iPhone, so we had a hackathon for a week. Since I was a distributed systems "hacker", I ended up doing what was needed :) and there were lots of questions related to the sizing of flash on web pages and what not. That's what started it - I simple python script that I refined during the hackathon to get the embed parameters etc.

But once I started processing the data, it became a thing and we made a small cross-team team to get this going. We eventually expanded the effort in a few different directions and wanted to do a Flash analytics, but ended up with the internal tool only due to privacy concerns.

fenomas

17 hours ago

I remember using that tool internally! Personally I think I only used it to get stats of which features/APIs were popular. But I think other teams used it for QA/conformance, like finding content that occurred in the wild but wasn't covered by test cases.

random3

16 hours ago

Hahaha. Always cool to find users of the tools/products you build, including the obscure ones, and on HN no less :))

tombert

20 hours ago

Heck yeah.

I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made.

Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember).

Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did.

If we can have a new Flash, I will be very happy.

moolcool

19 hours ago

I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.

idreyn

18 hours ago

Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.

tombert

17 hours ago

Well said, and I completely agree.

Since Flash was an animation-first piece of software that still had a fairly robust scripting system, it was able to create very unique and interesting pieces of media that can kind of only exist as they are.

People aren't making full on TV cartoons in Construct or GameMaker. This isn't a dig at those tools, they're good software, but the animation parts of them are targeted much more towards "animation for games".

KaiserPro

5 hours ago

From what I recall part of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386224/ was animated in flash, if not all.

tombert

18 hours ago

I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago.

If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020.

If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.

fenomas

17 hours ago

They would have if they could have - answered here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256093

KaiserPro

5 hours ago

It was a power play between apple and Adobe.

The iphone was underpowered, and apple decided that they could brazen their way out of not having flash support.

It turned into a movement, but that was never a given.

odo1242

17 hours ago

There would still be the security issues, but yea this is still true

tombert

17 hours ago

Sure, maybe, but I think if it were FOSS'd back in ~2005, then these security issues could be addressed by a larger set of eyes, including the browser-makers themselves.

If this hypothetical universe happened, I think we'd have had something akin to WASM much earlier. Flash already had its own bytecode and VM, and even had something roughly like Emscripten [1] to compile existing C++ code to Flash.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossBridge

DonHopkins

11 hours ago

ESR's "many eyes" quote in his "Linus's Law" is unmitigated bullshit. And Linux Torvalds should not be blamed for it, since it wasn't his law, ESR just named it after him to get attention. Hardly anyone actually reads code, and the few people actually qualified to find bugs by reading huge piles of buggy code dumped into the public domain when a company abandons it have much more important things to do with their time.

If the many eyes that Macromedia and Adobe paid to work full time on Flash couldn't prevent the need to push out Flash security patches several times a week, the code is fundamentally flawed far beyond the point that the few much less qualified people who might actually take their unpaid spare time to look at it are able to finally find and fix all the bugs.

The major browser developers have enough on their hands designing new open standards and writing and debugging new code, without having to spend any of their time burning their eyes and brains looking at free abandoned obsolete toxic waste code dumps. And ESR certainly isn't going to chip in and help them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133598

>He made up the ridiculous "many eyes" quote himself, then misnamed it "Linus's Law" to avoid personal responsibility and shift the blame to innocent Linus Torvalds, who never said such a stupid thing, and which HeartBleed and many other eyeballable bugs proved terribly wrong and misguided.

>About which the salty security expert Theo de Raadt famously said "Oh right, let's hear some of that "many eyes" crap again. My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

>In Facts and Fallacies about Software Engineering, Robert Glass refers to the law as a "mantra" of the open source movement, but calls it a fallacy due to the lack of supporting evidence and because research has indicated that the rate at which additional bugs are uncovered does not scale linearly with the number of reviewers; rather, there is a small maximum number of useful reviewers, between two and four, and additional reviewers above this number uncover bugs at a much lower rate.[4] While closed-source practitioners also promote stringent, independent code analysis during a software project's development, they focus on in-depth review by a few and not primarily the number of "eyeballs".[5]

>The persistence of the Heartbleed security bug in a critical piece of code for two years has been considered a refutation of Raymond's dictum.[6][7][8][9] Larry Seltzer suspects that the availability of source code may cause some developers and researchers to perform less extensive tests than they would with closed source software, making it easier for bugs to remain.[9] In 2015, the Linux Foundation's executive director Jim Zemlin argued that the complexity of modern software has increased to such levels that specific resource allocation is desirable to improve its security. Regarding some of 2014's largest global open source software vulnerabilities, he says, "In these cases, the eyeballs weren't really looking".[8] Large scale experiments or peer-reviewed surveys to test how well the mantra holds in practice have not been performed.[10]

>Empirical support of the validity of Linus's law[11] was obtained by comparing popular and unpopular projects of the same organization. Popular projects are projects with the top 5% of GitHub stars (7,481 stars or more). Bug identification was measured using the corrective commit probability, the ratio of commits determined to be related to fixing bugs. The analysis showed that popular projects had a higher ratio of bug fixes (e.g., Google's popular projects had a 27% higher bug fix rate than Google's less popular projects). Since it is unlikely that Google lowered its code quality standards in more popular projects, this is an indication of increased bug detection efficiency in popular projects.

tombert

4 hours ago

Man you really took issue with a small part of what I said.

Writing forty paragraphs about your opinion of the “many eyes” thing is interesting enough, but I stand by what I said. If Flash player had been FOSS I think it could have been integrated into browser standards and you’d have browser makers able to fix things and integrate better sandboxing since it could be part of the standard.

matja

6 hours ago

I think it is still more likely that a project can be improved if everyone has access to the source code vs not having access to any source code. Are there counterexamples to that?

dwighttk

9 hours ago

I enjoyed flash games… even made one with some friends.

I hated flash only for their video player being so widespread despite immediately redlining my Mac’s cpu and holding it there during the entire experience.

(Okay also security issues, but that was more like adding the ammunition to getting rid of the video player)

Brajeshwar

17 hours ago

I started my career as a Programmer and did a lot of programmatic designs. Unfortunately, I’m not artistic. So, my tools of choice for Design were Code and Mathematics.

Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn’t notice anything that interested me. I don’t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called “ASfunction” inside Flash, “What? You can write code to make the drawings do stuff?”

So, that was the magic; I can code and see things happen in real-time (no compilation, no render). And that was the only thing I did for quite a while.

Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth. I spend most of my time writing ActionScript in TextPad and compiling it with a CLI called MTASC (from the same developer behind HAXE.org).[1] If memory serves me well, I used to maintain the ActionScript syntax for TextPad.[2]

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2005/haxe-programming-language/

2. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/textpad-syntax-file-for-asmx/

tombert

17 hours ago

Yeah, I actually got into Flash because I wanted to be an animator some day. I made some crappy cartoons but sadly my art skills never really improved, even with a fair amount of practice.

But in the process I learned about ActionScript and found I had a lot of fun coding things and playing with different programming constructs.

I keep meaning to try out haxe, it looks neat enough, but to me it's still kind of missing half of what I liked about Flash, which was the animation tooling.

pjmlp

13 hours ago

I disagree with it being the most fun, because I would also consider TP/Delphi and C++ Builder.

Now I do agree that even something like Unity or PlayCanvas fail short of Flash's game development experience, because the browser debugging for 2D and 3D development sucks.

tombert

12 hours ago

I have heard lovely things about Delphi’s and C++ builder’s fun factor (maybe from you on this very forum actually :) ), but I have not used those so I cannot speak to it.

At least of the stuff I have used, Flash is the most fun. Admittedly I never really got into any other kind of graphics-first development like VisualBasic and the like. Flash just spoke to me for some reason.

matula

5 hours ago

> a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro...

This is an under-appreciated aspect of Flash's popularity, and probably a reason why Animate didn't have the same appeal. A kid could get a "free" cracked copy and make fun things.... and maybe not help Adobe/Macromedia's bottom-line, it DID help the general ecosystem.

Rive seems fine, but monthly subscriptions need to die in a fire. I'm not going to pay $10/month to allow me to build some stupid animation idea I have every few months. There are a few, like GameMaker, that do one-time pricing... but even that doesn't scratch the same itch Flash did for me.

casey2

18 hours ago

It's just selling a scam. I've never been impressed by a flash game, but I'm impressed by programs written in general languages daily and for longer than flash has existed.

The worst thing about tech is people who don't know any better get advertised tools that aren't sustainable and aren't suited to the job. If someone sees a flash game and says "WOW! that's so cool I wanna do that", then I don't have problem with it. But if people want to learn a language and are handed an SRS app, or want to make a unique game and are told to use an engine that's when it becomes harmful (and in many cases viral due to network effects)

tombert

18 hours ago

I gotta admit I don't really know what you're talking about.

I think Flash was fun to develop in. It was easy and fun to write a game in it and it was something a lot more approachable and easier to distribute than trying to cobble together something with OpenGL or DirectX.

Also, I think a lot of the games on Flash actually are fun. I played through Mystery of Time and Space a few months ago and it still holds up. The puzzles are clever, the jokes are funny, the art is likeable, it's a good game.

But what I liked about Flash was that, because it was so approachable, there was a lot of creativity to stuff. A lot of the games weren't good in any kind of "objective" sense, but there was at least a distinct lack of cynicism with a lot of them. The people who made the games weren't doing it for money, they were doing it because they thought it would be cool to make a game. Some games, like Pico's School for example, were unlike basically anything that had come before it. Is Pico's School a masterpiece of game design? Nah, but it's certainly unique, and it was something that could be played on pretty much anyone's computer.

wisemang

18 hours ago

Totally. I remember a thing where there were four horses that each had an a capella part and you could click each horse to bring that part in or silence it. They all harmonized together and the silly little animations for each was a nice touch. I want to say circa 2005.

[edit] well that wasn't hard to find: https://www.numuki.com/game/singing-horses/

Anyways yes the security was abysmal but I’m sure it enabled creativity that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise.

Nekorosu

12 hours ago

That's absurd.

ajkjk

14 hours ago

a "scam"? really? I don't think there's one person who used flash and felt scammed somehow.

bsimpson

2 hours ago

There's much love given here to Flash as a creative tool and as an on-ramp for UX engineering. Both well-deserved, and both reason-enough to support Bill's project.

One aspect that Flash got uniquely right was the ability to push and pull on vectors like clay. It's the only vector editing tool I've ever used that didn't concern you with bezier abstractions and just let you directly manipulate them.

I don't know what algorithms were that enabled that, but I hope that's part of this tool too!

Curious if C# is the right language for an ActionScript revival. Feels like a strange choice considering ActionScript was the TypeScript of its day, but perhaps the prevalence of Unity now and the ability to share tech with the tool's C# codebase makes it a reasonable decision.

HanClinto

a day ago

> .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them.

The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.

adrian17

a day ago

AFAIK the .fla format was never fully documented or reverse engineered by anyone (FFDEC has an exporter, but not importer), so this alone would be a bold claim.

samsartor

12 hours ago

https://ruffle.rs/ is pretty solid

adrian17

11 hours ago

I'm talking about the .fla (XFL) format, not .swf (which is documented well - though that doesn't mean its exact behavior its understood well)

(note: I'm one of Ruffle's maintainers)

Cr8

11 hours ago

ruffle is a player for the output format (swf), .fla is the authoring format

gs17

19 hours ago

I'm very curious if the "ActionScript-to-C# transpiler" will actually work as well as he's hoping.

tombert

18 hours ago

I'm cautiously optimistic that it could work.

It's been quite awhile since I've written ActionScript [1], but I remember when I wrote it I didn't write it significantly differently than C#. You still have similar Java-style OOP semantics with types that I think wouldn't be too hard to map into C#, especially if you're willing to be dirty and use reflection.

[1] Gah, has it really been almost fourteen years? Time is stupid.

Tade0

7 hours ago

It's a dialect (superset) of ECMAScript based on the never-released 4th edition draft, which was in development at the time C# was first released, so these similarities are no accident.

pushedx

20 hours ago

Every so often over the past 15 years I've had this exact thought, "The world needs something which is exactly like flash. Not kind of like flash, exactly like flash."

A whole generation of people learned how to create art, games, music, animations, using flash, and the same kind of tool hasn't existed since then.

I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.

tsumnia

6 hours ago

> I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.

I think this is the biggest shift. Minecraft starting out as a .jar file allowed for reverse engineering and modding support became a huge part of its "culture". Coupled with artists focusing on spritesheets, you got to have that same Newgrounds online underground scene but for the next generation of kids.

Roblox is takes a similar place now that Minecraft is ~15 years old and all "grown up". Maybe once Roblox hits that similar fate this new Flash will be ready to fill its shoes.

tombert

19 hours ago

I agree, I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer, and it's one of the few things I miss about moving to Linux away from Windows.

I can still run Flash MX 2004 via Wine and play with that there, so it's not "lost media" or anything, but what I want is something as close to Flash as possible, that runs on Linux, and gets regular updates, and that doesn't require I subscribe to it for forever.

I have a perpetual license to ToonBoom (that I bought when they were still doing perpetual licenses), and ToonBoom is very cool software, but it's purely an animation software. I also have a license to Scirra Construct 2, and that's pretty neat as well, but in my mind that's basically a game engine. Flash was this cool, weird hybrid of both a game engine and artistic software that I haven't found a good replacement for.

With Flash, you could make a cartoon without touching ActionScript. It was designed around animation. If you wanted to extend the cartoon you could then add code, piecemeal, and if you wanted to make a full game then you could make a full game. It was great.

spondyl

21 hours ago

This post raises a few flags in my mind that it was at least partly generated by an LLM? That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful.

The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spelling and grammar with em-dashes.

The "Not just" parts stick out like "Not just play them back — edit them" as well as "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment."

Anyway, best of luck to the author with their project!

sneak

20 hours ago

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LL...

mtrovo

8 hours ago

> This document was written by an LLM (Claude) and then iteratively de-LLMed by that same LLM under instruction from a human, in a conversation that went roughly like this

This is hilarious.

roywiggins

20 hours ago

> This document has been through ten editing passes and it still has tells in it.

The big one it missed: the headers are mostly "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]". LLMs (maybe just Claude?) love these. Every heading sounds like it could be a Robert Ludlum novel (The Listicle Instinct, The Empathy Performance, The Prometheus Deception).

lukan

8 hours ago

I don't like lists like these as I sometimes use half of the "signs" in my writing. And it would be trivial, feeding that list to a LLM and tell it to avoid that style.

zahlman

13 hours ago

Huh. This page claims "This website requires JavaScript." at the top, yet I can read everything fine. TFA on the other hand is blank without JavaScript.

GaggiX

21 hours ago

>That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful.

If you look at the icons of the tools in the image they appear to have been generated using a LLM. So yeah it's probably vibecoded a lot, it would be cool if the author reports how much and how it was used but I don't think newgrounds would like it much.

bouncyhat

20 hours ago

It makes me so happy to see this. When I was in high school Flash was THE way that you could practice programming games with the instant feedback of graphics animation, key input, and playing sound. I enjoyed it so much that out of college I joined the Adobe Platform team right around 2008. I worked in the SF office which was formerly the Macromedia HQ before Adobe bought them out.

There were some really cool Flash tools in the works around then. Some internal developers had gotten some version of Flash Alchemy to run Doom in the browser. There was a lot of work going on to add proper GPU integration into the platform. I got to see some cool prototypes. Ultimately though, my timing was poor. This was right around when Steve Jobs decided that the iPhone shouldn't run Flash. The internal lore/rumor mill was that some PM had missed Steve Jobs reporting crashes in Safari enough times that Jobs was just DONE with Flash and had decided to kill it on his platform. I have no idea how true that was.

There was a mad scramble at Adobe to try to figure out how to keep Flash running on the iPhone. The AIR team was actively looking into reverse engineering solutions so they could essentially deploy Flash apps that didn't look like they were written in Flash. They tried to rally the community with a "We <3 Flash" campaign. It didn't matter. Flash was taken off the iPhone and Adobe made the call to give up. In 2009 after a few waves of 2008 recession cuts they slashed a huge part of the platform team and I knew it was over.

There were a lot of reasons that Flash probably needed to go, but I wonder about what the web would have been if it hadn't been killed around that time. Regardless I hope this project succeeds. <3 Flash.

bsimpson

3 hours ago

The first time I saw Bret Victor speak was at a FlashCamp at that office! Went to some really cool talks there.

Also shipped my only Android game as an AIR app.

I will forever be one of Flash's defenders. Was the best digital creative tool I ever encountered.

socalgal2

17 hours ago

I get that Flash hit a sweet spot. I'm not sure I get why nothing has really replaced it. There are other apps that give you animated vector graphics, in an IDE, with coding.

Here's 2?

https://rive.app/editor

https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/

I believe Unity doesn't do flash style vector animations. It will take in SVGs, turn them into meshes and apply skeletons. That said, it has replaced Flash in turns of the 1000s and 1000s of web games made with it.

https://poki.com/en/unity

https://itch.io/games/platform-web (majorty are Unity?)

Fun history: There was a flash like (vector animation program) for the Apple II called Fantavision.

https://youtu.be/8_Bm8bidrpE?t=40

It would export executables IIRC.

__jonas

11 hours ago

Rive looks pretty nice, but a subscription pricing model without any option for offline use for an authoring tool like that is very unappealing to me.

k33n

10 hours ago

Rive has an open SDK and my understanding is that you could build an entire app without ever opening theirs. But then there goes the “flash” vibe, unfortunately. Their primitives are also a little obscure without their IDE.

emi2k01

16 hours ago

I tried Rive Editor and I could not export my animation unless I upgraded to a paid plan, not even to a proprietary format. The free plan is is just a demo with no real world usage, not even for hobby.

A bit mad because I spent more time playing with it than I would like to admit

pjmlp

13 hours ago

All of those alternatives fail at debugging, because to this day browser teams don't consider 2D and 3D debugging tools something worthwhile having on developer tooling.

So in some cases you need a native build to try to replicate browser issues, and then being able to plug into RenderDoc, Instruments, PIX,....

Flash had the tools.

frou_dh

7 hours ago

Safari's devtools has a visual <canvas> debugger. I remember using it, seeing all the CanvasRenderingContext2D calls that affected the canvas listed, and scrubbing left and right through time to see how a frame was built up.

pjmlp

6 hours ago

Thanks for the heads up, at least that is something.

999900000999

a day ago

Unless this is open source I don't see the point.

We can't trust closed source software for content creation tools.

What happens when he gets bored?

However, I LOVE C# and would totally be down to contribute if it's open source.

grimgrin

a day ago

".fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them."

as to when they share the source, idk!

999900000999

21 hours ago

Great.

I'd feel better if he had some other core contributors, but this is a great start.

whywhywhywhy

21 hours ago

Think in this day and age starting your project off saying it's open source but making sure to open the patreon first and take money before the repo is a bad start when the reason for the project existing is a closed source paid product is being discontinued.

Especially if the dev is working on a sound editor, something Flash doesn't actually need before even having an outputted example up and running or even a video of it working.

lukan

8 hours ago

Having an integrated sound editor does sound like a nice to have feature, but I also would be rather interested in a working example.

K0balt

20 hours ago

Hmm.

alhazrod

a day ago

I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...

fenomas

20 hours ago

If it was possible they would have loved to - certainly by 2012 or so, and more likely by 2008-9. The reason I heard they couldn't is that by that time Flash Player was a massive 10+ year old codebase with lots of parts that were licensed or external, and nobody had ever tracked which parts would be to be relicensed or rewritten.

Source: I worked there at the time and knew the relevant PMs.

tombert

17 hours ago

That doesn't surprise me, honestly.

I wish they had been able to figure out how to do it, but licensing and patents and whatnot have held back lots of innovation.

cube00

a day ago

They couldn't because it lives on in Adobe Animate which Disney as a customer among others.

egypturnash

a day ago

Which they have recently said they will be dropping all support for: https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-...

A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".

lelandfe

20 hours ago

If you follow their mea culpa link, it says they're keeping (a type of) support.

> Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers...

> Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features.

Of course, in my experience, such a lifeline never lasts much longer than the furor that earned it...

egypturnash

18 hours ago

Yeah, if I was in a Animate studio I sure would be putting some energy for the entire last month into finding a good crack for it so we could deal with our old files, and talking about our plans for how to deal with the major hit the production pipeline would take when we picked a new animation program and started retraining everyone on it.

PaulDavisThe1st

21 hours ago

A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents.

I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.

egypturnash

18 hours ago

There were zero open-source options at the time. Flash/Animate was the only digital ink-n-paint solution that was even vaguely affordable to the hobbyist or small studio for many years. Most studio-quality 2D programs were proprietary solutions developed in big studios like Disney.

People started using Flash for professional work around 1995. "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the name "open source" was coined in 1998 and it took a while before anyone but programmers gave even half a damn about it.

The first open-source studio-quality 2D animation package I know of was OpenToonz from 2016, which was a relicensing of a commercial package that dates back to the late eighties or the early nineties - Wikipedia just mentions v3 from 1993.

But anyway now there is a dude working on an open-source Flash clone that can read the editor source files, so all these people you have next to no sympathy for have something to celebrate.

PaulDavisThe1st

16 hours ago

> "Open source" barely existed as a concept then,

I was introduced to "free software" and the GPL in 1986, as a PhD student at the European Molecular Biology Lab (Heidelberg).

Your historical revisionism doesn't sit well. Yes, "open source" came later because some people didn't like the specifics of the GPL and wanted a term that could describe "source available" software under a variety of license. But by 1998, I'd already been contributing to GPL'ed projects for more than a decade.

I'm well aware of the lack of free/libre alternatives to Flash. But that wasn't my point at all. I'm not saying that people failed by choosing Flash over some (mythical) free/libre alternative. I'm saying they failed by choosing Flash, period.

Before proprietary software, there were almost no creative tools that were proprietary. Nobody bought proprietary paint, or proprietary paint brushes, or proprietary table saws, or propriety anything. The software showed up, and everyone was so gaga about what you could do with it that they just forget about the fact that XYZ Corp. controlled the tools 100%, and dived in. There were people warning them, but those people were ignored.

Dwedit

15 hours ago

Adobe open-sourced the ActionScript 3 interpreter way back in 2006.

IvanK_net

21 hours ago

In 2012, I created IvanK.js - a Javascript library with the "Flash API" for quickly remaking ActionScript 3 games into the web environment. But it required WebGL, which as not very well supported back then.

I could remake several of my flash games quickly into web.

https://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=bitmaps

lukan

12 hours ago

I used it, thanks for making it. (Did not released something with it, though)

I switched to EaselJS, as this was supposedly the official supported libary of Adobe Animate, but then later settled with pixijs.

01100011

20 hours ago

I know very little about this space, but wasn't Haxe(https://haxe.org/) supposed to be a sort of next-gen, modern Flash replacement?

gs17

20 hours ago

That's more of an ActionScript replacement if anything. What made Flash great to use was the combination of a good art/animation tool with scripting support in an easy to use package that exports to a format anyone can (well, could) run fairly consistently in their browser. I don't think a lot of people miss AS3 without the rest of the tooling.

benoau

20 hours ago

Haxe provides a similar syntax to ActionScript, but it was OpenFL built on top of Haxe that provided similar APIs.

https://www.openfl.org/

Brajeshwar

17 hours ago

Yes, not the Flash IDE per se, but an ActionScript Editor/Compiler. Nicolas from motiontwin.com released a tool called MTASC, which later gave birth to HAXE.

Dwedit

14 hours ago

Notably, Dead Cells was made using Haxe.

graypegg

a day ago

Exciting! But I can't seem to find any where I can take a peek. It looks like a lot of UI is at least there, and the post makes some big promises about what's already done.

The vector icons in the side bar have the distinct cruft of LLM-generated SVGs, so just ideally hoping it isn't a quickly-made UI shell. The big claims about .fla import make me a bit skeptical. Though even so, we're not owed anything and I think it's a cool idea to share!

SonnyTark

12 hours ago

I thought about doing this for a while, I was a Flash gamedev as an indie then professionally.

Back then, once Flash projects start to scale up to get more commercial/competitive, the flash editor is no longer as useful for development and transforms to an assets creation platform that outputs loadable SWF files.

The code moves to use Air/Flex SDKs which were more or less equivalent to the tooling we nowadays get with Go/dotnet etc.

So while Flash was an amazing expression tool for learners/hobbyists and is amazing for gamejams since assets creation is part of the workflow, it did hold devs back at higher levels of production.

Many Flash devs moved to Haxe to continue creating on that platform and it managed to survive and thrive.

RyanOD

4 hours ago

Good luck with this project. Very exciting!

I used to teach high school computer science classes and we built web pages with this new thing called "CSS" (no more tables!) and games in Flash. Cutting edge work we did. Those were good times.

Dectanable

16 hours ago

This is exactly the Ardour model (and what Aseprite did before their license change). It's a highly viable way to sustain a niche FOSS desktop app in 2026. Make the repo open source, but put a price tag on the official, signed binaries on the main website. The professionals who need this to get work done will gladly pay a fee to avoid spending an afternoon fighting with Avalonia dependencies and build environments. The starving students and FOSS purists can clone the repo and run the build scripts themselves.

hu3

12 hours ago

Isn't it dangerous to give up all the code of a commercial software in the age of LLM?

Competition can clone the project in another language and lipstick it to look different.

Dectanable

11 hours ago

I suspect this overestimates the value of raw code. Anyone can use an LLM to reskin a project but they can't use it to replicate the trust that's built over time. The moment someone forks the code, they inherit a massive maintenance burden. They have to manually verify every change or risk shipping broken garbage. Most professionals will gladly pay a premium for a signed binary from a trusted maintainer rather than risk their workflow on a cut rate clone.

The real moat is not the source itself but the reputation. Setting the right price point is the actual challenge. You have to find that sweet spot where the price is high enough to fund development but low enough that the friction of paying is less than the friction of cloning the repo and building it yourself. If you price it like a corporate seat then people will fork it out of spite. The goal is to make the official binary the path of least resistance.

tw04

19 hours ago

It's not flash until it supports homestar runner.

Brajeshwar

17 hours ago

I personally believe that Flash has had its day and should die a Hero, rather than be resurrected to become a villain.

For being open-sourced, it was a pretty hot topic, especially at an interesting gathering inside Macromedia in the summer of 2005. Little did we know (or kinda) that it was going to take a different path with Adobe that Christmas.

Honestly, I think, Flash kinda died way before the iPhone was released.

squidbeak

8 hours ago

That different path was grim. Adobe wrecked or killed a lot of really good software after the buyout. Freehand and Fireworks were incredible for their day.

shevy-java

3 hours ago

Would be kind of cool. Flash 2.0. Or 10.0.

One may say "but but but HTML5!" - but many games or applications that used to exist, are mostly gone (not all but many). Flash was creative. Joecartoon was fun back in those days; the HTML version is kind of ... lifeless compared to it. Granted, a lot of the "old" internet was also different so it is hard to compare.

pjmlp

13 hours ago

This is a very great idea, Flash authoring was gold, and we already had a class of games in 2010, that 16 years later WebGL/WebGPU still fail to repeat, in available games and development tools.

kriro

11 hours ago

I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for. So my understanding is that most useful thing is probably the .fla importer. Wouldn't it make sense to focus on authoring-tooling (animator+developer coop) and the importer but "export" to standard web tech?

LeratoAustini

6 hours ago

Often in these threads people say that thing does exist (Adobe Animate) and it's all fine, prblmslvd. Rarely are those people who themselves used Flash extensively (although some probably exist). There's something missing though, something went wrong in the transition from Flash to Animate.

Part of the beauty of working with Flash, at least as a newcomer or someone who leaned more towards graphics/animation than code, came down to a couple of main points:

- Code was *inside* MovieClips (in Flash [almost] everything was a MovieClip, basically a timeline of frames). Code was attached to frames. When the playhead entered the frame, the script would run. Some of us who started as designers later leaned heavily into the code, but even those who were more comfortable sticking to the visual side of things would end up with a little grab bag full of scripts/snippets that they could just copy/paste into a frame and tweak without getting too bogged down with code. Even at a very simple level (if somethingsomething jump to frame 20, else loop back to frame one) this added a dimension of control and interactivity. Crucially, it was implemented well and very simple to understand.

- Everything was nested. MovieClips within MovieClips. Timelines within timelines. Simple behaviours could be stacked up and lead to natural-feeling complexity just due to this nesting.

Of course these things can be implemented today too, and other tools have and do implement versions of them. But there are often just 1 or 2 levels of abstraction too much, enough to put off some kinds of minds, or people at certain levels of experience. The thing about the Flash experience was that it all felt so fluid and intuitive. Direct. Learning it was fun.

Animate (as far as I remember) did keep those paradigms I mentioned. The timelines were still there, the drawing/animation tools too. But something somehow goes wrong in the translation to modern web tech. If it didn't, people would have just carried on using Flash, outputting JS/HTML instead of SWFs and nobody would have noticed.

A lot of the above is testament to Macromedia and linked to their other software, Director (similar to Flash but aimed more at desktop and 'interactive CDs'). They made software that was a joy to use. To give them their dues, Adobe pushed it further. Also their market dominance meant if you wanted to get into this web stuff and make cool things, Flash was *the* (only, really) way to do it. Which makes me think it may have been a time and place thing, which we won't get back. The modern web and range of options maybe makes it too diffuse, harder for something new to catch on. I hope I'm wrong.

As others have said here though, maybe stuff like MineCraft and Roblox are filling a similar conceptual gap for different generations and I'm just old and nostalgic.

bsimpson

3 hours ago

Flash was an onramp to UX engineering in a way that no current tool compares to.

You would start out drawing, get tired of the repetitive parts, and learn to automate them. Eventually, you end up with an FLA file that's just an asset library and a reference to a script.

Plus, it had the most intuitive vector editor I've ever used.

gs17

3 hours ago

> Code was inside MovieClips (in Flash [almost] everything was a MovieClip, basically a timeline of frames). Code was attached to frames.

It will be interesting to see if this project ends up working more like AS2 or AS3. AS2 gamedev was a real mess, but it sure was great for the simplest things.

lightedman

2 hours ago

"I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for."

True, it can, BUT what's lacking in the total arena is actual authoring and development toolchains, which is what Flash packaged all in one single bundle.

I'm not trying to install 4 or 5 different things, along with all of their dependencies, just to make some 200MB thing that could have been done in 20MB and one program with Flash.

tonnydourado

an hour ago

That's cool and all, but can we pass a law that this can ONLY be used for games? Because I remember the web when flash was everywhere. The games might have been fun, but everything else sucked humongous balls. Let's not get back to that.

noelfranthomas

a day ago

Don't know much about this space, just curious why build this when we have Rive, Spline, etc?

egypturnash

a day ago

Approximately a quarter century of editor UI muscle memory in everyone who's used Flash/Animate professionally. And a quarter century of people being used to the precise quirks of how Flash/Animate organizes the parts for a cartoon. And a quarter century of source files in a private format that can only be read and understood by Flash/Animate.

j45

14 hours ago

Reminded me of this list of cartoons cerated with Adobe Animate (formerly flash)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...

PaulDavisThe1st

21 hours ago

Who has authored anything they actually cared about using Flash in the last 15 years?

I don't know Animate - is it basically Flash Updated (I've read here that Adobe kept some elements of Flash in Animate, but it is unclear what).

Also, there are non-Flash players for .fla files (not editors, however).

egypturnash

19 hours ago

Animation studios. I know for a fact that Teen Titans was animated in Flash/Animate for its entire life, for instance; that’s directly from a former co-worker who was the animation director there. Lots of small productions, too. Animate is a lot cheaper than Toon Boom Harmony so tons of hobbyists use it.

The only difference between Animate and Flash is that SWF export got dropped eventually. And a haphazard smattering of new features got added.

You don’t play FLAs. You load them into the editor and output SWFs. Or various video formats. There are reverse engineered SWF players, most prominently Ruffle, but this is the first I’ve heard of anyone parsing FLA files.

FLA is the source format, it is to a SWF (or other video file exported from the editor) as a PSD is to a JPEG, or a .c file to an executable program compiled with all debug info off.

PaulDavisThe1st

16 hours ago

OK, my mistake on .fla vs. .swf ...

so the story is that Flash basically disappeared from the web, but evolved into a tool to do more general/extensive animation (Animate) that continues to be used today even though the output is (essentially) never .swf files? is that more or less correct?

egypturnash

6 hours ago

Somewhat.

Flash started life as a general animation tool with a highly-compressible vector output format and a browser plugin to play them. And maybe some basic interactivity, I never touched it until version 4, when it definitely had pretty rich interactive capabilities even though you had to program it all via repeatedly hitting a dropdown menu with all the commands in it. 5 was a big improvement on that front with freeform textboxes instead.

Flash kept being used for animation while also being used for an increasingly large amount of interactive stuff on the web and desktop. Adobe bought Macromedia pretty much entirely to get it and started trying to build a write-once, run-anywhere programming environment out of it. Like Electron, with all its faults of being a resource hog with the added bonus of regular security holes that only Adobe could fix at a snail's pace.

Apple decided not to let the SWF player onto the iPhone's app store, officially citing the resource hog and security hole problems. People stopped using Flash to make interactive experiences. YouTube stopped delivering video as a Flash player streaming Flash's streaming video format. People kept on using it to animate.

Some time after this Adobe renamed Flash to Animate. People kept on using it to animate. I didn't, I'd quit animating by then.

Some time after that Adobe removed the ability to export SWF files. People kept on using it to animate.

And some time after that Adobe said "fuck it we're done with this thing, we've barely been adding any new features for a while, we're gonna stop supporting it and turn off the auth servers". People who were still using it to animate screamed. Loudly. And Adobe turned around within a day and said "uh okay well I guess we'll, uh, keep the auth servers running and, uh, maintain a skeleton team to fix bugs for a while".

One month after that, some dude made a post on Newgrounds - one of the major online centers for Flash stuff, both during the 2000's boom and the modern day - about his clone of the Flash editor, that he claims is capable of reading Flash source files. And here we are.

tl;dr: pretty much yes except it was always an animation tool from the very first days

vishnuharidas

11 hours ago

There were many study materials that were made in Flash that came back alive with the help of Ruffle. Here's my fav list: https://astro.unl.edu/animationsLinks.html

outlore

17 hours ago

For someone like me who never got the opportunity to play with Flash, what are some modern equivalents? Is it Rive or Three.js? Or even Godot Web?

lukan

12 hours ago

Rive is closest sonce they have scripring support.

Threejs is a 3D graphic libary, something different. And godot web I never used but know of as a game engine, not a scriptable animation tool.

Pfeil

11 hours ago

As Godot is still very simple from the UX perspective, I'd prefer a set of tools to fully replicate the flash workflow instead of a dedicated app. Why reinvent the wheel? Stuff like keyframe animation editor etc is already there anyway and the engine is powerful enough. Just missing some tools, which could be easily added via the asset store.

redenter

8 hours ago

Sometimes I give presentations about how awesome the browser is. And everytime it reminds of all the capabilities we had back in the time. Easy animations, sound, 3D, augmented reality. Yea, we've got HTML5. But it took years to even come close to what we could do with Flash and Actionscript. Let alone how easy it was to create super cool animations.

JKCalhoun

6 hours ago

I apologize, I have spent all of about one minute considering this—but I would think Flash for 2026 might simply be a wrapper for HTML5, Canvas. Likely there is already a Javascript library out there that closely fits the bill.

KaiserPro

5 hours ago

flash player, yeah.

the IDE, not really. IF it were that easy, someone would have done it, because the flash IDE was a bit like vim, but for a wierd mix of visual and coding.

Like action script was object object oriented, but also kinda graph based, with time.

JKCalhoun

5 hours ago

Thanks.

pmarreck

9 hours ago

The first time I tried VideoWorks (which is what Flash was based on) on an early Macintosh was magical.

AndrewDucker

a day ago

This doesn't make it clear how people will run the end products.

Is it targeting the web? If not then it's not going to be useful for the same things as Flash was.

lbourdages

a day ago

Apart from the HTML5 export mentioned by another commenter, there exists Ruffle[1], a Rust + WASM reimplementation of Flash that can play swf files. It's used a lot on archive.org or on some websites like https://homestarrunner.com.

[1] https://ruffle.rs/

j45

14 hours ago

Ruffle looks pretty amazing.

hendersonreed

a day ago

It says:

> HTML5/Canvas export — Export to self-contained HTML5 with JavaScript Canvas 2D playback.

AndrewDucker

a day ago

Thank you, I missed that. Excellent news!

adampunk

a day ago

Call me crazy, but I think the folks at newgrounds will figure out what to do with this new flash.

nacs

a day ago

They may but note that this isn't an official Newgrounds project - this is just a user ("Bill") posting on his own Newgrounds blog that he has made this (its not Newgrounds' official blog).

adampunk

21 hours ago

I meant Newgrounds the community.

nickpsecurity

a day ago

I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial.

(Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.)

It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source.

I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?

cosmic_cheese

a day ago

Of the two, I think Adobe is most responsible for the decline of Flash. Even if smartphones had never entered the picture, laptops (where efficiency is important) were quickly becoming the most common form of PC, which would've eventually made Flash as it existed under Adobe untenable as well. The timeline was just accelerated by smartphones.

Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads of Adobe execs at the time. Yes, cleaning up the ball of mud that the Flash codebase had become and making it not so battery hungry wouldn't have been an easy task, but it would've futureproofed it significantly. Instead they decided to keep tacking on new features which ended up being entirely the wrong decision.

EDIT: The constant stream of zero-days certainly didn't help things either. A rewrite would've been worthwhile if only to get a handle on that.

Shebanator

a day ago

I think Apple is more responsible. One of Flash's chief benefits to the customers who paid the big bucks was that it 'just worked' everywhere. Once Apple stopped supporting Flash on the iPhone, that story was a lot less attractive.

The bugs were definitely Adobe's fault: as with most tech companies, they were far more interested in expanding the feature set than they were on fixing the bugs and stabilizing the platform.

raw_anon_1111

17 hours ago

This is a myth that needs to die.

The first iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor and could barely run Safari. If you scrolled to fast you would get a checkerbox while Safari was trying to catch up.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1732478

If it couldn’t run Safari with decent performance, how was it going to run Safari + Flash?

In fact when Flash finally did come to Android in 2010, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it barely ran then and killed the battery. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

Another anecdote is that the Motorola Xoom was supposed to to be the “iPad killer” because it could show you the “real web” with Flash.

But it came out without Flash because Adobe was late. You couldn’t even see the Xoom home page on the Xoom when it was first introduced because it required Flash.

Marazan

a day ago

Flash was not particularly battery hungry (My go to example when HTML 5 demos started coming out was rebuilding a HTML 5 demo that was using 100% of 1 core into a flash app that used 5%).

The reason it burned CPU cycles is that non-coders could make programs with it and they would produce the world's worst code doing so that "worked". The runtime itself was fine (efficiency wise, not all the other things).

j45

14 hours ago

It was probably hard to imagine the rise of laptops, internet, and Flash.

Flash itself was acquired via Macromedia as well.

Adobe's business is keeping technologies billing, and while Flash had it's flaws, the world was not ready for it to depart as soon as it did, because there was not a capable replacement available.

mikepurvis

a day ago

The "pay to sell your work" model is basically what Autodesk does to provide a version of Fusion that's free/accessible to the hobby 3d printing market while still protecting their b2b revenue.

I haven't looked in a while, but I believe there's music and audio production tools with similar approaches.

sfifs

20 hours ago

More impressively, Da Vinci Resolve is actually free with no restrictions. It is a high end video editor that film makers and professional film studios use (together with hardware and some paid features) from black magic design. Incredibly impressive. Affinity Photo and PhotoPea are also now free without restrictions.

ellg

21 hours ago

Whats the key difference between this and Rive? Especially now that Rive has full scripting support? Just curious more than anything, this does seem neat, especially the fla / xfl support (although for new things this doesnt seem like a huge killer feature)

intellix

16 hours ago

I think Rive is quickly becoming a good Flash replacement. They started with vector animation and timelines and then started adding components and coding etc.

theanonymousone

12 hours ago

Isn't that Flutter, i.e. an exotic language plus skipping DOM and drawing into a canvas?

bsimpson

3 hours ago

Flutter's authoring environment is a text editor. This is rebuilding the Flash authoring environment. They are not the same.

Nobody would author a kid's TV show in Flutter.

gs17

3 hours ago

No, when people say they miss "Flash", they mostly mean the editor.

thenthenthen

10 hours ago

Sadly the website is blocking me and also my vpn and also my 5g :(

jezzamon

20 hours ago

Seems fun, I would've loved for this to be a web app though. Given flash is so tied to the web, it would be fitting if the editor itself worked like that

immy

21 hours ago

Hype (YC W11) is for animators to produce HTML5 https://tumult.com/hype/

gaigalas

3 hours ago

Synfig though.

I know it doesn't export stuff or have interactive SWF things, but its whole 2D backbone is absolutely fantastic.

alcover

a day ago

May the Gods be with him. The nostalgia is very strong. Opening Flash and start a new project was an immense source of joy to me in the 00's.

agnishom

19 hours ago

I hope there is a feature that will let people export the artefacts to HTML5/JS.

ivanjermakov

12 hours ago

New Flash that can't run in the browser?

DonHopkins

11 hours ago

Marc Canter (founder of MacroMind/MacroMedia) one explained to me something revealing about the Director timeline (their original product before Flash, later integrated with the web browser as Shockwave):

It's essentially just a BASIC program rotated 90 degrees on its side, full of GOTOs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35652164

DonHopkins on April 21, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2...

I love all the amazing inspirational open source examples of generative procedural art and artificial life that Jared Tarbell published on his web site https://web.archive.org/web/20070202025610/http://levitated.... .

It opened my eyes to using Flash for procedural graphics and simulations, instead of just using timelines like a glorified graphical player piano, or like a BASIC program full of GOTO spaghetti rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise (which is how Macromedia founder Marc Canter described Director's Lingo, which also used frame numbers like BASIC line numbers).

Jared went on to do a lot more amazing stuff in Processing, co-founded Etsy, and built a toy factory!

https://www.artnome.com/news/2020/8/24/interview-with-genera...

https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/8/8/why-love-generative-ar...

https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/dusseldorf-2018/speakers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-9UWkgDf8

babypuncher

3 hours ago

replacing ActionScript with C# is a big win in my book, I will be watching this project with great interest.

ccppurcell

12 hours ago

The creativity and range of newgrounds content was mind blowing. The focus on fun as opposed to money making was really clear to me even as a kid. I've always had this little conspiracy theory that they killed flash because it was a threat, too easy for us to make our own culture and fun without a wealth extraction step in the middle. I know it's not true but it's just a weird little feeling I have.

agumonkey

a day ago

I wonder how much this would impact the react world

graypegg

a day ago

I don't think a modern flash would come after web app UI in the same way it once did. The niche this would fill would be in web games/interactive media I think.

markstos

21 hours ago

But will there be a browser plugin?

Dwedit

15 hours ago

There is the Ruffle browser extension which will restore Flash functionality to very old websites.

gethly

4 hours ago

with js canvas, i am surprised "flash" has not made a comeback ages ago. maybe it is not flash itself but the concept that it represents that we have passed over already.

phplovesong

11 hours ago

Haxe used to be the goto for Flash development. Maybe it could benefit a project like this too. I assume the target is AS5?

purplejacket

19 hours ago

Sorry, but can someone explain to me why Flash failed? Was it because Apple killed it, or other reasons? Because not open source? Too heavy? I never really got the story, or only got bits and pieces. I know a lot of people liked Flash.

raw_anon_1111

17 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257159

phendrenad2

19 hours ago

If this ships, it'll fulfill the "editor" piece of the flash equation. We're still missing the "runtime" though (if we want that old flash feeling). We'll probably need to strongarm Google into supporting it in Chrome, but that's not impossible (especially with AI-enabled coding eroding Google's moat).

gs17

3 hours ago

He's promising both HTML5 and SWF export, I don't think we really need a new "runtime". Ruffle is pretty close to full AVM2 support.

cynicalsecurity

a day ago

I feel young again.

mock-possum

21 hours ago

I just noticed in a dev stream for Cult Of The Lamb that they were using .fla files, what a throwback. I remember those days well!

Dwedit

15 hours ago

Mewgenics had assets created using Flash.

luxuryballs

15 hours ago

Now THIS is Claude Maxing! /anakin-podracer-meme

LoganDark

a day ago

Article title could use capitalizing Flash -- I thought it was about NAND at first.

functionmouse

20 hours ago

also thought it was NAND

Computer0

a day ago

I thought it was a camera accessory.

recursive

21 hours ago

I thought it was about inappropriate exposure in public while wearing a trenchcoat.

dmd

20 hours ago

God forbid anyone read past the title.

LoganDark

8 hours ago

I made the comment because, I did?

Retr0id

21 hours ago

It's impressive what people are able to vibecode these days!

latexr

21 hours ago

There’s no mention of any vibe coding in the post. Believe it or not, there are people who are still able to program by themselves.

roywiggins

21 hours ago

The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc. It's fine, it seems like a fun project to vibe code. Not sure about raising money on Patreon for it, but

latexr

20 hours ago

> The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc.

No, not “etc”. What else looks LLM-formatted about them? Because em-dashes are not enough to claim LLM.

Look, I get that you don’t care about proper typographic characters. You don’t have to, that’s fine. But many of us humans do.

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

And going from “LLM-formatted lists” (without any certainty) to vibe-coded project is a huge leap.

roywiggins

20 hours ago

They are very even. They are uniformly bolded. They're long and comprehensive. Most humans would have more variation in length unless they were working to a template or a style guide. A long catalogue of tools is also just way more detail than most people would put into an announcement post... but an LLM doesn't get tired and will barf all that out if you don't stop it.

A more robust and perhaps more vivid indicator are sentences like this: "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment."

"It's not X, it's Y" is an LLM tell. "It's a real Z" is another. Together? I'm going to conclude it's LLM generated to like a 90% certainty.

And as the sibling notes, the icons look like LLM SVG output. They're more mangled than even a rushed human would do.

Again, it's fine. If I had more time I'd love to try to vibecode a Flash clone.

Retr0id

19 hours ago

This isn't just some em-dashes, it's 126 of them in a single announcement post.

latexr

18 hours ago

The number is irrelevant. They are being used as separators on every list item, of course there are many. They could all be hyphens or arrows or colons and it would be exactly the same.

Look, I’m not saying this wasn’t written with an LLM. What I’m saying is that you don’t know that judging by the em-dashes alone.

Retr0id

17 hours ago

The number is relevant when the comment with the most em-dashes on HN (prior to 2023) had only 31. It's also not the only signal here.

roywiggins

17 hours ago

There are no colons or semicolons, anyone who really is a stickler for punctuation would not write exclusively with em-dashes.

roywiggins

19 hours ago

And not a single colon! Well, outside the smiley in the opening paragraph.

Just read the first two paragraphs and there's a full stylistic whiplash. I'd bet $100 that the first paragraph was human-written and the rest were almost fully Claude.

It's kind of creepy, like a human rolling their eyes back partway through a paragraph and suddenly speaking like Microsoft Bob.

casey2

18 hours ago

Nor any semicolons. Also full of nonsense. SWF fundamentally runs action script. The idea that you are going to have a AS3 to C# transpiler and a C# scripting engine AND export SWFs is incongruous. Again, "C# code executed when the playhead enters a keyframe." Now I'd love the oppurinity to learn, but ctrl+f c# here [1] shows 0 results. Though I'm sure I'm just misunderstanding the meaning here ( ≖_≖).

[1] https://open-flash.github.io/mirrors/swf-spec-19.pdf

gs17

3 hours ago

I'm skeptical about SWF export as well, but mostly because I'm not sure of the usecase for it in "flash if flash was built in 2026". I'd imagine even people opening old FLA files would rather have a modern non-plugin-requiring format (or a modern Projector equivalent) for output. Maybe for people still using Scaleform?

roywiggins

17 hours ago

only thing I can imagine is that they are building it with Unity, hence the C#. You can compile other languages to SWF bytecode, that's what Haxe is.

GaggiX

21 hours ago

I'm not the parent comment but if you look at the images they posted you can see that the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM (the SVGs).

latexr

20 hours ago

> the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM

They just look like bad rushed placeholder icons. And why does that immediately scream vibe-coded?

Retr0id

19 hours ago

Humans tend to use free icon collections or search the web for suitable images, rather than hand-writing SVG markup.

foresto

18 hours ago

Why even consider hand-written SVG when drawing tools like Inkscape exist?

Sure, there are occasions to write markup from scratch, but vanishingly few in my experience.

GaggiX

20 hours ago

They have the same same inconsistencies and incoherencies that I have encounter with LLMs creating SVG. Very different from what a human would have created (and I don't think you have to train your eyes to see it).

Sebguer

18 hours ago

if you truly can't clock that this is AI written, you probably need to desperately develop this skill as soon as possible, because everything outside of the first sentence is so very, very clearly slop.

latexr

8 hours ago

There are few types of people more annoying and less successful at changing anyone’s mind than those who are condescending while failing to understand the point being made.

Developing the skill to recognise when you’re being one is paramount to having fruitful conversations.

Unless, of course, one just cares about sounding right, not actually understanding the conversation and reaching a truthful conclusion.

Piraty

13 hours ago

there is electron already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087381