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Show HN: Flash replacement

its-near.me

99 points100-xyz72 comments

There are other flash "replacements", the one I like the most being Haxe [0] (transpiler to flash bytecode, javascript, and more) + OpenFL [1].

OpenFL replicates flash API [2], can work with Adobe Animate (formerly flash), and can use swf assets [3]. There are also converters from AS3 to Haxe, both available and not yet released (like the one used to migrate Forge of Empires [4]).

Haxe + OpenFL can export to flash player, HTML5 but also to native (desktop, mobile, consoles).

[0]: https://haxe.org [1]: https://openfl.org [2]: https://api.openfl.org/ [3]: https://www.openfl.org/learn/haxelib/tutorials/using-swf-ass... [4]: https://haxe.org/videos/conferences/haxeup-sessions-2019/dan...

I think this project is aimed more at Flash's authoring story. Haxe etc. are fine as frameworks, but what really made Flash popular and useful was the IDE.

Yes, and that's why I pointed out compatibility with Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash)

off topic - why do you have different usernames?

Sorry but I don't understand what you're asking

I'm dumb, it was the "5 minutes ago" and then "4 minutes ago"

Eh, maybe I was primed, but it got me too for a second. I scanned for the usernames wondering what might be the issue, and then I noticed there was two users with similar names, k_12 and k_8 - that must be the confusion!

.. nope, I'm just dumb too. Hah :)

Because your username ends in an underscore, my brain wants to associate the number from the timestamp with your username. So I really want to read "k_ 3 hours ago" as "k_3" for your username.

A lot of others here talk about authoring being what made Flash popular, but the other big part of it is the SWF format itself, which is highly efficient because of its compact encoding and ease of parsing. Those who played Flash games on computers over a decade ago may remember what I mean --- a tiny file provides high quality vector graphics and interactivity (and the ads, although I hear that these days they're just as obnoxious even without Flash...) HTML/CSS/JS doesn't even come close, although it feels like they're slowly reinventing bits of Flash with things like WASM.

Tbf, you can produce very similar output to .swf with the likes of WebGL, Canvas, SVGs, or a combination of those technologies. But the authoring tools fostered a community of developers who didn't see themselves as programmers at all.

They saw themselves as artists. And users benefited a great deal from that.

In fact, some aspects of the IDE were so good, that some 'developers' didn't even care to use it to develop programs. They produced cartoons instead. I think Craig McCracken's Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends was the most successful work of this kind.

In the place of that creativity now, we have cleaner code, to be sure, but we now also have an awfully boring technology war, and a load of unnecessarily complicated UI code.

I might miss Flash a whole lot less, if someone created a HTML5 authoring tool with the same toolkit the Flash IDE once had.

Isn't that what Adobe Animate still tries to be? It has HTML5 authoring support, and inherits from the Flash IDE directly (not just in spirit).

Arguably I think the saddest difference between Flash and Animate is the business model. In the old web, Flash was also partly so ubiquitous because it was sometimes so commonly pirated and passed around among aspiring developers/artists. In the Creative Cloud era it is a lot tougher to pirate, and can be a huge cost overhead for small or aspiring artists.

This. And this is also the reason why gaming on HTML5 hasn't picked up yet: there's no widely supported container format. I can't easily share/distribute/version HTML5 games like it was possible with SWF containers.

On top of that, it's also not easy to "watermark" HTML5 games. With SWF, you could create custom loaders and force ads and logos, both core revenue models for gaming websites.

Do you have an email address? Your app has a bug where it's popping up some kind of Laravel debugger, and it's exposing things...like where the web-world-readable file with all the collected emails is.

Thanks for the email tyingq. Appreciate it. Fixed it. I've been up almost all night and am groggy :-)

Under a different comment he said his email is "leisenming AT protonmail DOTcom"

Thanks...found that comment in his history. Email sent.

oh that file shouldnt be accesible anyway

I never used flash, but if this is what it was like I can see why flash was so popular. I'm loving it. Reminds of the time I spent doing WC3 maps when I was younger.

Don't listen to the naysayers, just keep at it. You got something here.

Thanks for your comment and encouragement. I am amazed at the negativity!

Negative comments make much stronger impressions than positive ones, alas, but when I survey this thread I don't see it as so negative (other than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21750978 which is a trollish post that we moderated).

Based on a lot of experience moderating these things, I think the issue was primarily your title. HN users react badly to grandiose claims. Also, the title "Flash replacement" is so large and generic that it was inevitably going to evoke comments about Flash replacements in general.

This is obviously a nice piece of work, and the best way to present it would have been with a more neutral title that depicted what you've built so far, and then a first comment in the thread giving the backstory of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it. That tends to seed discussion in a better direction. And in your comment you could certainly have explained that your intention is to work on a Flash replacement.

I had actually submitted with the title 'Flash is Dead? A replacement attempt version 3'

Ah I missed that. Yes, the submitted title was "Show HN: Flash is dead? Here is a replacement – version 3". Not sure that's less baity though. Arguably more, which is probably why a moderator edited it.

In some ways Unity is the new flash. It isn't pretty but it is accessible, it lets you prototype and throw together highly graphical creations with minimal technical knowledge, and then ship them on all platforms (including the web). And it's free.

The scripting interface and stored actions actually remind me more of Shockwave then Flash. I bring it up because while Shockwave was simpler to use in some ways, it also couldn't compete with Flash in terms of broader flexibility.

How about advising me on how to develop this further? I am looking for people like you :-) - those who like animations and have some experience in Shockwave / Flash. If interested please shoot me an email leisenming AT protonmail DOTcom

The advice I would give you is to maybe decide whether you want to build an animation tool or a game tool, and stick with that for now. Flash is still one of my favorite runtimes just because of how powerful it was, but there was a lot of complexity under the hood and isn't something I would recommend someone replicate as a side project.

If you want to focus on an animation tool, you'll want to think about things in terms of timelines, and how you can create independent animations with their own timelines and combine them into other timelines. A good example from your website would be the santa walk animation is one timeline, which is placed inside another timeline that moves from left to right, which is in another timeline that that controls the top level animation. Nothing needs to be scripted in this case, you just visually lay out when a timeline should start and stop and appear or disappear like any other video editor. Timelines can be played in parallel or one after the other etc...

On the other hand if you're thinking of creating a game engine you would focus creating a canvas that can programmatically add or remove VisualObjects (static images or animations that you could create in a simple timeline format) and then be able to provide other devs control over the x,y coords of where to position that visual object for every fps time interval that the game is running at. They would additionally need to be able to control which frame in the visual object to show so they can control forward, backward, stop, etc...

Sorry not much more I can provide for guidance but that would be a general start

Hardly a flash replacement.

OP here. I am looking for user advisors with some animation experience who can direct future developments (which features to develop further). Anyone interested please shoot me an email leisenming AT protonmail DOT com

Also, the Dilbert and related characters used in the demo are Scott Adams copyright and are used only for Demo purposes.

Hi, are you familiar with my library IvanK.js ? It has the "Flash interface", but for scripting.

I used it to port several of my flash games to the web: http://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=spritesheet

is this open source? doesn't seem to have any license info.

Not open source.

Being true to Flash? :)

Reminds me of SMIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronized_Multimedia_Integr...

This version has the following:

Library of images that you can click to use.

A simple script engine that uses simple english to create the animation (Action script equivalent)

eg:

Wait 2 seconds.

Car move to Point p1.

Uses sprites.

Created files can be exported and imported into a player.

Can also be included in your pages.

Might want to set APP_DEBUG = false for production.

Animations glitch in MS Edge.

Hi const-me, darkwater2, adamzeglin, Thanks for pointing out the error. I have found the bug, but this is not a quick fix one. Will include it in the next version. Thanks again for the heads up.

In Firefox (Ubuntu) as well

And Safari 11 too.

There was a server crash. Hopefully the glitch is now remedied?

Nothing changed, take a look: http://const.me/tmp/buggy-flash2.mp4

it was only a matter of time for something like this to appear. there was a reason flash was popular.

the problem with flash was not what it did, but how it was implemented, as proprietary browser extension.

doing the same with standard, browser supported javascript solves that problem.

getting rid of flash was a long, hard battle. it potentially would have been easier if alternatives like this appeared earlier.

This is not even close to the first Canvas-based animation tool, nor is it a valid replacement for Flash. It's an MVP at the level of tutorial code. A nice effort but don't oversell it.

Nice work. Can't help but miss flash seeing this though.

@100-xyz, The current page isn't working as expected. The images are all getting 404'd.

Hi siddartpai, By any chance are you reopening a previously created animation? If so, it may get 404'd. The server ran out of disk space and I had to delete a large number of animations.

If not, can you provide some more details: are you landing directly on the url https://its-near.me/flash2/editor? What OS/browser? Are you getting any other errors that may help me narrow things down?

Thanks

Nice. But still miss flash...

It is definitely something but not Flash replacement.

Well everything has to start somewhere.

You're database is crashing:

Illuminate \ Database \ QueryException (HY000) SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1114 The table 'errors' is full (SQL: insert into `errors` (`url`, `trace`, `updated_at`, `created_at`) values (2601:589:4a80:ba00:8590:6c18:79d6:3ffc: /flash2/editor, /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php LINENUM:624 /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php LINENUM:459 /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php LINENUM:411 /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Query/Processors/Processor.php LINENUM:32 /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Query/Builder.php LINENUM:2657 /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Builder.php LINENUM:1353 /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php LINENUM:839 /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php LINENUM:804 /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php LINENUM:667 /var/www/its-near/app/Exceptions/Handler.php LINENUM:54 /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Http/Kernel.php LINENUM:314 /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Http/Kernel.php LINENUM:118 /var/www/its-near/public/index.php LINENUM:55 , 2019-12-10 09:44:05, 2019-12-10 09:44:05))

>General error: 1114 The table 'errors' is full

That's pretty ironic...

Thanks for letting me know. Did not expect such heavy traffic.

You should probably put 'APP_ENV=production' and 'APP_DEBUG=false' to your laravels .env file.

That is what it is set as. Not clear what the situation is.

What does the traffic look like? Always fun to see.

I've got full disk usage instead :D

    file_put_contents(): Only 0 of 191 bytes written, possibly out of free disk space

Our startup builds a Flash replacement called Construct 3: https://www.construct.net

It's a web-based animation/game development IDE with support for JavaScript coding too.

Ok someone else mentioned their startup so I'll mention mine. My startup is a free cartoon maker:

https://www.superanimo.com

There's a ton of competitors in a similar space but I think mine is the best if you want to make cartoon stories quickly. It also exports to MP4/GIF and is free. It doesn't have scripting, but if you're just looking to drag/drop things on a canvas and animate them on a Flash-like timeline, SuperAnimo is great option.

Both these options are nice, but its a hard sell in big corps to put IP in the cloud.

I don't see any comparisons here.

Flash had a timeline based animation system with vector graphics, animations, easing, tweening, etc. Does Construct have anything like that?

Laravel seems to be crashing (not surprised). But isn't HTML5 a decent replacement for flash already?

Yes, but tooling is no where near as integrated an experience. Especially for animators and game creators.

Are you here just to make attacks on Laravel?

And you are here only to defend Laravel.

I think my two replies to your comments are the only ones I've made on the subject of laravel in my entire time of being on hacker news.

So no, I'm not here to defend laravel.

And if it wasn't bad enough that the site is using Laravel, that framework is also exposing a ton of sensitive data about the server. Perhaps disable dev mode? Anyway horrible choice of a framework.

> Anyway horrible choice of a framework.

I love unsubstantiated attacks on software.

This comment breaks not only the HN guidelines but also the Show HN-specific guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Would you please review them and stick to the rules when posting here? We're trying to prevent the thread from becoming toxic.

You went to the trouble of creating an account just for anti Laravel dribble. Please enlighten us.

I've had an account for years and I agree. I find it hard to justify using PHP for anything in 2019.

That's fine. The year is almost over and plenty of other developers can justify using PHP for many things in 2020.

Can say the same shit about any language.

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