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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

Flash was absolutely atrocious from a technical standpoint.

It had to go. We had to adapt to better things.

It's not that webgl isn't capable. It's that the market for in browser flash like games has diminished when you can now play AAA games in the browser.

The market has changed. And sadly that doesn't mean every single person doesn't want them anymore. Just that the majority don't.

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What was atrocious about Flash? AS3 was a decent language. Better, more open tools were coming along. Insecurity and privacy concerns were addressed by properly sandboxing it. The biggest downside of Flash is that it wasn't an open web technology, but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established. All in all I don't see what all that fuss was about.

If WebGL and Flash competed on an equal footing the WebGL tools (including Flash-like, newbie-friendly frameworks) would be forced to get better than Flash.

I'm relieved I'm not the only one who thought AS3 was decent. It had the structure of Java without the absurdities of Java (first-class functions always come to mind immediately).

>but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established

An open alternative was available - HTML5 games were possible before Chrome started disabling Flash by default. Smartphones and social media really killed the market for online browser games - you really don't seem them anymore other than .io games. For anyone developing games, the return is far greater in the app store vs. online. Ad Revenue, if your name isn't Google/Facebook is a joke. I can't imagine why anyone would develop a browser game today when the App Store exists.

For artistic expression? I know plenty of Flash games that are not for-profit at all. Small interactive toys hosted on personal homepages.

Sure, but that ignores the reason why sites like Newgrounds had the massive library they did, you could get paid to put your content on newgrounds because you got a slice of the ad revenue. Massive games libraries like Newgrounds didn’t exist for solely for artistic expression

Still waiting on a freely available toolkit that allows for easy game creation with animated vector assets.

It was great from a development point of view, looking back it completely pushed the bounds of what we thought was possible and pioneered Alma y things which only later finally made it into the browser.

- Strongly typed language (js is still not there) - interestingly Microsoft killed Ecmascript 4 which was AS3, but are now championing typescript) - Canvas api is basically the flash.graphics api - Tweeting libraries - It didn't invent Ajax at all, but wow was it great at the times for dynamic data - 3d in your browser, and it was fast too for computers of its time - 2d / 3d transformations per object - custom font loading - reusable components

There was a lot about flash that was bad also, like compiling it was a chore, flex was a disaster, but it pushed the web forward so for that I am thankful

haxe was a great strongly-typed language that compiled to flash

> Flash was absolutely atrocious from a technical standpoint.

Flash the runtime? Flash the browser plugin? Flash the authoring environment?

Actionscript the language?

Not all of this stuff needed to be dumped. And not all of it has been replaced by something that can measure up to what was lost.

Some of

Your train of thought seems to have fallen into a black hole.

Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, regardless of someone else's train of thought. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

Wait, what? There's no attack there, it was just a funny way of mentioning they seemed to hit post before finishing a sentence - there's even a space after it like they planned on typing more words:

> Some of

Ok, I see now. It read like an insult but I see your point. Sorry!

Judging by the downvotes, I'd guess a lot of people misunderstood you.

Well, you made my day, at least =)

I think the prospects for an 11 year old hacker creating their first game with art, programmed behaviors etc, were much higher on Flash in 2006 than on WebGL in 2020.

you should probably be comparing Flash to the wide variety of engines and tools that can release to HTML5 rather than to raw WebGL

I disagree. Godot, Unity and Construct are all examples of tools that are both easier to learn and less costly in 2020 than Flash authoring tools were in 2006. They export HTML5/WebGL games that can be hosted for free in a few clicks on itch.io.

I think the prospects for an 11 year old hacker creating their first game with unity or godot are much higher than they were in 2006 with flash.

Look at the submissions for any itch.io 48 hour game jam and see how many of them are playable on the web, and created by people with very little experience. These prospects have moved to places where they're more accessible, not disappeared.

Here's an example where 1158 web entries were created in a weekend.

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/entries

For a jam with no prizes.

Thank you, I feel like Itch.io should be featured on the main thread on HN. I didn't know about its existence.

Yep, there hasn't been a better and easier time to make your own homemade games than today. People who deeply laments for the Flash era are simply not looking at the right places.

>Godot, Unity and Construct are all examples of tools that are both easier to learn and less costly in 2020 than Flash authoring tools were in 2006.

I don't think this is true at all. Making something in Flash and publishing it even back then was easier to me than to use Unity or Godot today. The latter two tools are much more powerful, but way more complex.

Also, you linked a game maker's toolkit gamejam. Of course they're going to be playable in the browser. I would consider that to he easier to use (or at least on par) than Flash.

Unity 2020 reminds me very much of the shockwave authoring tools.

Game Makers Toolkit is just the name of the youtube channel that hosts the jam. Not the name of a tool anyone used for it. Most people used one of the three tools I named. You're probably thinking of Constructor, which is the third one I named and is indeed easier than flash was. But I think recent Unity releases have surpassed my memory of the flash tooling I got to use. Tough to say because I don't have the old shockwave stuff around anymore to do a side by side comparison.

In most of the itch.io jams, browser games are strong. People still do downloads too, but the winners are almost always HTML5/WebGL playable. You just get drastically more plays (and therefore more ratings during the contest) if people don't have to install things.

I think a lot of the creativity you used to find on Kongregate really has gathered at itch.io.

>It had to go. We had to adapt to better things.

I'm sorry, I don't understand why. If someone develops a fun little game in Flash, and then I play it on Kongregate, what harm has been done?

Because flash was a plugin, not locked to that one little game. Once you install it, every website could use it. A lot was done, by browsers, over the years to try and give more control to the end-user, but Adobe didn't have too much interest. They were the dominate player, what other option was there!? Countless security vulnerabilities (https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...), siphoning personal data back to Adobe, etc. Looking today at what some companies are doing to harvest data, one could say they were just ahead of their time...

It was atrocious but there was much better tooling behind it that made it all make sense.

I just wish flash would have been stripped down into a web only version that was safe and only for things like flash games.

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