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> There is no free equivalent available targeting HTML/JS

I commented to the same effect elsewhere, but I would take this a step farther. There is no alternative, free or paid, Open Source or proprietary, targeting any platform (even just iOS or Windows) that is as good as Flash was at rapid prototyping and accessible game creation.

To me, the focus on the web is really frustrating. Unity is not as good as Flash was for rapid prototyping. Gamemaker is not as good as Flash was for animation. It's not the platform's problem that literally no one has found a way to merge animation, artwork, and programming in the same way as Flash did.

It's not that there's something awful about the web and that it ruined the ability to make that tool. Literally no one for any platform for any motivation has ever replicated Flash even just as a content creation tool.

So why are we talking about the web at this point? WebGL, Canvas, and WASM are powerful enough to replace Flash. That is not the issue anymore. I think when people touted the web as a replacement for Flash, there was an expectation that some company or Open Source initiative somewhere was going to make effective tools and that never happened. And instead of talking about the fact that the entire games industry has been unable to replicate Flash, we're attacking the Open web instead.

I agree that Flash was prematurely killed online, I agree that HTML advocates were too dismissive about the problems. But we are far past that point. The web kept its end of the bargain, the APIs exist, but nobody else built the necessary tools. We should be talking game engines right now, not the web.

the flash/macromedia creative suite is so good, and even tho it wasn't free, it was popular (with plenty of pirated copies obviously).

If your thesis is true that the web/html api could've been just as good as flash had there just been a suite of tools to create the content, then why doesn't one already exist? I think the true underlying issue is that the expectations of the users have grown - "simple" animations that can be created in the flash suite and replicated using a html suite cannot satisfy users any more.

> then why doesn't one already exist?

I think that's the big question that these threads need to be asking, because it's not just that it doesn't exist for the web. It doesn't exist anywhere for any platform.

Coming in and just saying, 'HTML5 can't replicate Flash' -- not only is that inaccurate, it's unhelpful. We need to ask what modern developers need and why we seem to be unable to supply that. What are our modern tools missing? Would Flash still be relevant for indie development today? Do we need something more extensive or powerful? Do we need to rethink developer workflows? Is the problem funding, or finding a way to monetize, or is it a community problem where we just can't get indie devs to standardize on one tool?

Every thread where people complain about the loss of Flash could be a really productive conversation about what a modern animation engine would need and how we could build one. But instead it's just people re-litigating a 15-20 year old fight for no reason.

Because the APIs are there. Any company could build an animation engine today that output to any low-level language: C, Rust, whatever. And the output could be compiled to WASM and the pixel buffers could be rendered to a canvas. We could even do smart updates and partial re-renders and cache large operations on separate canvases. Or that frame compilation could happen behind the scenes in WASM and the image data could be spit out as a single array of pixels. We could do all of the optimizations we need.

But that tool doesn't exist. It doesn't exist for the web, or for iOS, or for Android, or for Windows, or for any modern console. Why? That's the productive question to ask, that's the question that will actually help us make progress towards replacing Flash. The only thing the web can provide is APIs and technology, at some point game devs need to stop complaining about the web in specific and start asking why our game dev tools in general aren't up to snuff.

>But that tool doesn't exist. It doesn't exist for the web, or for iOS, or for Android, or for Windows, or for any modern console. Why?

My 2 cents: the market for animation on the web collapsed due to changes in Youtube's algorithm, and Flash itself has been more or less superseded by game engines that can export to the web, 3d tools like MMD and game mods.

But Flash collapsed before YouTube really became popular. It was the iPhone and the iPad coming out without flash support that really killed flash. YouTube didn’t have anything to do with it. If anything, YouTube got popular because of the death of Flash - it filled the void.

OK fair enough, although there was a big animation community on Youtube and it did get wiped by the algorithm, I'm probably misremembering the timeline.

In my opinion, someone just needs to rebuild Flash, but based on modern web standards. We don’t need “productive conversations”. We already had the ideal tool - Flash. Just make a feature by feature duplication of what Flash was.

That already exists - it's flash's creative suite from adobe, and it exports to html5/canvas. Now of course, it's harder to pirate since it's a subscription service now-a-days (like photoshop).

I don't think the problem is a lack of tools. It's more fundamental.

Adobe Animate claims to be this, but it's really, really not in practice.

> I don't think the problem is a lack of tools. It's more fundamental.

It's very hard for us to admit that something could just be a string of pure luck, like the brief moment where Flash, Newgrounds, and fighting stickmen were at the cultural epicenter.

In fact, we as engineers seem biased in the complete opposite direction when it comes to understanding social phenomena. Technical advantages and disadvantages do very little to explain the world and why people do things and why things catch on.

Whether or not HTML5 replicates "what mattered" about Flash does nothing to understand how Flash fell out of cultural hegemony because it's not what mattered about Flash. HTML5 can't do anything to roll back the clock and recreate the perfect storm responsible Flash culture.

I think Flash, like Javascript and Wordpress, was simply at the right place at the right time to take advantage of unique characteristics of the early internet that are very hard to quantify with confidence much less replicate or predict.

>Why? That's the productive question to ask, that's the question that will actually help us make progress towards replacing Flash.

There are basically two camp of people. Those who use Flash, and stating HTML5 not as good as Flash are coming from a user, designer, creative point of view. Its ease of use, from coding to authoring. The simplicity of getting something done. Like HyperCard.

The other camp are programmers, software and web developers who just saw Flash and HTML from a technical perspective. Of course you can replicate 99% of Flash capability, but that was not the point. Since the first camp sort of rely on the 2nd camp to provide tooling. And the 2nd camp doesn't understand or care what they are missing. Nothing is being done.

Classic Software consultant and development problem.

Again, if Flash no longer provide any value to Adobe, may be they could open source it?

I used Flash, and I'm a programmer.

HTML5 is fine. The problem is the lack of tooling. That's what's letting me down as a user, designer, creative person. Not the web, the lack of tools.

But HTML5 can not fix that problem. Only the games industry can fix that problem. HTML5 is never going to be a game creation IDE, it's just an API and a set of technologies. Companies like Epic, Adobe, Unity, etc... have to step in and develop game IDEs that are comparable to Flash.

And they just haven't. I don't know why they haven't, people should ask them that question.

There's this idea that web advocates don't understand that web tooling for games is bad, and that's just not the case. As web advocates we do understand the problem, but Mozilla is not in a realistic position to build everyone a game engine. It's not something that browser-manufactures can do. It's something the games industry has to decide to tackle. Calling out the web is counterproductive, we are doing everything that we can do to help with replacing Flash.

> Again, if Flash no longer provide any value to Adobe, may be they could open source it?

That would be great, but I wouldn't bet on it. The hope was originally that Adobe would migrate Flash to HTML5 canvas output. They never did until Flash was mostly dead, and from everything I've heard their new engines are kind of terrible to work with anyway.

The secondary hope was that they'd Open Source Flash, or at least help with emulating SWFs so people could continue to use old versions of Flash to publish to the web. That never happened either because... I don't know why. Maybe licensing issues, maybe Adobe just doesn't care about anyone in their user communities at all.

To see people giving tearful salutes to a company that literally just sat there and watched its product rot rather than do anything at all to help the community... it's just very frustrating. I was a Flash developer too. But I'm not mad at Open web advocates, there are plenty of other people/businesses for me to be mad at.

Probably the same reason that Adobe let flash die on the vine-making a robust flash like authoring tool and targeting broke teenagers as your market isn't profitable.

> What these people are really lamenting is the ease of authorship that Flash provided to non-technical users.

Yes, that's what we've been saying. And it was HTML5 boosters who said that when Flash died nothing of value would be lost, I'm pointing out their comparing a platform & authoring tools with a narrow tech stack.

And the Flash Authorship tools were absolutely NOT free. You had to pay hundreds of dollars for the Flash IDE (not that it stopped people from pirating it).

FlashDevelop was free, but that was not an Adobe product.

I think the point you're missing is that Flash supported an entire ecosystem. Because it was easy to distribute the files (and steal them from other portals), there were tons of game portals out there competing for traffic. This competition created incentives to do special deals (add my logo and a link for $2k before you launch). I released several games sponsored by Kongregate which went viral and got distributed to thousands of portals. Higher-tier portals would reach out and purchase a site-locked version without their competitor's branding for an additional $300-$1k depending on if they had their own API for high scores and such. Because there were SO many portals, it wasn't as winner-take-all as the modern mobile marketplaces.

I could easily recreate my games in javascript today (or swift. or C#/unity. or whatever) from an "is this possible" point of view, but I think it's much harder to make money today. You could argue that's more due to the competition level and number of creators than Flash, but I think the siloed app stores are awful for the long tail and smaller developers.

That ramp-up of competition kind of happened even before Flash was dead-dead, though--the big portals existed in a time before Facebook games (which suck now but were amazing for awhile) and mobile games. It's wild now to see my kids (5 & 8) play a lot of online games on modern much-shittier-than-Kongregate-and-Newgrounds portals, but there's basically a short time period between "old enough to play games" and "old enough for their own phone or steam account" that they're in right now, and I suspect that audience isn't big enough to support the kind of innovation we saw before Facebook games (which were also made with Flash, for the most part!).

The Flash authorship tools were free because 3rd party authors creating Flash content were assisting in the promulgation of a proprietary platform that was gradually replacing open web standards.

What? The Flash authorship tools were definitely not free. I remember Macromedia Studio used to cost nearly a grand. They were widely spread because, like Photoshop, Macromedia/Adobe didn't bother cracking down on piracy.

This raises the question - what paid HTML tools are available today which are as easy to use and have similar capabilities as the old Adobe tools?

none - flash is still the only tool i know of that had the scene model which allowed you to have animations within objects in the scene. It was a very easy model to use, but is powerful.

Flash can export to html/canvas iirc. I dont think the lack of tools is the reason why html5 didn't replace flash in terms of output of new games/animations.

There are actually a number of tools that allow easy HTML5 authorship for non-technical users. We make one too - Construct 3 [1].

I think one reason Flash had such prominence was their effective monopoly. Remember when you had to install a browser plugin to get Flash? They reached ubiquity, but it was basically an impossible job for anyone else to achieve. So if you wanted Flash-like content, Flash was your only real option.

Since HTML5 is based on open technologies, there are lots of competing tools on the market doing exactly what some people apparently lament are no longer available. They're out there if you look, and arguably it's a healthier marketplace since there's real competition - although the choice is more complicated now, since there isn't that one option everyone uses.

[1] https://www.construct.net

> that was gradually replacing open web standards.

Flash was offering things that the normal web couldn't do (like video). It took a long time for the web to catch up nominally, and it's still lacking

Macromedia would still be selling Flash if there was an open standard that replaced swf and was equally performant

After all the web is now full of SPAs which are a very bloated version of flash pages with much less functionality

> The Flash authorship tools were free

Flash MX was a paid tool.

tldr there is no replacement