Comment by joeyjojo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joeyjojo | Hacker News Reader

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At its core the beauty of Flash was the extremely tight interplay between vector graphics in nested timelines, and the the programming environment. Many people compare Flash to Unity, but I really don't find the two all that comparable. You don't create your assets in Unity, and by the time those assets get into Unity you have lost most potential for dynamic behaviour. Flash's tight integration allowed for extremely fast iterations, and its hierarchal model was very flexible and allowed you to work very fast and creatively.

I'm surprised no one has had a good crack at re-creating the core functionality of Flash circa 2004, based on web tech, or something like Kha[1]. I've thought many times about starting such a project. I think the biggest challenges are developing a solid vector rendering runtime alongside the vector drawing tools, but just about everything else that ex-Flashers want can be reduced down to some pretty simple functionality. You could even forego all the cruft of the display list, the event model, etc, and just go with a simpler immediate mode renderer and I think you'd still be retaining those core components that made Flash special.

There are so many use cases (eLearning experience, Digital Signage, Touch Screen Kiosks) that Unity isn't particularly suitable for, and for which HTML/Javascript is just clunky, that such a tool could far better accomodate.

1. https://github.com/Kode/Kha.

Flash's vector drawing tools were the best in the business, and I think would be very difficult to clone. It was all based on doing boolean operations between bezier splines ("planar maps" I think is a good search term), which I believe (I did a small amount of research into this) has no generally-applicable analytic solution, so you sometimes have to fudge it with approximations. And Flash's tools did spaz out sometimes; occasionally your drawings would disappear or turn inside out or otherwise corrupt themselves. To be honest I think it's amazing that it was as stable as it was.

AFAIK this drawing model came from Flash's predecessor FutureSplash Animator. In fact, it might have already been there in SmartSketch. It really was the most innovative part of what became Flash, and it's not surprising to see all the commercial and open-source would-be-replacements opt for the easier-to-implement vector model used in stuff like Illustrator, where you just have a stack of separate shapes.

I think any Flash replacement that does vector graphics the easier way will have a hard time feeling as natural to create in as Flash did.

I'm not sure it is particularly desirable to clone Flash's vector drawing tools. They were certainly nice to use but also pretty glitchy as you say. Functionality like vector shape tweening, while nice to have, is also not that important IMO. If the tools optimised more for artists and animators, they would mostly be using graphics tablets for more illustrative graphics. Vector tools for UI could perhaps be more along the lines of what Sketch offers.

I reckon taking something like Godot's vector draw tools, and combining that with a Flash timeline/library, with a Javascript runtime, and you would win over all those animators that keep saying "why can't they just re-make Flash".

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