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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

You can remember that there was a vibrant community of Flash game developers before the demise of Flash (EOL December 2020, the date of its “demise” is debatable). There’s not really a replacement for Flash and the community kind of fragmented.

That said, my impression is that a big chunk of talent from the Flash community went to work on HaXe. These are people who make games and want tools to make game development easier—as opposed to people who get excited about engines, architectural patterns, and programming languages. Just as a general impression, based on people I’ve recognized working with HaXe.

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Because it's not obvious until visiting the Heaps page and clicking through to About: Heaps is built on Haxe. So you're complimenting it, right? (Your comment reads like a non-sequitur criticism if one doesn't know what Heaps is).

That said, I agree that Haxe seems to attract a good crowd. I've also worked with some very competent people who primarily used HaxeFlixel.

I'm certainly not going to try to write comments assuming that people don't read linked page, that sounds tiring :-)

You don't have to click on "About Heaps", the landing page mentions HaXe inside the page <title>

I read the word "Haxe" on the front page and still had no idea what language Heaps was written in, because I didn't know Haxe existed until today.

Or click on the link to the source and see for yourself.

comment = "This is written in Haxe. " + comment;

Yes, that’s exactly the kind of thing which I think is a waste of time/effort.

Why? Its not hard and and very helpful.

And being helpful to readers is helpful for getting your point across.

I don't see the point in spending any effort helping out people who don't click the main link in an HN post.

You could equally say "It's not hard to click on the link at the top, to get context if there's a comment on HN you don't understand." It's a really low bar. Honestly, making HN a better place for people who aren't willing to click the link is just making HN a worse place for everyone else.

If I'm gonna burn time writing something clearly so anyone can understand it, it's gonna be on my blog, or answering questions on Stack Overflow, where that effort pays off. I know there are people on HN who dive straight into the comments without reading the article---I do that often enough---and it's not usually a big deal. However, if I don't understand a comment and haven't read the article, I'm not gonna blame the comment for that.

Interesting how you seem to think you are helping the community by not helping the community.

Its not a lot of work to have a quick line "HaXe (which Heaps is written in)...".

I ported my https://rpgplayground.com from AS3 to Haxe. It was the most sane technology to replace Flash, because it came with some platform independent benefits (as opposed to coding straight in JavaScript)

Not using Heaps but https://github.com/Kode/Kha.

And I think you are indeed correct in your assumption, since I know plenty of others who made that switch.

> as opposed to people who get excited about engines, architectural patterns, and programming languages.

I feel attacked.

Well the people who used to be excited about Flash certainly were not excited about any of the things mentioned above.

I don't understand why the Flash runtime is needed or why it matters that it went through a "demise". I was under the impression that you could just export Flash to HTML5 and javascript now? I'm not a flash developer so you'll have to forgive me if this is a dumb question.

(1) The rumors about HTML5 are not exactly true.

(2) There are good open-source Flash runtimes.

(3) The selling points of Flash were the no-installation experience and really good development tools. Both aspects are somehow lacking today, so the momentum is gone. Maybe someone will produce a great and accessible tool to create comparable HTML5 experiences, and that thing will become popular. But not yet.

What is missing in HTML5? You have WASM and websockets and the WebGL canvas built into every browser now, that seems to replicate just about everything Flash was known for doing? And just to clarify, I mean actually using the same old Flash development tools (apparently it's called Adobe Animate now?)

Or is the issue that the export-to-HTML5 functionality in those tools is just not fully done yet?

Isn't the scene isn't there any more, or is it?

Is Adobe Animate free (or easy to crack) so that an interested kid would just start with it and some tutorial, and could make something moderately cool in an afternoon?

I don't know, I was asking you!

>What is missing in HTML5?

- Audio (while in some respect capable) is a nightmare, the interface is unstable and breaks about once a year in my experience.

- You can't do pixel-perfect rendering (People keep promising that you can - the last time I checked was a few months ago - the DOM rendering architecture is deeply wretched when it comes to pixel-access).

- No nice pipeline for integrating vector animations/art into games like there was in flash. (SVG exists, and I've used it in games myself, but it's a niche thing to do). For most engines nowadays you're baking your SVG art to sprite, but flash kinda took care of it for you - its approach to vector art+animation was great/very very powerful, and Adobe Animate allows for HTML5 animation export nowadays, but that's somewhat short of a full interactive app pipeline.

- many of the html runtimes for new engines (Unity for instance) feel waay heavier/more sluggish in the browser than flash games. Pauses during loading/weird interactions with the mouse, having to click before you can see anything is common behaviour. And often they don't perform so well as the flash runtime.

- easy to make fancy + good-looking interactive UIs. There's a reason Scaleform was so beloved for UIs even outside of the browser ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx ).

It's not obviously better than flash still. Flash was a very stable platform for many many years - really good with backwards compatibility (IIRC as a result of literally having secretly several copies of the runtime for different versions), and ...well, for instance Godot HTML5 builds as of last week crashes in safari for everyone it seems.

Source: I made bunch of flash games, and have made a bunch of HTML5 games, and have made a HTML5 game engine myself. And flash was just a better experience as a user for so many things (except for abuses) and as a developer. Outside of writing javascript yourself, haxe is probably the best replacement for flash (as well as being good in its own right). I have been playing with heaps this week actually and it's yeah pretty nice. But flash had a nicer pipeline.

Flash was weaker at 3d stuff, though - even back when flash was a thing I still went for Unity/hand-rolled for 3d games.

Just my experience—the audio API seems relatively stable to me since the autoplay policies launched a couple years ago. I do remember it being a mess back when I started doing audio, and I remember needing libraries to paper over the differences between different browsers, but these days I don’t need that.

Agreed that the “export to browser” in Unity et al. is usually junk.

Can confirm all this. I used to work professionally as a Flash developer from 2005 to 2010. Since then I’ve been working using Unity and other game engines, but nothing else really comes close to the workflow of Flash. Sometimes it feels like tools in this area are moving backwards.

About the pixel perfect aspect: were the people that made the flash games/experiences that I played just bad, or did flash also struggle with pixel perfect placement. I remember both a lot of nearest neighbour flickering and a bunch of seems appearing/disappearing.

I'm not sure if I agree with all of this. People forget flash kinda sucked. One of the most significant ways in which flash sucked was the performance. Imo, the most famous flash game of all time is Binding of Isaac, which basically couldn't achieve a respectable, consistent frame rate even on the most powerful rigs. It's native rewrite, Rebirth, never had performance issues.

>You can't do pixel-perfect rendering

Sure you can, with canvas, and if you want to have absolutely perfect control, there's WebGL (and nice stuff like PixiJS)

>No nice pipeline for integrating vector animations/art into games

You can render SVG sprites into bitmaps, and use them in WebGL or canvas, as you mentioned, you needed to do this too in flash as well if you wanted decent performance.

>easy to make fancy + good-looking interactive UIs

If I remember correctly, most fancy game UIs were built with some framework, like flixel, which used low-level drawing primitives and built-up the UI from scratch. Alternatively you could use the full power of HTML+Js frameworks to build arbitrarily complex UIs and overlay them on your game scene.

>many of the html runtimes for new engines (Unity for instance) feel waay heavier/more sluggish in the browser

True, but they are meant to be, and meant for bigger games than flash/html5+js is. But for modern engines, HTML5 export sucks, there's no doubt about that. But that's a failure of execution, not technology. I remember Epic citadel a decade ago, which ran by compiling C++ to js with emscripten, and it worked pretty well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV32Cs_CMqo

Also, there' a few Electron based indie games, most notably CrossCode, which is a fun, and technically pretty well executed game, and by the devs' own admission, it's built on pretty ancient tech.

>Audio (while in some respect capable) is a nightmare, the interface is unstable and breaks about once a year in my experience.

I don't know if I understand, something like flash would probably do its own mixing and only use AudioBufferSourceNode. That seems to be what Emscripten uses and I haven't heard about any major breakages there.

>You can't do pixel-perfect rendering (People keep promising that you can - the last time I checked was a few months ago - the DOM rendering architecture is deeply wretched when it comes to pixel-access).

You can though, with WebGL. The point is you avoid the DOM just like what the Flash VM did.

>and Adobe Animate allows for HTML5 animation export nowadays, but that's somewhat short of a full interactive app pipeline.

This is what I'm asking though. How is it different? It seems the pipeline is completely the same except instead of exporting to SWF you export to HTML5.

> And often they don't perform so well as the flash runtime.

I'm actually asking why can't you still use a port of the flash runtime that's done in WASM. I think you misunderstand my question. If the compatibility was there you could also get Scaleform to work with no changes.

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