Ruffle: WebAssembly Flash Player Emulator

Modern kongregate is a shell of its former self. The vast majority of the people I knew who made it great back in the day, including the founders, have long since departed.

Most purists insist on coding things in HTML/CSS and this stack is fairly unworkable for a good visual editor. Anyone who has built a robust visual editor ends up building one using canvas. (Figma is a great example)

Figma is great but it's not using classical tags to express fonts, tables, layout. Similarly Flash got it's layout and animation right... it just wasn't a web standard. A Canvas based editor/builder/WYSIWYG approach would be fantastic but it required us to move past HTML/CSS in the traditional and compatible model.

Said another way - if you try to use HTML/CSS to build a layout tool, you end up having to re-create browser layout and rendering engine.

Developers could build a design/tool similar to flash using canvas and I've actually prototyped elements of a tag/based design language that gets rid of the traditional HTML layout engine. It's significantly faster (1000x) to render/send over the wire but the moat of HTML/CSS is so large that I'm not sure there's interest in such approaches.

From my point of view the next thing that fills that role would be unity. Though a big part of unitys strength is not being bound to one platform (web) but instead being cross-platform (web, mobile app, desktop, ...). Iirc it has been used by artists for both "advanced" topics like movies as well as for small games.

We're building one: https://www.construct.net

Yes for the past few decades we've been dealing with HTML5 and related technologies. And while great for laying out simple websites, it pales in comparison to things like Flash in terms of building interactive games and animations. It's just not made to do that stuff and attempts to make it do stuff like that anyway tend to involve a lot of hackery, and workarounds for it's many limitations. Sometimes somebody manages something really nice with it but it seems to be non trivial to deliver good results consistently with it.

People frequently call out how wonderful "native" applications are compared to web applications are fundamentally talking about these limitations. Most web applications that also have mobile applications deliver a second rate and more mediocre experience on the web. With Canvas, WebGL, WASM, etc. a lot of that can now be addressed. Hence ruffle being able to deliver the experience we had decades ago when people routinely knocked out all sorts of things in Flash that are near impossible to do with HTML 5/JS without a lot of work.

All IOS and Android do is provide programmers a robust component library and a modern development experience around it; which is something web developers simply don't have and never have had. The built in browser components are pretty poor in comparison and the stuff people hack around that isn't a whole lot better typically. That's why people prefer native: richer components that work smoother and better. It's just nicer. And less work.

After two decades, I don't believe HTML5 + JS/CSS is actually fixable. There's a technical gap with "native" applications in terms of what it can be made to do. Luckily, with WASM, we don't have to. Ruffle is a nice example of that. Applications like Figma show that UIs in a browser can be fast, responsive, and slick. I see it as an early example of a new style application that mostly just opts out of the traditional web stack and its limitations.

WASM is only going to get better. Jetbrains actually silently released a WASM compiler for Kotlin recently that currently requires several experimental flags on Chrome to enable all the new features it needs for e.g. garbage collection and a few other things. Once that stuff stabilizes in browsers, there's going to be an influx of languages that don't do manual memory management and those languages will bring new tools and component frameworks. It will become basically a general purpose architecture you can target with pretty much anything that has a compiler. Doing DOM/CSS based work with that is going to be possible of course. But driving a "native" framework that bypasses that, probably makes more sense for a lot of things.

Adobe Animate, formerly known as Flash (the authoring software), supports HTML5. But since it doesn't support ActionScript with HTML5, only JavaScript, it might have lost a lot of its old momentum?

Newer generations aren't willing to put in the money for them.

They do exist, though.

I was a drive-by contributor of a few PRs to Ruffle out of love for old flash videos and one of my favourite users is The Internet Archive. It’s wonderful that this stuff is preserved in the active sense and that you no longer need to view YouTube/video renders of flash content to see all the old animations.

Obviously the vector graphics is both lightweight and scales beautiful, but somehow the loading screens and various bits of interactivity in primarily video content are almost as important to me at least.

This has saved parts of my childhood from the brink of extinction.

An issue is that only the old stuff works, because AS2 has been implemented. The newer (imo) creative stuff still doesn't work due to spotty AS3 support

Last time I looked at Ruffle, you had to sideload the extension. Looks like they're in the Stores now!

If my memory is correct, the entire Peppa Pig[1] TV Series was done in Flash. Many other popular TV series were done entirely in Flash. A good friend and fellow Flash champion, Chris Georgenes[2], did quite a lot of good animations during the early days of Flash.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppa_Pig

2. https://www.youtube.com/user/chrisgeorgenes

Charlie the Unicorn was done in Flash, that is at least the initial episode.

All of Stone Trek (a superb Star Trek TOS/Flintstones crossover parody – https://www.angelfire.com/fl/sapringer/STDOTCOM.html) was done in Flash.

All the work of Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES up until 2018 or so was in Flash (last version of their page before they switched to video files: https://web.archive.org/web/20180109044355/https://www.yhcha...).

> Video. YouTube. That's is the successor of Flash

Flash is interactive.

It can't be a full successor as YouTube doesn't do games.

Due to Web's failure to provide a proper alternative, everyone went to native mobile games.

This is mainly for keeping Internet history accessible. Flash had tons of problems, but a lot of amazing content was created on the platform. Now that it's gone, it's difficult or impossible to access the historical content.

I don't expect anyone to be making new flash content, but I'm really excited that all this work is going in to make sure we don't lose a really cool slice of Internet history

It's done in wasm, so we have a much bigger problem if it does.

No, WASM was specifically designed to allow running native-like code without any of the security issues that plugins like Flash had

The sheer amount of history and nostalgia that somewhere from 1 - 2 generations have tied up in flash is immense.

That history is worth preserving as much as possible, same as any other emulation/implementation. Not too mention however many "Business critical and you must use this flash app" applications there are, which is presumably non 0.

WASM bringing back Flash from the dead... Oh, the irony...