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Comment by bugmen0t | Hacker News Reader

Surprising there is no mention of the wasm/rust-implemented flash player https://ruffle.rs/ in the article.

I recently used Ruffle [2] to get some Flash applications [0] working in the Pro version of my web browser [1], which is specifically designed to be remotely accessible and embeddable in an iframe. To run Ruffle on pages that require it, I utilize the Chrome Remote Debugging Protocol [3], similar to how a Chrome extension content script operates. Ruffle itself relies on WebAssembly and runs smoothly. It's been exciting to see the audio and video functionality of these old games restored and being able to play them again.

[0]: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Test-SWFs

[1]: https://github.com/crisdosyago/BrowserBox#bb-pro-vs-regular-...

[2]: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

[3]: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/tot/

"oldest ones, including the original Haplands, are AS2 Flash, which runs pretty well thanks to Ruffle."

They did mention it. They use it for some of their older games but it seems like Ruffle isn't yet feature-complete with Action Script 3 and thus cannot be used to run their newer games

It sounds like adding those features to ruffle would have been three order of magnitudes easier than writing a flash player from scratch

I understand contributing to OSS is a pain (I often end up with half implemented features in my own branch and never manage to merge them upstream) but he could have saved himself some trouble.

Ruffle plays compiled Flash swf files

The tool that the author made reads Flash fla files and exports data from that.

Swf files contain binary data. The ActionScript code has been compiled into bytecode. The vector data is probably also represented in binary format.

Fla files, as pointed out in the OP blog post, contain XML data.

It sounds like OP is doing something quite different from what Ruffle does.

Ruffle tries to be a player for swf files.

OP wanted to export data from Fla XML to other formats, so that he could build executable games.

It seems to me like a very different skillset required to reimplement a runtime like the SWF player vs hacking together an alternative FLA compiler that's just good enough to work on your own games.

Ruffle still doesn't support Actionscript 3.0, I suspect the task is not that straightforward.

While Ruffle's AS3 support is still lacking a lot of features, since a couple months ago it's been able to play some simple games that require it. The build used on author's site is from 2021, and I just checked that the latest build is able to play several more AS3 games hosted there.

(note: I'm a Ruffle dev)

I'm waiting for it to develop further, I'm very excited, especially because I still play Crystal Saga everyday, I don't know why, but it's got something that I haven't been able to find in any other games.

But sadly, I haven't been able to make Crystal Saga work using Ruffle

MMOs are pretty much the last game Ruffle or any in-browser emulator will get to support - not just because it's likely some of the most complex piece of code you can find, but also because MMOs are likely to use sockets, which AFAIK can't really be accessed in modern browsers at all.

That's great news! I've been meaning to write a cron script or something to fetch the latest Ruffle every week or so, so thanks for reminding me to do that. Thanks also for your work on Ruffle, it's really great.

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