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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> It blows my mind that no one has made a tool like that in so long. […] Why has the pinnacle of ease of use in game creation been achieved and never replicated since?

FWIW it never went away¹ and targets standards-based runtimes these days. I'm sure there are many kids every month having the same kind of epiphanies with it!

That being said, because Adobe Animate is marketed as a tool for professionals rather than kids/enthusiasts, orders of magnitude more kids are having the kind of experience you had with Minecraft and Roblox instead.

¹ https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

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There is a small but major difference with Flash vs Minecraft and Roblox. Flash let you create something from scratch (or close to it). You aren't just modding a game, you are making a game or a cartoon. It was fantastic. Minecraft you are limited to the world of minecraft.

It could also run in its own standalone environment you could redistribute. IIRC you could even export something like an EXE and bundle the flash player with the installer.

> There is a small but major difference with Flash vs Minecraft and Roblox. Flash let you create something from scratch (or close to it). […] It was fantastic.

Absolutely fantastic, yes! Roblox does allow you to make a game from scratch — even though the primitives are generally less primitive and the constraints much different — but my point is just that if you're wondering where the spirit of dj_mc_merlin's experiences went, two places where it can be found in spades are in the Roblox and Minecraft communities. (Source: Am a parent experiencing this vicariously via my kids.)

>Roblox does allow you to make a game from scratch

...with the caveat that once Roblox (the company) folds, all the games will be gone.

...and that since Roblox changes the code all the time, you have no idea whether your game will look the same in a year. Or even run.

So yes, while I understand what you mean by the spiritual successor.. Roblox takes everything that made Flash bad (i.e. dependence on a clunky binary that one day may not be supported), and makes it worse.

Source: worked in Roblox when a new shiny material pack was rolled out, which replaced existing materials in existing games, messing up the look of games where materials were used creatively.

> ...with the caveat that once Roblox (the company) folds, all the games will be gone.

True, and I guess Flash is a useful lesson in that sense, although no platforms I jammed with as a kid are around either. It makes me wonder if Godot apps written today will work on the web 20 years from now.

The amount of commercial games that used (and still does actually) Flash is much higher than many could believe. Jackbox is probably one that many here have played in the past few years. Some games used it only for UI, like Borderlands.

World of tanks used Flash-based tech for game UIs as well.

PS At least that was the case 9-10 years ago when I was involved.

Scaleform - it came with the big world engine

Did it? I remember it was something Adobe, suspected Adobe Air.

Anyways, the client ui team definitely used Actionscript, which I had to read from time to time as a server-side dev.

For context, most of these games use(d) a Flash derivative called Scaleform for their GUIs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx — it's discontinued now but was indeed hugely popular.

A lot of games today use an HTML-powered UI library from Coherent Labs which can still be authored using Adobe Animate (i.e. what the Flash editor turned into): https://coherent-labs.com/

"FWIW it never went away¹ and targets standards-based runtimes these days. "

I just tried Adobe Animate recently and nothing worked out of the box or like flash used to.

I basically had to tinker, until even basic animations somewhat worked.

And I even have quite some experience with EaselJS, the target framework, but that didn't helped much.

The power of flash was the ease of use - that is gone.

You might like Svija — you can easily animate SVGs using Illustrator. It's not as powerful yet as Flash, but that's our goal. Disclaimer, I made it ;-)

You need to work on your self-promotion a bit more - both here ( :) ) and on your website:

https://svija.love/

I must admit, this isn't the most inspiring landing page for someone like me, who could be your exact target demographic (long-time Illy user and someone who likes to tinker with new web tools). I don't really 'get it' and (this is entirely personal) the design looks quite dated.

I'll bookmark it, share it and keep an eye on it though - Good luck!

Gorgeous home page. What does Svija do?

I remember when Minecraft was released a bunch of kids had their first Java experience due to the modding scene. Funnily enough I didn't do that since by then I was a C enthusiast and had an irrational hatred towards Java (oh how the turntables..). I wonder if that's still possible now that Microsoft has changed the codebase IIRC?

It's still possible for the java edition.

Definitely still possible, various modding frameworks like Forge or Spigot for Java Minecraft still thrive.

There are 2 editions of Minecraft. One, is the original one, now called Java edition. They definately still work on it, because despite not running well on Java > 8 for a long time, it now does. But afaik, they're still stuck on LWJGL 2.

The newer one written in C++ was first called "pocket edition" and targeted mobile. It's now called "Bedrock edition" and is also the version that has RTX support.

It'll be hard to move the modding community over to the Bedrock edition. I personally don't have any knowledge how limited modding is in the latter one.

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