Ruffle: 2023 in Review | Hacker News Reader

Ruffle: 2023 in Review

ruffle.rs

152 pointshexmiles21 comments

Incredible achievements. First time I used Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/ruffle

Honestly, the progress looks very impressive.

We still need something as intuitive as Flash for developing interactive content for the web.

I was barely 11 or 12, and it was amazing how quickly i went from drawing shapes to animating them to making them interactive with simple logic back in that summer.

Fast forward to now, not sure what we have, that comes close to that level of ease of use. Maybe some game engine that exports to html canvas/webgl?

I know that it's not the web frameworks and the fragile wsiwyg editors that target them.

We have partitioned the developer experience too far. We need a full stack stack.

The Flash authoring tool still exists, it was just renamed to Adobe Animate. It supports Canvas and WebGL.

The SWF format itself was also nice though. It's just one file that you can easily host or share anywhere. One use case that was really cool was how VKontakte (the Russian Facebook) had Flash apps. You didn't need a server to build an app like you do now, you just uploaded the SWF in the app settings and that was it.

I did try Adobe animate a couple of years ago and for some reason it felt a lot more clunky than Flash 5 i remember. Maybe the feature creep. Maybe the Adobe pricing structure. Not sure...

I think the loss of these tools has less to do with the death of flash, and more to do with the decline of the genre of "internet ugly" cartoons and free games as a whole. We have technology in the browser that is just as powerful and just as portable (case in point canvas), but we rarely see it being used in the same way to build the same variety of browser games and experiments.

I know a lot of people talk about the tooling not being there, but I'm not sure that's the case. Web development is a very open field, there is a ton of documentation, and a lot of easy ways to get started. Just open developer tools in your browser and you can write Javascript - things were never the easy with flash. There's also plenty of free tools for building things with, from game libraries to animation editors, to IDEs.

I think the bigger issue is that the audience isn't there in the same way. Partly that's culturally - part of the glory of that era of internet was proper reveling in crappy animation, gross-out humour, and absurdism. But that's no longer part of the cultural zeitgeist in the same way. As a result, the cultural force behind a lot of the early examples of the medium has died out.

But also, and I think more importantly, the platforms have evolved. Animation still exists, but it looks different and tends to be hosted on YouTube or TikTok, because that's where people are. Games still exist, but now they're usually mobile games, because it turns out people like playing these games on the loo, and mobile browsers suck. And both of these platforms have their own advantages for creators: they both make monetisation easier, and they make it harder for other people to steal your work - both things that flash creators spent a lot of time worrying about.

Even as flash was dying, if it was culturally necessary to maintain, people would have done so. We had the tools and we had the technology. In fact, people did - I remember people pushing "HTML5 games" for a while, but they were never any good because no one had been making good news games for a couple of years at that point. In the end, flash died for much the same reason that non-threaded forums and IRC died - the cultural forces that used them either died themselves, or switched to other systems.

> I know a lot of people talk about the tooling not being there, but I'm not sure that's the case. Web development is a very open field, there is a ton of documentation, and a lot of easy ways to get started. Just open developer tools in your browser and you can write Javascript - things were never the easy with flash. There's also plenty of free tools for building things with, from game libraries to animation editors, to IDEs.

But a lot of JavaScript/web tooling is basically about making "web applications out of what once was a document framework".

Flash was more of a gateway to creative interactive content than "webapps"/games imo. MS paint -> vector art -> animation with sounds -> interactive content was that really good creative path way. Action script didn't mean maintainable code. It just meant you could easily add simple actions to various events. I honestly believe that tool alone gave birth to a lot of the cultural forces you mention.

I remember cartoon network and movie studios releasing lot more interactive websites for their content in Flash.

But you're right, a lot more content gets consumed on mobile / tablets these days than desktops, and i guess people/businesses are optimizing for that.

> I remember cartoon network and movie studios releasing lot more interactive websites for their content in Flash.

In fact, quite a few animated TV shows and films were themselves created using Adobe Flash, including new shows in 2024:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_films

Maybe Flutter, it uses the canvas. If you want to distribute it as a binary, it will be able to compile to WASM(-GC) in the near future.

That's just a developer library. There are so many of them... Pixijs, D3 based ones etc ...

The authoring tool that flash had was like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kHOQkooK0qY . 2 tutorials like this and you'd have everything you need to make a multimedia website

Roblox games

Sometimes I wonder, what amount of money would Adobe accept to sell Flash Player and Flash Professional.

That company could then open source it. I even thought of the name of the company already, it should be called Macromedia.

Really impressive work! Ruffle was already fully featured and usable for my limited purposes. I spent a couple days thinking about and finding old flash games I played in school and managed to acquire most of them. Now they live in a folder alongside Ruffle which makes them easy to play and demo offline anytime. Thanks, Ruffle team.

I don't think there's an equivalent to flash even today. The design tools and the model behind is still probably the best way to create moderately interactive content.

From ease of development standpoint? Because featureset it seems like JavaScript and or WASM has absolutely filled that neiche. There were web apps and games that were never before feasible with flash.

Yes, the frame by frame approach and focus on vector graphical animations made people have a lot of fun instantly ( together with the great authoring tools).

I'm currently thinking about a project that requires "regular people" be able to create interactive content for the web, and honestly i don't see any alternative.

Where it started to go bad is when people tried designing full data-oriented websites with flash and air, but i believe it remains great for its core purpose.

Great work, getting Flash back into the browser.

Is there a good way of collecting information on currently missing Language / API calls in pages or files that have Flash elements not presently supported by Ruffle?

It might make it more useful to know what makes one off well loved flash items not currently work, or which elements are commonly used but missing support.

There is a compatability page on the project website

https://ruffle.rs/compatibility

Edit: Rereading your question, I think you probably meant to see what is missing in a specific swf. That would be quite nice.

I never expected them to go that far, amazing!

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