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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Didn't we already do this experiment with Flash? Macromedia/Adobe made the player free, and charged for tools. In the same way, it seems that Rive wants to open source the player and then charge for the editor. Maybe its a bit different since Rive seems targeted at game devs using other platforms like Unity and Unreal - presumably to embed things like cinematics? But then of course you have this (OSS) player, which implies Rive also wants to own the whole experience. Hence the reference to Flash.

It's not really my area, but best of luck to you!

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Flash was great, someone creating a better Flash has been long overdue. I think Rive looks like a great attempt at a new Flash.

The Flash tooling is still around, actually. It's now called Adobe Animate and targets existing web standards.

Did that pivot ever really work?

I know Adobe renamed Flash, and I haven't talked to anyone in the cartoons space since then, but it seems like innovation/attention to the Flash toolchain died with the player.

We used to use a tool called flump to rasterize flash animations for iOS games (I ended up writing our runtime and renderer in Unity and later SpriteKit to consume that data). I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to build an exporter from Flash (the program, now Animate) to this runtime if the features are fairly compatible.

Flump was a fantastic tool in the early mobile days when there wasn’t really anything else to create quality 2D animations. I also wrote a few Flump runtimes and have since written a few more runtimes utilizing the Export as Texture Atlas feature in Adobe Animate. If the goal is to just render the rasterized output from the exported texture atlas animations it should be pretty simple to create a converter.

If the goal is to render vectors I imagine it is more complicated due to quirks in how Macromedia triangulated their vectors, but someone has done it before http://blog.bwhiting.co.uk/index.php/2014/03/17/introducing-...

That's a really great comparison, and great point that this is just the renderer. I'm happy to see it released under an MIT license, but I wonder how many OSS tools there are to build compatible content, and how easy it would be to build exporters from other formats in existing tools.

Our entire runtime and format are open-source. https://rive.app/runtimes We charge for the editor, but everything else is open.

and think of how much better flash could have been if the player and file format were open, and third party tools didn't have to reverse engineer them!

There was Scaleform, and it looks like it's been discontinued along with Flash - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx

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