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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

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

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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-...

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