Building a new Flash

This sounds like a "is there anything you can do in C++ or Javascript that you couldn't do in Brainfuck?".

Flash was a complete authoring environment. Yes, you can replicste the output in JS+CSS (or more likely JS+Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU), but at what cost and with how much effort?

You can turn the curves into polygons, or render them to textures. Ruffle, I recall, makes everything polygons (so it's a little chunky if you zoom in?), and Super Meat Boy rendered everything to textures.

I'm not sure what the actual flash player did, which seems to have pretty decent performance relative to Ruffle in my testing.

Maybe they have some proprietary technique for rendering curves quickly on a GPU? (I read a paper on rendering curves, and there's OpenVG, which I think came later and nobody uses?)

probably not. The only difference is that it'd be build once display everywhere. Flash meant that everything looked the same regardless of browser or platform.

Its a lot better nowadays, but its not as easy as flash was.

The _key_ thing thats missing is the flash IDE/designer. There are no compelling editors/environments that allows both artists and coders to work in the same space.

Sure I can use Illustrator to make graphics, but there are no animation systems out there that allow me to animate well (I can render a unity app to HTML/JS but thats not quite the same)

This has more or less been the line from the day Steve Jobs decided Flash would never be available on the iPhone. And it was readily apparent that no one who said that worked in the audio domain. Things are much, much better now, but I remember challenging myself by trying to build a drum machine in HTML, Javascript, and CSS (not wanting to muck about in Canvas at the time) and while I could make it look decent enough, there was no such thing as a solid, reliable clock in Javascript, for about a decade. Just the way you played audio files back varied from browser to browser on the same machine. It was absolute garbage.

In-browser capabilities have basically caught up or exceeded what Flash did - I don't keep up anymore - but to echo other replies, the authoring tools just aren't as accessible. Maybe vibe coding tools close that gap. But the forced sunsetting of Flash set online interactive multimedia back at least a decade. It was never my main career path, but I more or less abandoned that fun side quest, and as evidenced by my feeling the need to comment here, it still kind of bums me out.

For artists, SVG is probably the worst vector format imaginable. In fact, I'd say any project that uses SVG as backend is doomed to fail with artists. It's pretty much a red flag at this point that if "supports vector" means "support SVG" they're doing it wrong and just chose the easiest to implement vector graphics because you probably have a billion open source SVG libraries at this point instead of rolling their own proprietary vector rendering algorithm that actually improves the artists' workflow.

To answer your question, the important thing about Flash wasn't the vector rendering but the vector art authoring tools. You could make Inkscape work like Flash, but nobody has done that yet. All you need is a brush tool that automatically does union of shapes of same color and subtraction of shapes of different color so the whole layer is always "flattened" with no shapes overlapping. This is the sort of thing that made Flash exceedingly easy to use for artists. It was a vector art program that worked exactly the same way as a raster digital art program. It thought of vectors not as shapes that the program was going to render but as paint strokes on a canvas.

If you were building a vector art software today you probably would want all sorts of things that SVG doesn't provide, e.g. line art with varying thickness based on tablet pressure (although Flash didn't need this, since you could draw shapes instead of strokes). You might also want to take a look at OpenToonz' vector implementation, which has "fills" that automatically expand when you change the enclosing strokes and an indexed color palette system, and CSP's line art vectors that let you use textured raster brushes with settings like dab scattering in vector strokes.

By the way, I also believe the idea that HTML5 could replace Flash games was insanely stupid. Anyone could make a Flash game and deploy it to web browsers in one click. Do that in HTML? With Javascript? Which means you need to download all these images/audio from the Internet? You want to play it locally? CORS issues, baby! Now you need to turn this mess into an electron app or use the most disgusting build step imaginable to turn whole jpegs into a base64 strings so you can create a single HTML file that is several megabytes. How did the entire world convince themselves that this was an actual replacement of Flash's functionality is honestly beyond me. For Flash websites, sure, you have <video> now, but for everything else that Flash provided there has never been a proper replacement (at least until Godot/Unity started WASM'ing, but that was a long time after).

https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1554561/1

Better to go the route of doing Spine2D animations then leverage a real game engine like Godot or Unity and load the animations there.

But then you're essentially back to "traditional game development" which is very different from what you could do with Macromedia's Flash back in the day.

This said, it was always cool when we could control the entire stack, but the reality was that once we scaled things up, we had to throw things over the fence to IT, DevOps, SRE and whatever name evolutions there were and the reality is AWS/GCE/Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally.

But once I started processing the data, it became a thing and we made a small cross-team team to get this going. We eventually expanded the effort in a few different directions and wanted to do a Flash analytics, but ended up with the internal tool only due to privacy concerns.

If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020.

If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.

I hated flash only for their video player being so widespread despite immediately redlining my Mac’s cpu and holding it there during the entire experience.

(Okay also security issues, but that was more like adding the ammunition to getting rid of the video player)

I think Flash was fun to develop in. It was easy and fun to write a game in it and it was something a lot more approachable and easier to distribute than trying to cobble together something with OpenGL or DirectX.

Also, I think a lot of the games on Flash actually are fun. I played through Mystery of Time and Space a few months ago and it still holds up. The puzzles are clever, the jokes are funny, the art is likeable, it's a good game.

But what I liked about Flash was that, because it was so approachable, there was a lot of creativity to stuff. A lot of the games weren't good in any kind of "objective" sense, but there was at least a distinct lack of cynicism with a lot of them. The people who made the games weren't doing it for money, they were doing it because they thought it would be cool to make a game. Some games, like Pico's School for example, were unlike basically anything that had come before it. Is Pico's School a masterpiece of game design? Nah, but it's certainly unique, and it was something that could be played on pretty much anyone's computer.

But in the process I learned about ActionScript and found I had a lot of fun coding things and playing with different programming constructs.

I keep meaning to try out haxe, it looks neat enough, but to me it's still kind of missing half of what I liked about Flash, which was the animation tooling.

At least of the stuff I have used, Flash is the most fun. Admittedly I never really got into any other kind of graphics-first development like VisualBasic and the like. Flash just spoke to me for some reason.

It's been quite awhile since I've written ActionScript [1], but I remember when I wrote it I didn't write it significantly differently than C#. You still have similar Java-style OOP semantics with types that I think wouldn't be too hard to map into C#, especially if you're willing to be dirty and use reflection.

[1] Gah, has it really been almost fourteen years? Time is stupid.

The big one it missed: the headers are mostly "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]". LLMs (maybe just Claude?) love these. Every heading sounds like it could be a Robert Ludlum novel (The Listicle Instinct, The Empathy Performance, The Prometheus Deception).

This is hilarious.

The reason it burned CPU cycles is that non-coders could make programs with it and they would produce the world's worst code doing so that "worked". The runtime itself was fine (efficiency wise, not all the other things).

The bugs were definitely Adobe's fault: as with most tech companies, they were far more interested in expanding the feature set than they were on fixing the bugs and stabilizing the platform.

Flash itself was acquired via Macromedia as well.

Adobe's business is keeping technologies billing, and while Flash had it's flaws, the world was not ready for it to depart as soon as it did, because there was not a capable replacement available.

A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".

I wish they had been able to figure out how to do it, but licensing and patents and whatnot have held back lots of innovation.

I'd feel better if he had some other core contributors, but this is a great start.

The real moat is not the source itself but the reputation. Setting the right price point is the actual challenge. You have to find that sweet spot where the price is high enough to fund development but low enough that the friction of paying is less than the friction of cloning the repo and building it yourself. If you price it like a corporate seat then people will fork it out of spite. The goal is to make the official binary the path of least resistance.

I don't know Animate - is it basically Flash Updated (I've read here that Adobe kept some elements of Flash in Animate, but it is unclear what).

Also, there are non-Flash players for .fla files (not editors, however).

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

It will be interesting to see if this project ends up working more like AS2 or AS3. AS2 gamedev was a real mess, but it sure was great for the simplest things.

You would start out drawing, get tired of the repetitive parts, and learn to automate them. Eventually, you end up with an FLA file that's just an asset library and a reference to a script.

Plus, it had the most intuitive vector editor I've ever used.