One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc.
That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file.
But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game.
Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.
Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
I remember trying to produce a Flash renderer in C# when we wrote DudeFactory to render out the characters after you used the Flash app to put all their clothes and accessories on. I think we cheated in the end and pre-rendered large PNGs of them all and used .NET to just layer them all with instructions sent from Flash.
SVG + CSS + JS was hailed as the Flash-killer. But authoring tools never materialized. The tech stack can render the same things, but the process of creating anything beyond a static image in SVG is night and day compared to making the same thing in Flash
> Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
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?
> Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
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)
Yeah, there's two approaches to rendering Flash vector art.
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?)
>Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
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.
Every time I see SVG mentioned with Flash I just think it's immensely ignorant. No offense, but programmers love to think of "vectors" as SVG because it's all they know. For several years I kept hearing people say "we have HTML5 and SVG now, so we don't need Flash anymore." And with that Flash animations and games were lost forever and I'm still bitter about it.
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).
It feels like we're fairly close yet so far. Lots of newer tools do have animation and tweening of arbitrary properties but then will just have bitmap image editors instead of a built-in vector editor for example. Or just make it really hard to tie all the stuff together.
The ease at which Flash CSx would just let you draw a circle in a spot, then click on it to get its script file and immediately add a little bit of behavior is magic for prototyping
In my experience what made Flash special wasn't the SWF runtime but teh FLA as a single editable file that bundled timeline, vectors, and code so an artist could hand over an animation and a developer could open the same file and tweak frames without a full rebuild. To recreate that loop I built a pipeline where artists export PNG sequences from Adobe Animate, TexturePacker packs them into atlases, a small tool emits a JSON timeline with frames as {spriteIndex,durationMs,easing}, and an AssetPostprocessor in Unity or an import plugin in Godot hot-reloads that JSON into AnimationClips so timing can be nudged in-editor. I've found the practical tradeoff is bigger assets and more import complexity, so make your timeline format human-readable for sensible git diffs, keep per-animation metadata minimal for easier merges, and accept that you'll be debugging the importer at 2am while an artist asks for 'one frame faster' but iteration speed pays off.
I feel we need a modular verdion of Flash: standalone editor that produces just the animations with Flash-like mechanics, SDKs for major OSS game frameworks, and possibly an editor component you can use in IDEs. You then drop in animation file(s) and track them in VCS like any other asset.
Edit: but of course, the standalone variant should work for non-game animations as well!
Before opening the comments I made a bet with myself that the top comment would be about how someone made flash games in the 2000s and nothing really replaced it in the coming years. :)
Remember how mobile sites were the same thing except with less personality? And then they figured out they could remove what little personality remained and call it progress? And then they realized they could do that on desktop too?
The versioning was indeed a bit of a pain, also anything with dynamic input.
I was pretty proud of a solution where we could feed a web CMS that had a flash and a html version with the same editable text fields. IIRC you could grab the input of some fields from a text file and Flash didn't care where these came from, so on save the CMS just spit out a bunch of text files in a folder. That must have been around 2001.
It's a UI authoring toolkit, you could do entire games in it I suppose, but you'd be fighting against it, rather than being helped by it.
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.
I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that.
We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place.
Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area.
The tool uncovered a ton of security issues.
It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.
Thanks for sharing. It's stories like these I've read since childhood that got me into this. Those little adventures into remote places to work on some computers. This was my version of Indiana jones.
It looks like there's a a bit of reversal in some areas (e.g. ML) and it may make sense to have more geographically distributed (edge) compute so maybe we'll get more diversity in the currently cloud-dominated space.
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.
This was around when we were trying to get Flash to work on the first iPhone, so we had a hackathon for a week. Since I was a distributed systems "hacker", I ended up doing what was needed :) and there were lots of questions related to the sizing of flash on web pages and what not. That's what started it - I simple python script that I refined during the hackathon to get the embed parameters etc.
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.
I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made.
Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember).
Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did.
I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.
Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.
I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago.
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 enjoyed flash games… even made one with some friends.
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 started my career as a Programmer and did a lot of programmatic designs. Unfortunately, I’m not artistic. So, my tools of choice for Design were Code and Mathematics.
Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn’t notice anything that interested me. I don’t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called “ASfunction” inside Flash, “What? You can write code to make the drawings do stuff?”
So, that was the magic; I can code and see things happen in real-time (no compilation, no render). And that was the only thing I did for quite a while.
Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth. I spend most of my time writing ActionScript in TextPad and compiling it with a CLI called MTASC (from the same developer behind HAXE.org).[1] If memory serves me well, I used to maintain the ActionScript syntax for TextPad.[2]
Yeah, I actually got into Flash because I wanted to be an animator some day. I made some crappy cartoons but sadly my art skills never really improved, even with a fair amount of practice.
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.
I disagree with it being the most fun, because I would also consider TP/Delphi and C++ Builder.
Now I do agree that even something like Unity or PlayCanvas fail short of Flash's game development experience, because the browser debugging for 2D and 3D development sucks.
I have heard lovely things about Delphi’s and C++ builder’s fun factor (maybe from you on this very forum actually :) ), but I have not used those so I cannot speak to it.
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.
This is an under-appreciated aspect of Flash's popularity, and probably a reason why Animate didn't have the same appeal. A kid could get a "free" cracked copy and make fun things.... and maybe not help Adobe/Macromedia's bottom-line, it DID help the general ecosystem.
Rive seems fine, but monthly subscriptions need to die in a fire. I'm not going to pay $10/month to allow me to build some stupid animation idea I have every few months. There are a few, like GameMaker, that do one-time pricing... but even that doesn't scratch the same itch Flash did for me.
It's just selling a scam. I've never been impressed by a flash game, but I'm impressed by programs written in general languages daily and for longer than flash has existed.
The worst thing about tech is people who don't know any better get advertised tools that aren't sustainable and aren't suited to the job. If someone sees a flash game and says "WOW! that's so cool I wanna do that", then I don't have problem with it. But if people want to learn a language and are handed an SRS app, or want to make a unique game and are told to use an engine that's when it becomes harmful (and in many cases viral due to network effects)
I gotta admit I don't really know what you're talking about.
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.
> .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them.
The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.
AFAIK the .fla format was never fully documented or reverse engineered by anyone (FFDEC has an exporter, but not importer), so this alone would be a bold claim.
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.
Every so often over the past 15 years I've had this exact thought, "The world needs something which is exactly like flash. Not kind of like flash, exactly like flash."
A whole generation of people learned how to create art, games, music, animations, using flash, and the same kind of tool hasn't existed since then.
I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.
I agree, I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer, and it's one of the few things I miss about moving to Linux away from Windows.
I can still run Flash MX 2004 via Wine and play with that there, so it's not "lost media" or anything, but what I want is something as close to Flash as possible, that runs on Linux, and gets regular updates, and that doesn't require I subscribe to it for forever.
I have a perpetual license to ToonBoom (that I bought when they were still doing perpetual licenses), and ToonBoom is very cool software, but it's purely an animation software. I also have a license to Scirra Construct 2, and that's pretty neat as well, but in my mind that's basically a game engine. Flash was this cool, weird hybrid of both a game engine and artistic software that I haven't found a good replacement for.
With Flash, you could make a cartoon without touching ActionScript. It was designed around animation. If you wanted to extend the cartoon you could then add code, piecemeal, and if you wanted to make a full game then you could make a full game. It was great.
> I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.
I think this is the biggest shift. Minecraft starting out as a .jar file allowed for reverse engineering and modding support became a huge part of its "culture". Coupled with artists focusing on spritesheets, you got to have that same Newgrounds online underground scene but for the next generation of kids.
Roblox is takes a similar place now that Minecraft is ~15 years old and all "grown up". Maybe once Roblox hits that similar fate this new Flash will be ready to fill its shoes.
This post raises a few flags in my mind that it was at least partly generated by an LLM? That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful.
The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spelling and grammar with em-dashes.
The "Not just" parts stick out like "Not just play them back — edit them" as well as "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment."
Anyway, best of luck to the author with their project!
> This document has been through ten editing passes and it still has tells in it.
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 document was written by an LLM (Claude) and then iteratively de-LLMed by that same LLM under instruction from a human, in a conversation that went roughly like this
I don't like lists like these as I sometimes use half of the "signs" in my writing. And it would be trivial, feeding that list to a LLM and tell it to avoid that style.
Huh. This page claims "This website requires JavaScript." at the top, yet I can read everything fine. TFA on the other hand is blank without JavaScript.
>That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful.
If you look at the icons of the tools in the image they appear to have been generated using a LLM. So yeah it's probably vibecoded a lot, it would be cool if the author reports how much and how it was used but I don't think newgrounds would like it much.
It makes me so happy to see this. When I was in high school Flash was THE way that you could practice programming games with the instant feedback of graphics animation, key input, and playing sound. I enjoyed it so much that out of college I joined the Adobe Platform team right around 2008. I worked in the SF office which was formerly the Macromedia HQ before Adobe bought them out.
There were some really cool Flash tools in the works around then. Some internal developers had gotten some version of Flash Alchemy to run Doom in the browser. There was a lot of work going on to add proper GPU integration into the platform. I got to see some cool prototypes. Ultimately though, my timing was poor. This was right around when Steve Jobs decided that the iPhone shouldn't run Flash. The internal lore/rumor mill was that some PM had missed Steve Jobs reporting crashes in Safari enough times that Jobs was just DONE with Flash and had decided to kill it on his platform. I have no idea how true that was.
There was a mad scramble at Adobe to try to figure out how to keep Flash running on the iPhone. The AIR team was actively looking into reverse engineering solutions so they could essentially deploy Flash apps that didn't look like they were written in Flash. They tried to rally the community with a "We <3 Flash" campaign. It didn't matter. Flash was taken off the iPhone and Adobe made the call to give up. In 2009 after a few waves of 2008 recession cuts they slashed a huge part of the platform team and I knew it was over.
There were a lot of reasons that Flash probably needed to go, but I wonder about what the web would have been if it hadn't been killed around that time. Regardless I hope this project succeeds. <3 Flash.
I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial.
(Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.)
It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source.
I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?
Of the two, I think Adobe is most responsible for the decline of Flash. Even if smartphones had never entered the picture, laptops (where efficiency is important) were quickly becoming the most common form of PC, which would've eventually made Flash as it existed under Adobe untenable as well. The timeline was just accelerated by smartphones.
Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads of Adobe execs at the time. Yes, cleaning up the ball of mud that the Flash codebase had become and making it not so battery hungry wouldn't have been an easy task, but it would've futureproofed it significantly. Instead they decided to keep tacking on new features which ended up being entirely the wrong decision.
EDIT: The constant stream of zero-days certainly didn't help things either. A rewrite would've been worthwhile if only to get a handle on that.
Flash was not particularly battery hungry (My go to example when HTML 5 demos started coming out was rebuilding a HTML 5 demo that was using 100% of 1 core into a flash app that used 5%).
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).
I think Apple is more responsible. One of Flash's chief benefits to the customers who paid the big bucks was that it 'just worked' everywhere. Once Apple stopped supporting Flash on the iPhone, that story was a lot less attractive.
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.
It was probably hard to imagine the rise of laptops, internet, and Flash.
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.
The "pay to sell your work" model is basically what Autodesk does to provide a version of Fusion that's free/accessible to the hobby 3d printing market while still protecting their b2b revenue.
I haven't looked in a while, but I believe there's music and audio production tools with similar approaches.
More impressively, Da Vinci Resolve is actually free with no restrictions. It is a high end video editor that film makers and professional film studios use (together with hardware and some paid features) from black magic design. Incredibly impressive. Affinity Photo and PhotoPea are also now free without restrictions.
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One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc.
That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file.
But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game.
Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.
I remember trying to produce a Flash renderer in C# when we wrote DudeFactory to render out the characters after you used the Flash app to put all their clothes and accessories on. I think we cheated in the end and pre-rendered large PNGs of them all and used .NET to just layer them all with instructions sent from Flash.
https://dudefactory.com/
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?
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)
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?)
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).
The ease at which Flash CSx would just let you draw a circle in a spot, then click on it to get its script file and immediately add a little bit of behavior is magic for prototyping
Edit: but of course, the standalone variant should work for non-game animations as well!
Maybe Rive fits this well enough? (Not affiliated, just looked into it at a time from a render engine perspective)
I was pretty proud of a solution where we could feed a web CMS that had a flash and a html version with the same editable text fields. IIRC you could grab the input of some fields from a text file and Flash didn't care where these came from, so on save the CMS just spit out a bunch of text files in a folder. That must have been around 2001.
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.
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1554561/1
We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place.
Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area.
The tool uncovered a ton of security issues.
It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.
But everyone's in an AWS world right now.
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.
I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made.
Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember).
Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did.
If we can have a new Flash, I will be very happy.
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)
Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn’t notice anything that interested me. I don’t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called “ASfunction” inside Flash, “What? You can write code to make the drawings do stuff?”
So, that was the magic; I can code and see things happen in real-time (no compilation, no render). And that was the only thing I did for quite a while.
Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth. I spend most of my time writing ActionScript in TextPad and compiling it with a CLI called MTASC (from the same developer behind HAXE.org).[1] If memory serves me well, I used to maintain the ActionScript syntax for TextPad.[2]
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2005/haxe-programming-language/
2. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/textpad-syntax-file-for-asmx/
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.
Now I do agree that even something like Unity or PlayCanvas fail short of Flash's game development experience, because the browser debugging for 2D and 3D development sucks.
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.
This is an under-appreciated aspect of Flash's popularity, and probably a reason why Animate didn't have the same appeal. A kid could get a "free" cracked copy and make fun things.... and maybe not help Adobe/Macromedia's bottom-line, it DID help the general ecosystem.
Rive seems fine, but monthly subscriptions need to die in a fire. I'm not going to pay $10/month to allow me to build some stupid animation idea I have every few months. There are a few, like GameMaker, that do one-time pricing... but even that doesn't scratch the same itch Flash did for me.
The worst thing about tech is people who don't know any better get advertised tools that aren't sustainable and aren't suited to the job. If someone sees a flash game and says "WOW! that's so cool I wanna do that", then I don't have problem with it. But if people want to learn a language and are handed an SRS app, or want to make a unique game and are told to use an engine that's when it becomes harmful (and in many cases viral due to network effects)
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.
The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.
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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.
A whole generation of people learned how to create art, games, music, animations, using flash, and the same kind of tool hasn't existed since then.
I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.
I can still run Flash MX 2004 via Wine and play with that there, so it's not "lost media" or anything, but what I want is something as close to Flash as possible, that runs on Linux, and gets regular updates, and that doesn't require I subscribe to it for forever.
I have a perpetual license to ToonBoom (that I bought when they were still doing perpetual licenses), and ToonBoom is very cool software, but it's purely an animation software. I also have a license to Scirra Construct 2, and that's pretty neat as well, but in my mind that's basically a game engine. Flash was this cool, weird hybrid of both a game engine and artistic software that I haven't found a good replacement for.
With Flash, you could make a cartoon without touching ActionScript. It was designed around animation. If you wanted to extend the cartoon you could then add code, piecemeal, and if you wanted to make a full game then you could make a full game. It was great.
I think this is the biggest shift. Minecraft starting out as a .jar file allowed for reverse engineering and modding support became a huge part of its "culture". Coupled with artists focusing on spritesheets, you got to have that same Newgrounds online underground scene but for the next generation of kids.
Roblox is takes a similar place now that Minecraft is ~15 years old and all "grown up". Maybe once Roblox hits that similar fate this new Flash will be ready to fill its shoes.
The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spelling and grammar with em-dashes.
The "Not just" parts stick out like "Not just play them back — edit them" as well as "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment."
Anyway, best of luck to the author with their project!
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.
If you look at the icons of the tools in the image they appear to have been generated using a LLM. So yeah it's probably vibecoded a lot, it would be cool if the author reports how much and how it was used but I don't think newgrounds would like it much.
There were some really cool Flash tools in the works around then. Some internal developers had gotten some version of Flash Alchemy to run Doom in the browser. There was a lot of work going on to add proper GPU integration into the platform. I got to see some cool prototypes. Ultimately though, my timing was poor. This was right around when Steve Jobs decided that the iPhone shouldn't run Flash. The internal lore/rumor mill was that some PM had missed Steve Jobs reporting crashes in Safari enough times that Jobs was just DONE with Flash and had decided to kill it on his platform. I have no idea how true that was.
There was a mad scramble at Adobe to try to figure out how to keep Flash running on the iPhone. The AIR team was actively looking into reverse engineering solutions so they could essentially deploy Flash apps that didn't look like they were written in Flash. They tried to rally the community with a "We <3 Flash" campaign. It didn't matter. Flash was taken off the iPhone and Adobe made the call to give up. In 2009 after a few waves of 2008 recession cuts they slashed a huge part of the platform team and I knew it was over.
There were a lot of reasons that Flash probably needed to go, but I wonder about what the web would have been if it hadn't been killed around that time. Regardless I hope this project succeeds. <3 Flash.
Also shipped my only Android game as an AIR app.
I will forever be one of Flash's defenders. Was the best digital creative tool I ever encountered.
(Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.)
It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source.
I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?
Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads of Adobe execs at the time. Yes, cleaning up the ball of mud that the Flash codebase had become and making it not so battery hungry wouldn't have been an easy task, but it would've futureproofed it significantly. Instead they decided to keep tacking on new features which ended up being entirely the wrong decision.
EDIT: The constant stream of zero-days certainly didn't help things either. A rewrite would've been worthwhile if only to get a handle on that.
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.
I haven't looked in a while, but I believe there's music and audio production tools with similar approaches.