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
Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS but it just took a knee because so many people hated flash for all of its warts by the time SVG and Canvas moved vector graphics rendering to the browser. Flash was a real pain the ass for most web users and Web 2.0 technologies did kill it.
“Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. […] Adobe donated Flex to the Apache Software Foundation
[…]
In 2014, the Apache Software Foundation started a new project called FlexJS to cross-compile ActionScript 3 to JavaScript to enable it to run on browsers that do not support Adobe Flash Player and on devices that do not support the Adobe AIR runtime. In 2017, FlexJS was renamed to Apache Royale. The Apache Software Foundation describes the current iteration of Apache Royale as an open-source frontend technology that allows a developer to code in ActionScript 3 and MXML and target web, mobile devices and desktop devices on Apache Cordova all at once”
[1] I may be wrong though. It’s not easy figuring out what Flash code ended up in which of Adobe’s Flash-like products over time.
> 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)
Guaranteed deployment, and the lack of an IDE which works for both programmers and artists were definitely the two advantages Flash had.
I'd really like to find a replacement which clicks for me the way it did --- started out w/ its predecessor, Futurewave Smartsketch (used it on PenPoint, Mac and Windows, and for Windows, continued using through a succession of pen tablets, most notably my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 which I despair of replacing --- transflective displays went out of vogue).
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?)
OpenVG is just an API by Kronos group, that was never implemented by hardware vendors on desktop graphic cards (it was specifically created for mobiles, as OpenGL|ES).
Btw, there exists several implementations, with pure CPU rendering (like AmanithVG SRE) and others with GPU backends.
>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.
Have you ever tried that out? Last time I checked (some yeqrs ago) wide support (and performance) was not great but more importantly handling I found not great.
Support and performance might have improved, but I think the style is still ugly and good authoring tools non existent.
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 have a date I use that's incorrect, but consistent so I can remember it if I need to, that I use for age verification for anything that doesn't truly need an accurate birthdate (example, age verification to view games on Steam).
It's roughly the same age as mine, but if someone tried to pass themselves off as me with that birthdate, they wouldn't succeed.
These companies are mostly just verifying I'm an adult anyway, and I am legit that.
But yeah, I don't like just giving the actual date everywhere as it can potentially be used for identity theft.
So I've handcoded and released a couple dozen games in the past, but I'm now old with responsibilities and a day job of coding, and my brain just doesn't have the energy to mess about with it like it used to after a day of work, so I have started experimenting with letting A.I. agent code some things (and been surprised at how well it can work).
I'm aware of the gen AI stigma but it's either that or this damn game probably never gets released at this point (I basically let the game sit dormant all year last year, only recently picking it back up again), and I have a full graveyard full of unreleased projects the past decade and would like to finally get something out there again.
That being said, at least for the forseeable future, I won't use any A.I. generated art or music in the game (unless I inadvertently hire an artist that does use it, I guess), because there is still a huge (and somewhat justifiable) stigma against A.I. generated art and music assets.
So instead I'm just doing what I did in the past, and creating the art and music myself as best I can with Illustrator or Logic Pro, and keeping my games fairly simple and abstract so it doesn't seem too much like programmer art (I might at some point pay an artist or musician to improve things just before it gets released though).
I also have a personal stigma against AI art (for commercial purposes) because I don’t see the cost vs the value doesn’t add up to me. I am trying to see if my own bias was negatively effecting my progress or if staying hand drawn was what the average age dev was doing. As for programming, I find it does help aid when I know what I want but can’t quite find the syntax, it’s the balance between that and still learning that I struggle with.
I miss my fast food job (and especially my retail job), to a certain extent. I also worked in a warehouse and a factory for a bit, and there are certain things I miss about those as well. I don't miss the low pay though. And my health is no longer good enough (in part because I've been too sedentary in office jobs the past 20 years) that I can no longer stand for hours at a time (not even that, I can no longer stand in place for more than a few minutes at a time).
I could completely forget about my job when I got home, didn't have to somewhat keep a framework of some giant corporate spaghetti code soup in my head to a certain extent for months or years on end, and interacted with people way, way more than I do now, and made deeper friendships with my coworkers.
Also there was no risk of me working on something for six months and it get cancelled or shelved before it gets used by anyone. At least in fast food and retail jobs you're helping multiple people (sometimes hundreds of people) every day. In my corporate career I've often ended up working on software that only has a handful of high paying clients, or only used internally and not client facing.
If I could justify the insane pay cut and could manage it physically I'd probably do something like be a barista nowadays. Or be a teacher, maybe.
Flipping burgers really isn't that difficult. It was my first job, and I even have nostalgia for it at times.
If I had to go do that again, the main problem would for me would be that I don't think I could stand in one place for that long anymore, my thigh and lower back start stinging and want me to sit down (at least they do when I cook at home).
I interacted with way more people at a fast food restaurant than I do now, and got to interact with customers as well. Which wasn't always positive, but it was at least interesting to see all the various people that came in.
Also it was a lot more laid back and less serious than what I do now (which is work on web apps for large corporations).
Also at least I knew what I worked on was going to get used. I've been on too many projects that end up getting cancelled, or only used by a small handful of (high paying) clients, etc. Or specific features that end up getting cancelled or delayed indefinitely, etc.
Too bad it pays so little, or I'd actually consider it for a change of pace (well, more likely I'd want to try being a barista instead, that seems more enjoyable and a lot less walking on greasy floors).
I have 'unlimited', but I work for a consulting firm, and I'm expected to maintain a certain percentage of billing hours throughout the year, so if I dip too far below that it gets hard to get PTO approved.
Even still, it hasn't been difficult to take 20 days off plus a few sick days each year. The only year I dipped below my target was a couple years ago, where I was in between client projects and sitting on the bench for a month and a half.
Thankfully they had a new client project in mind for me pretty quick, it just took some time to get the approvals and make the transition, or else I might have been on the bench long enough to be at risk of being laid off.
I basically took the last year off from creative projects and just played solo board games in the evenings for most of the year, on nights when I didn't have other plans.
Marvel Champions in particular is a lot of fun, although may be a bit overwhelming at first if you don't play a lot of board games already.
I also got into Legendary deckbuilding games recently, and those are a bit more approachable, although not all of them play solo unless you manage two hands of cards (which isn't a big deal for me, but I've played hundreds of different board games).
They have those based on various IPs (Game of Thrones, James Bond, X-Files, Matrix, Alien movies, Buffy, Marvel, and in a few months DC comics) and play somewhat similarly, so if you learn one it would be easy to learn another one.
I also picked up a solitaire variant called Hoki just last week and really enjoyed it. You upgrade your cards over multiple games (that are each about five minutes to play), and then once you've completely upgraded all the cards you can play the game daily and then consult a book that will give you a fortune based on the final state of your game.
It took me 53 games to unlock the final state, and I did all of them in just a couple of days, I enjoyed it so much. Now I'm playing a game or two a day to see what the fortune is and then writing a journal to reflect on what that could mean, for fun.
Slowly getting back into my creative hobbies this year (which include board game design and writing), although coding I still feel is hard to do in my off time (even when it's making games, which I've historically really enjoyed doing).
I've messed around with A.I. agent coding a bit, and I'm a bit more impressed with it than I anticipated, but I'm not sure how deep down that rabbit hole I want to go and not code myself. But I really don't feel like I have much energy left in the tank for coding more after doing it for my day job lately.
LOL, I meant for a living but I enjoyed reading this nevertheless :D
But ya, I was out of work for 9 months and enjoyed pretty much every minute of it up until I realized it was not as easy to find a job as I thought it would be (well, it played out a bit differently but for the sake of brevity I'll stick that story)
We usually stop by Michigan City every time we're driving through the area (usually on our way to somewhere in Michigan or on our way back), mainly to make two stops: Cool Runnings Restaurant and Bar (excellent jerk chicken and catfish) and FLUID Coffee Roasters (really good coffee). Both highly recommended.
The city itself seems like a relatively quiet city. There's some parts of town that seem kind of run down but not too bad, and the downtown area (where FLUID is) is nicer.
We went to their outlet mall once (which is all I knew about the place ahead of time, people would say how it's a great place to shop) and while there's a decent number of stores there, the courtyard was surprisingly bland and undecorated at the time, like it was never finished. We haven't had the urge to go back since. I've been more impressed with shopping centers in the Chicago suburbs (where I'm from), like the Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook, or the Chicago Premium Outlets in Aurora.
Also stopped by their beach once, and it's fine, but I think other beaches not too much further away in SW Michigan or the Indiana Dunes are nicer (especially the Dunes).
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.
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