Still Have A Use For Adobe Flash? Ruffle Is Working To Safely Emulate It In Rust

[lowflyer]

Usually when something starts to accumulate rust it's a clear sign for its decay.

[andrei_me]

Gemcraft and Massive Missile Mayhem are 2 flash games that come to my mind for trying this

[kpedersen]

That is kinda horrible thing, because Adobr Flash was kinda best tool for some small developer to solo develop a game.

I kind of get that. It allowed people to express novel ideas with fairly low effort (and lack of decent engineering!). Unity has mostly picked up the slack for these kind of "disposable games" but Flash was quite easy to use, even for less technical guys. I suppose when Unity goes under, we will be back to square one

Back then, we actually ported a few of our (C++) LEGO "advergames" to Flash Bytecode (to run on the Flash VM) via Adobe's Alchemy (GCC based) compiler (I think it is called Crossbridge now). So really the Flash VM and WebAssembly do have some big similarities. There is no real reason why Adobe can't retarget their Flash tools to HTML5/WASM. I do wonder why they haven't prioritised this. Unity makes a lot of money on the prosumer market, I am surprised that Adobe doesn't want a slice of that cake (plus Unity is fairly weak when it comes to 2D workflow).

I suppose the platform to run Flash games will now be Ruffle -> Rust -> WebAssembly so everything should mostly work again in future.

Edit: For a while there was even a Unity internal beta called "molehill" that transpiled the C# into ActionScript3 and then compiled to Flash VM. It was horrible though and barely worked.

[paulocoghi]

2advanced.com , all versions, from v1 to v6!

How come none of you haven't mentioned one of the greatest (serious) classics made in Flash yet?

[piotrj3]

My flash experience was pretty much:

flash_missing.jpg

It was so badly supported in Linux and Solaris and the workarounds for BSDs were even worse.

The only good thing Steve Jobs did was place a lot of FUD on Adobe Flash and its ecosystem, effectively triggering its death.

That is kinda horrible thing, because Adobr Flash was kinda best tool for some small developer to solo develop a game. Adobe flash professional still has the best tools to make any type of 2D animation and anything out of Unity/unreal engine/godot for such purpose doesn't even come close. This is why back then we had so many great games made with adobe flash of all types of genre and because it could be putted just on website they actually got traction. Developing games for websites or WASM is garbage comparing to Adobe Flash sadly, and still is.

Gemcraft, epic battle fantasy, bloons td, the space game, minions, motherload, line rider, age of war and much more great games that i spent countless hours on...

[dragon321]

Every project dedicated to preservation of various arts (games, animations etc.) is worth following. I don't like Flash but there are many great things that uses it and it's very good thing that it still can be used by modern and open source Flash implementation rather than old and proprietary plugin.

Worth noting is the fact that Lighspark has some development as well. While it's not as much dynamic as Ruffle, recently I tried running some Flash content that wasn't working before on Lightspark and now it's working with fresh build.

[GI_Jack]

Like what are you browsing and it doesn't work because of Flash? I haven't seen flash in like 10yrs it seems.

Legacy content. A lot of it got converted to HTML5 video, but things like badgers or lions in kenya don't exactly translate to video because they are procedurely generated.

So flash did both video, animation and code in one, so you had a high degree of script able, so a lot of stuff from the 00s blended the line between video game, short movie, and animation.

Or even infinite loop like Badgers!. It was procedural generated, so there was no start, no finished and sequences appeared at random.

It became this unique free-form art, that was somewhat unique in what it did.

This was very much a big part of Golden and Silver ages of the internet.

[kpedersen]

My flash experience was pretty much:

flash_missing.jpg

It was so badly supported in Linux and Solaris and the workarounds for BSDs were even worse.

The only good thing Steve Jobs did was place a lot of FUD on Adobe Flash and its ecosystem, effectively triggering its death.

[Jabberwocky]

Like what are you browsing and it doesn't work because of Flash? I haven't seen flash in like 10yrs it seems.

South Africa Tax Collector required you to install their own browser which was basically chrome but with flash enabled. I think they fixed most of it last year where they told people they can uninstall proprietary government software from their personal computers. They still use proprietary Adobe PDF XFA forms (which could potentially still embed flash according to the specs) and doesn't work with any open source PDF implementation that I have tried. I'm just paying someone to do my submissions for me. I don't have time to mess with compatibility issues caused by incompetent government.

https://www.sars.gov.za/individuals/how-do-i-register-for-tax/browser-compatibility-guidelines/

Other use of flash is for gaming. I have many AAA games but I enjoy the games on https://www.kongregate.com/ more.

The obligatory:

flash_games.png

[ALRBP]

Like what are you browsing and it doesn't work because of Flash? I haven't seen flash in like 10yrs it seems.

No one is using flash in modern usage (well, except some incompetent organizations), the point is to allow people to still use old flash content, mostly for museum-like purposes. For a lot a people, including me, flash games are a part of our childhood/teenage, and we would be sad if they were lost forever. It is like emulators for old gaming platforms. Flash games are the main reason this kind of project is interesting (also, archiving flash-based websites).

That said, I am very happy that flash, and other awful similar things like Silverlight or ActiveX, which were even more problematic on Linux, are dead.