Comment by lukan
14 hours ago
How did you got that impression?
There is the universal hate for flash because it was used for ads and had shitty security, but anyone I know who actually used AS3 loved it.
At its peak, with flex builder, we also had a full blown UI Editor, where you could just add your own custom elements designed directly with flash ... and then it was all killed because Apple did not dare to open source it, or put serious efforts on their own into improving the technical base of the flash player (that had aquired lots of technical dept).
> There is the universal hate for flash because it was used for ads and had shitty security
That's only one side of it. Flash was the precursor to the indie/mobile gamedev industry we have today (Newgrounds, Miniclip, Armor Games), before smartphones become ubiquitous. Not to mention some rather creative websites, albeit at the cost of accessibility .
Flash's only fault was it's creators were gobbled up by Adobe, who left it in the shitter and ignored the complaints people had about it's security issues.
It was by design very difficult to secure.
Arguably, so is the web. A long series of extremely complicated and constantly changing data formats that are nightmarishly difficult to parse, which has to be done in C++ for speed reasons, combined with a full scripting language, which has to be JIT compiled for speed reasons, combined with 30 years of legacy and a security model that was completely ad hoc and more discovered than designed (e.g. the different variants of the same origin policy). Take that and add on top a browser community that doesn't philosophically recognize any limits on what the web is meant to do, so it just keeps getting more and more APIs until one day both Mozilla and the Chrome team decided to just stop pretending and build full blown operating systems on top of them.
I don't think Flash was harder to secure than HTML itself. People just gave up trying because browser vendors used security to purge the web of anything they didn't control.
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You mean intentionally?
I think they just had the focus on features and speed and fps. Not security nor efficency (battery life).
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> ... and then it was all killed because Apple did not dare to open source it, or put serious efforts on their own into improving the technical base of the flash player (that had aquired lots of technical dept).
IIRC, they couldn't open source Flash due to its use of a number of 3rd party C/C++ libraries that were proprietary.
Adobe's license with these 3rd parties permitted binary-only distribution so it would have meant renegotiating a fresh license (and paying out $$$) for an EOL codebase that had enormous technical debt, as you also acknowledge in your last sentence.
> and then it was all killed because Apple did not dare to open source it
Did you or, more likely, your phone mistype Adobe? I don’t think Apple ever had the rights to the source or even the source, did they?
Yes, Adobe of course.
I'm in a terrible situation right now where I promised a client a fairly simple web-based game, to be delivered in pixijs. Pixi is great for what it does, and as an old time Flash game coder, I find it mostly does enough for procedural stuff, although it's got its share of quirks, gotchas, bugs and memory leaks. What I didn't think about was how to get prefab vector animations into this game - not sprite sheets, but cut scenes that I wanted to be essentially animated SVGs. So I started to go the Adobe Animate route and found to my horror that it's basically Flash stripped of all its useful tools and riddled with bugs; there's no good way to import those animations as vectors or even as bitmaps into Pixi. Animate's exporter still runs on EaselJS code from 2015 and just spits out badly formed json files that misrepresent the tweens. Worse still, it can't even pack textures correctly or consistently. It appears to size them at random based on what size they are in some random frame. And it crashes anytime it tries to pack a texture large enough to be useful. It's not an understatement to say that Flash 7 or 8, in the early 2000s, was far more advanced and powerful.
So what would have taken a day or two back when Flash was available is now taking a week of hand-writing tweens and animations in raw Typescript, one layer at a time.
Since I happened to write the first canvas-based interactive screen graph code that Grant Skinner partially ripped off to create EaselJS, and since I'm sure he's making a fine living from Adobe licensing it, it's especially galling that I'm still paying for a CC license and this is what I get when I want to use a GUI to make some animations to drop into a game.
It's the first time I've done a 2D game since 2017, and I had over a decade of experience building games in Flash/AIR before that. It's just mind-blowing how stupid and regressed Adobe's tooling has become in the past few years, and how much harder it is to do simple things that we took for granted in the heyday of Flash authoring. There really is still no equivalent workflow or even anything close. I guess that post-Flash, there aren't enough people making this kind of web game content for there to be a solid route without using Unity or something.
I also worked on a number of Flash projects in its heyday. I agree that there aren’t really any close equivalents to its feature set today, but there are some tools like Rive and Lottie that I’d consider modern day reimaginings for many multimedia workflows.
Yes, I know what you mean. I gave up on Adobe Animate.
Pixi is great for anything that is a texture, then it is really fast. Otherwise it is not a flash replacement.
I do not use it for vector animations, but spritesheets or a webm video overlay is what I would use in your case.
yeah, I really didn't want to use video. The vectors are around 64kb per cut scene. I don't want to create several Mb worth of mp4s for each one.
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It was also leaking memory, which made it very unsuitable for anything long running (like long-running screen displays, ask me how I know).
This is a misconception. AS3 actually had great garbage collection, and solidly written AS3 code did not leak.
Flex player leaked memory like a sieve. After one day or so it would hang the computer. Maybe it was wrongly written, but leak it did. I have experienced it first hand.
Maybe it was the standalone flex player instead of the web Flash player?
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Adobe, not Apple.