Newgrounds has done a lot of work on preserving old Flash content. Some standouts are their own Flash player and an SWF to MP4 converter, but what I find most interesting is Ruffle.
Ruffle is a Flash emulator written in Rust that can be used as a browser extension, a desktop client, or a website polyfill. It's still a work in progress, but eventually websites with heavy use of Flash content (like many late-2000s webcomics, or even Newgrounds itself) could use the polyfill to replace Flash content with WASM blobs.
The roadmap was updated recently, and provides a good overview of Ruffle's current capabilities. There's also a demo instance that can run arbitary SWFs, with a few examples available.
I don't really understand why this isn't the migration path for any legacy tech... Just containerize and emulate it. If there is a security problem, it's only inside your container. No big deal.
Ruffle is great! I just used it the other day to convert a flash website with a service manual for my outboard engine into a nice pdf. Each page was a swf file, so I only had to wget them all, convert them with ruffle, and at last convert the images into a complete pdf.
I hope this gets to whoever was in the room when Charlie Rose's show [1] switched thousands of hours of content over to Flash back when it probably seemed like a good idea - a window of perhaps a year or two as Real player faded out and video streaming over the top was finally a little stable if your link was over 2-300kbps.
I was pissed when they switched to Flash but whatever you think of the tech, or Charlie for that matter, it would be a crying shame to loose so much content. He interviewed everyone who was anyone during some eventful times. That site is part of the rough first draft of history.
Poki is also doing something similar together with Nitrome. They use technology from the guys of Away (the ones that initially brought 3D to flash). The product is called AwayFL.
1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier
2/ it's API that provided things that were not possible when browsers had none of these API (video streaming, socket programming...). At some point you could even write 2D shaders or inject C/C++ code with something called Alchemy.
Point 2 is now largely covered by browser web API, although one might argue that the performances might not be always as good as they were in flash, especially when it comes to vector graphics or realtime audio processing. But 3D and webgl are more performant than flash in the browser.
Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent, and even Adobe Animate isn't really doing exactly what flash did when it comes to authoring content for browsers. So there is still a potential market here. I'd like to see something node based when it comes to coding. Artists love their nodes.
The real problem is obviously running old flash content like games. Some of these games were really good. I remember playing one which was a hotel management simulator and it was really really fun. But it's a bit like a these jar games in the 2000' one cannot run on modern mobile phones anymore. Without an effort to preserve these, they will all be lost.
1. If Macromedia was still the author of Flash/Dreamweaver/Fireworks through the html5 transition days, I imagine all of those products would still be providing big benefits to web content creators. I genuinely believe that Adobe never understood the value of these products and the communities that formed around them. Adobe as a company didn't know how to foster and grow this half developer / half designer user base.
So now that we'll soon be moving back to opaque binary blobs with WASM, what exactly have we gained?
I know browsers have appeared to make enormous technical progress with all the new features - until you read stuff like this and realize most of it was already possible 20 years ago via Flash (Type-safe javascript as well, btw) - and partially in better quality and with less programming knowledge required than now.
> 1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier
Why is it that with all our computer power, we somehow can't create authoring tools as good as we had in the past?
HyperCard, DreamWeaver, Visual Basic 6, etc. all seem to be dramatically better for common people (read: not career programmers) than any modern equivalent we have.
On point 2: socket programming hasn't caught up to the same level of performance as Flash had. Try sending or receiving gigabits per second with WebSockets. In my own tests last year on reasonably modern hardware with a 10Gbps Intel NIC, Chrome was the worst performer (around 3Gbps before the CPU was completely saturated), and Edge was the best at around 5.5Gbps. I didn't compare with Flash last year to be fair, but historically it was much better. A native app on the same hardware was generating 10Gbps over the network at <20% CPU usage.
Let's not forget that Flash was the backbone of the ad industry back in the day as it was leveraged to produce rich media in the form of banners and interactive ads.
The other day I was researching how to add simple procedural animations to some web-based interactive content for a museum.
This would have been a breeze with Flash. You just passed the .fla to the animator/illustrator and they would create the item in the library for you. Then you could simply animate that display object in your code and the artist would be able to modify it without breaking anything.
I came up with this solution using DragonBones[1] so that the artists could work on their own. And then I could render those animations with Pixi[3].
I agree an all-in-one solution would be much nicer but not sure there is a market for it.
Yeah, there are a few really good things that will soon be lost forever, for instance the classic National Lampoon "Rigging of a Ship" Flash movie. Also, I'm not sure, but I think the absolute Scott Adams classic story of how he passed as a-hole mission statement consultant "Ray Mebert" was posted in Flash at the San Jose Mercury News' site years ago. (This is literally live-action Dilbert trolling of teh Logitech exec tean that all think this guy is an idiot, but are afraid to say so because he was brought in by the CEO...) If exists on the net at all anymore, it's probably only at Archive.org.
Went down the rabbit hole because of point 2 and ended up at some Chrome experiments. There is some amazing stuff like that out there. I can't believe there aren't more browser-based 3D games.
Regarding point 1, I’m not super familiar with the flash IDE, but I would guess that the closest thing we have today are fantasy consoles like PICO-8 or TIC-80. Thinking about it, Scratch (scratch.mit.edu) also kind of fulfills the niche. Flash was obviously way more powerful, though.
If anyone knows anything current similar to the flash IDE, I’d be curious to hear about it.
I don't know if everyone here is familiar with this, but the decline of Flash began or was greatly influenced by Apple's decision to not let flash run on iPhones/iPads. Steve Jobs even wrote an open letter about it[1].
I ran in to some hassles just last week with some online proxy voting site for some shares I hold. I couldn't see the document they were asking me to vote on because this well known proxy vote site "securely" hosts the content using Flash. Of all the ridiculous things to use. I'd be willing to bet the document was a PDF underneath it. My only option was to request a paper copy of the document so that I could make the right decision which is an utterly absurd waste of ink and paper.
“Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages from its site and Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.”
This blocking seems really dumb to me. At least throw up a warning. It will cause old web content to be completely inaccessible, throwing away years of human creativity. Most likely there will be some legacy systems somewhere that will then use a hacked version of flash laden with malware because it’s the only thing available so some legacy system written by long gone people can be used.
I think hacked versions of Flash are statistically more likely to be secure than the official version, though.
Why do you think that the official Flash player would provide a secure environment going forward? It never has, and so without Adobe's active support, I imagine it would get even worse. Official Flash has always been a security nightmare.
I didn’t have Flash on my computer for several years, but I installed it last week. I'm planning to take the GRE, which is being given remotely due to Covid. A proctor watches you through your webcam, which I find this completely creepy, but what can I do?
I took the GRE in 2011 and I recall driving to a strip mall in rural Seattle and sitting in front of a Dell PC, underneath moldy ceiling tiles, and doing the test on some kind of virtualized, _greyscale_ Windows 3.1 environment. My memory may be exaggerating at this point, but it was shockingly old.
My wife is currently in didactic year of PA school. When they went remote, there was a period of about half a day when they told all of the students they had to turn on their cameras (but not their mic) via Zoom during every test the rest of the year. They changed their minds quickly when they realized most of the students were not on board with it and most of the faculty didn't want to have to 'proctor' over Zoom.
I'm still confused by the statement 'Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.' are they literally going to stop the flash player loading SWF files on the 1st of January?
What are we to do about all the useful tools, pages and games that were either written in or utilized Flash? I realize some of this stuff will be rewritten in HTML5, but what about the things that are not?
How will we preserve all those classic flash games that we wasted our time playing in the early 2000s?
Why can't Adobe open source flash? It would be a massive help to people trying to create alternative implementations of flash to keep legacy websites working
I have http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html in my bookmarks. A really beautiful depiction of the Sixtine Chapel. But I have no Idea how to load it on a modern OS. I have also no idea if the vatican has plans to update ist for more modern technologies.
Installing Flash used to be one of the very first things I did when configuring a new system. Now? I can't even remember the last time I actually used it.
Flash was a dumpster fire of performance and security issues and being a closed platform in direct competition with the web we have today, I won’t shed a tear over this.
What will be sorely missed though, are the brilliant authoring tools that Flash came with. For a very short time in history there was one tool that allowed designers and developers to truly collaborate on rich interactive experiences. It was amazing what that unlocked.
I don't get it why my Windows 10 installation is still downloading updates for Flash Player. I deselected it in some setting which was to be found somewhere (Windows 10 settings are a horrible maze), but for some reason it still thinks it needs to protect me from this deactivated piece of malware.
Gosh, I always think the websites in the FLASH era is the most versatile and really have no limitations, just see today's websites, all plain, simple, and boring as hell. Yeah I can understand the vulnerabilities and slowdown of Flash, but it really shines at that golden age! R.I.P
Basically it's a massive bundle of flash (and other plugins) together with a curated list of games and animations. It spawns a local web server to trick the games into "thinking" they are still being run on their original servers (this doesn't work for games that required a multiplayer server obviously, it's only to workaround the common portal exclusivity rights that were common in the golden era of Flash games).
It's really a labor of love and an incredible window into a slice of web history from the early 2000's
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frigid|5 years ago|reply
Ruffle is a Flash emulator written in Rust that can be used as a browser extension, a desktop client, or a website polyfill. It's still a work in progress, but eventually websites with heavy use of Flash content (like many late-2000s webcomics, or even Newgrounds itself) could use the polyfill to replace Flash content with WASM blobs.
The roadmap was updated recently, and provides a good overview of Ruffle's current capabilities. There's also a demo instance that can run arbitary SWFs, with a few examples available.
https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player
https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel
https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
Roadmap: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap
Demo: http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/w...
[+] [-] triangleman|5 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-...
[+] [-] londons_explore|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] birktj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihuman|5 years ago|reply
https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
[+] [-] jimmySixDOF|5 years ago|reply
I was pissed when they switched to Flash but whatever you think of the tech, or Charlie for that matter, it would be a crying shame to loose so much content. He interviewed everyone who was anyone during some eventful times. That site is part of the rough first draft of history.
[1] https://charlierose.com/
[+] [-] smerik|5 years ago|reply
https://www.pocketgamer.biz/interview/73491/interview-poki-p...
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bborud|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chessmango|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw_m239339|5 years ago|reply
1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier
2/ it's API that provided things that were not possible when browsers had none of these API (video streaming, socket programming...). At some point you could even write 2D shaders or inject C/C++ code with something called Alchemy.
Point 2 is now largely covered by browser web API, although one might argue that the performances might not be always as good as they were in flash, especially when it comes to vector graphics or realtime audio processing. But 3D and webgl are more performant than flash in the browser.
Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent, and even Adobe Animate isn't really doing exactly what flash did when it comes to authoring content for browsers. So there is still a potential market here. I'd like to see something node based when it comes to coding. Artists love their nodes.
The real problem is obviously running old flash content like games. Some of these games were really good. I remember playing one which was a hotel management simulator and it was really really fun. But it's a bit like a these jar games in the 2000' one cannot run on modern mobile phones anymore. Without an effort to preserve these, they will all be lost.
[+] [-] seanalltogether|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xg15|5 years ago|reply
I know browsers have appeared to make enormous technical progress with all the new features - until you read stuff like this and realize most of it was already possible 20 years ago via Flash (Type-safe javascript as well, btw) - and partially in better quality and with less programming knowledge required than now.
So did we eventually come full circle?
[+] [-] bsder|5 years ago|reply
Why is it that with all our computer power, we somehow can't create authoring tools as good as we had in the past?
HyperCard, DreamWeaver, Visual Basic 6, etc. all seem to be dramatically better for common people (read: not career programmers) than any modern equivalent we have.
[+] [-] samcrawford|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kripy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pier25|5 years ago|reply
The other day I was researching how to add simple procedural animations to some web-based interactive content for a museum.
This would have been a breeze with Flash. You just passed the .fla to the animator/illustrator and they would create the item in the library for you. Then you could simply animate that display object in your code and the artist would be able to modify it without breaking anything.
I came up with this solution using DragonBones[1] so that the artists could work on their own. And then I could render those animations with Pixi[3].
I agree an all-in-one solution would be much nicer but not sure there is a market for it.
[1] http://dragonbones.com/en/index.html
[2] https://pixijs.io/examples/#/plugin-dragonbones/eyetracking....
[+] [-] dublin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selimthegrim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yhippa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winrid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmrdsprklpny|5 years ago|reply
If anyone knows anything current similar to the flash IDE, I’d be curious to hear about it.
[+] [-] htk|5 years ago|reply
[1]https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
[+] [-] srathi|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-N...
[+] [-] morganvachon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Twirrim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|5 years ago|reply
I recommend everyone that uses Citi's virtual CC's to do the same. They need to get off their ass and fix this.
[+] [-] mehrdadn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|5 years ago|reply
This blocking seems really dumb to me. At least throw up a warning. It will cause old web content to be completely inaccessible, throwing away years of human creativity. Most likely there will be some legacy systems somewhere that will then use a hacked version of flash laden with malware because it’s the only thing available so some legacy system written by long gone people can be used.
[+] [-] cryptoz|5 years ago|reply
Why do you think that the official Flash player would provide a secure environment going forward? It never has, and so without Adobe's active support, I imagine it would get even worse. Official Flash has always been a security nightmare.
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|5 years ago|reply
Anyway, this system apparently requires Flash.
[+] [-] elromulous|5 years ago|reply
They have no incentive to improve. They are a government funded "non profit" monopoly.
[+] [-] johnwalkr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eben-ezer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Majestic121|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aclelland|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FillardMillmore|5 years ago|reply
How will we preserve all those classic flash games that we wasted our time playing in the early 2000s?
[+] [-] jason0597|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omnibrain|5 years ago|reply
There are even more http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/index_en.html if you dig around a little, but I have no clue how to preserve them...
[+] [-] space_ghost|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jonnax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] micheljansen|5 years ago|reply
What will be sorely missed though, are the brilliant authoring tools that Flash came with. For a very short time in history there was one tool that allowed designers and developers to truly collaborate on rich interactive experiences. It was amazing what that unlocked.
[+] [-] qwertox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egberts1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notRobot|5 years ago|reply
The only sad thing about it is that it'll become much harder to play thousands of old-school flash games.
[+] [-] terrycody|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glaberficken|5 years ago|reply
https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
Basically it's a massive bundle of flash (and other plugins) together with a curated list of games and animations. It spawns a local web server to trick the games into "thinking" they are still being run on their original servers (this doesn't work for games that required a multiplayer server obviously, it's only to workaround the common portal exclusivity rights that were common in the golden era of Flash games).
It's really a labor of love and an incredible window into a slice of web history from the early 2000's
[+] [-] cosmotic|5 years ago|reply