[HN Gopher] Ruffle: Flash Player Emulator
___________________________________________________________________
Ruffle: Flash Player Emulator
Author : rapnie
Score : 234 points
Date : 2023-10-21 11:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ruffle.rs)
(TXT) w3m dump (ruffle.rs)
| bexsella wrote:
| I check in on this project every year or so, and I'm happy to see
| that their support for AS3 is creeping towards completion. I,
| like many, wasted so many hours in flash games while in school
| that it was sad to see an element of gaming history fall by the
| wayside. At least Ruffle can pick up some of the pieces. It does
| remind me that that there is still no way to play Wolfenstein RPG
| on iOS. I have an old iPod that I bought in 2010 almost
| exclusively to play it, but that battery won't last forever. But
| for now, I think I'll go and play some Adrenaline Challenge.
| GranPC wrote:
| Wow, last I checked they were just getting started on AS3.
| Crazy to see how quickly they're getting there.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Same. I'm still looking for a way to play Inishie Dungeon
| again.
| koito17 wrote:
| About 18 months ago I recall hearing Ruffle had virtually no
| AS3 support, and that was a show stopper for me. I wasn't
| expecting them to get much done on this front for years. So in
| that time I simply installed the last version of Flash without
| the time bomb. Thankfully I am wrong :)
| neverdied wrote:
| the more I look, the more Ruffle seems to speed along. how
| did they get so good (and this fast) ?!?
| TheDong wrote:
| Unironically, because of rust.
|
| Rust's type system encodes more information than most
| languages, and so you can offload more work to it. That
| becomes more and more valuable as the project grows.
|
| Rust also attracts good developers in general, moreso than
| the average language certainly.
| bsder wrote:
| > Rust's type system encodes more information than most
| languages, and so you can offload more work to it.
|
| I suspect at least one of the developers would argue with
| you as I have listened to his rants. :)
|
| Rust is a remarkably poor match to implementing Flash
| because Flash has lots of object orientation with child
| and parent pointers--which Rust _really_ hates.
|
| > Rust also attracts good developers in general, moreso
| than the average language certainly.
|
| I suspect this is way more relevant.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Couldn't you just have a global object table and make
| your pointers indexes into this, using Rc::Refcells
| throughout? Rust is still fast with runtime GC.
| adrian17 wrote:
| More specifically (assuming we're talking about the same
| thing), the issue is with reproducing a standard C++
| inheritance hierarchy (used for both the AS2/3 native
| objects and for the ,,DOM" tree nodes), while keeping its
| overhead characteristics, devirtualisation opportunities,
| having it interact with our GC and borrow checker and
| still have a convenient, safe Rust API on top. Our
| current solution works, but has deficiencies in most of
| these aspects.
| pcwalton wrote:
| I suspect that it's two things: (1) the relatively good
| support for Wasm in Rust; (2) the Cargo ecosystem. In the
| case of Ruffle, the combination of the two seems
| particularly effective.
| Cloudef wrote:
| probably because of the sponsors
| adrian17 wrote:
| Just to clarify: we already had a ton of work towards AS3
| done before that, there was just nothing to show for it until
| we added some final missing pieces. It's not like we did
| everything from scratch in 18 months.
| neverdied wrote:
| I wish some of the long standing PRs Ruffle has would actually
| get in
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| > It does remind me that that there is still no way to play
| Wolfenstein RPG on iOS.
|
| This may change very soon :)
|
| https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE/pull/139
| Conscat wrote:
| The popularity of two similarly named Rust projects, Ruff and
| Ruffle, seems mildly unfortunate.
| neverdied wrote:
| I think people may have a tough time noticing the similarities
| between the projects
|
| whole different worlds of not confusing
| lucasyvas wrote:
| I'm curious. Is authorship of new titles even a possibility once
| this ships, or is all tooling so beyond ressurection at this
| point that it would mostly serve as away to revive the back
| catalog?
|
| Obviously the back catalog is insanely massive, but from what I
| hear a lot of developers loved making Flash games - it would be
| interesting if anyone were dedicated enough to try to revive the
| scene.
|
| It's true that it's not really needed anymore and there are some
| promising web standards evolving every day. But that never
| stopped the crazy ones from making it work anyway. People are
| still finding ways to make new games for old Nintendo hardware.
| PBnFlash wrote:
| New grounds has a "flashforward" event every year or so.
| lucasyvas wrote:
| Very cool. It would bring a smile to see this community grow
| large enough to make some noise.
|
| One of the best parts of a "dead" platform is that it doesn't
| change!
| echelon wrote:
| Flash shouldn't have died.
|
| It was an incredibly accessible authorship tool that produced
| cross-platform single-file animations that were low-bandwidth
| and scaled.
|
| We still haven't made up for its loss. Javascript + canvas +
| web stack is a mess. If the Ruffle runtime could quickly start
| up, I'd start authoring new Flash.
| neverdied wrote:
| the only thing that really died was adobe's support (if you
| can call it that) and the web plugin I was kind of shocked
| how big the community still is
| o11c wrote:
| There was the teensy problem of being an unending bag of
| security vulnerabilities. Java Applets were its only
| competitor, and Java had the disadvantage of being
| fundamentally designed without security in mind.
| neverdied wrote:
| people making login systems in flash should honestly be
| ashamed of themselves
| lmm wrote:
| > Java had the disadvantage of being fundamentally designed
| without security in mind.
|
| Nonsense. Java is one of very few languages that was
| designed to handle untrusted code from day 1, and it showed
| in having far fewer vulnerabilities than Flash.
|
| Unfortunately the JVM was slow to start up, so you had an
| even worse "grey rectangle effect" than Flash, and applets
| like all plugins were poorly integrated with the rest of
| the page. Top that off with Java not being particularly
| great for writing UI or video in (it's fine, but it's not
| great) whereas Flash had excellent tools for doing vector
| animations and you can see why Flash was more popular.
| o11c wrote:
| The very idea of having a `SecurityManager` that runs in
| the same VM is nonsensical, but that's what Java did.
| Java was designed - and widely used - as a general-
| purpose language with full platform capabilities.
|
| Flash at least implemented a VM with a fairly minimal
| surface. It can only blame its quality of implementation.
| lmm wrote:
| > The very idea of having a `SecurityManager` that runs
| in the same VM is nonsensical, but that's what Java did.
|
| Lolwhat? It's fine. It worked great. (It had some
| vulnerabilities in its history, but so does every
| sandbox/hypervisor/what-have-you out there)
| cyberax wrote:
| Not really. The whole SecurityManager thingie was a
| fiasco from the start.
|
| It granted access to _code_, not to the environment.
| Basically, you declared in the manifest that
| "com.mycompany.blah.*" wants to have full access rights,
| and SM granted permissions to that _code_. So it was
| predictably easy to subvert this, because Java code was
| not typically written in defensive style, sanitizing all
| the input data.
|
| All the modern sandboxes instead isolate the environment.
| strken wrote:
| s/Java had the disadvantage/Flash had the disadvantage/
| perhaps?
| jcranmer wrote:
| Don't forget stability issues. Flash was (before being
| banished to a separate process) the single largest
| contributor of crashes in Firefox, responsible for about
| 1/3 of them. Even in its dying days, I'd "fix" a slow page
| by wandering over to a terminal and typing "kill -9 plugin-
| container" to kill all the Flash instances on the page.
|
| I shed tears for the Flash games that were killed off by
| the demise of Flash. I don't shed any tears for Flash
| itself.
| taylorius wrote:
| Back in the day, before flash added 3d I wrote a flash
| player emulator in a Java Applet, as a "UI System" for our
| 3D engine. Looking back, I've literally no idea what the
| hell I was thinking. :-)
| mcpackieh wrote:
| It's a pity the demise of flash killed a games/art scene, but
| the rest of the web is better off with flash gone and nothing
| new to fill that role.
|
| The way some people used to make entire websites as flash
| apps that would bring old computers to their knees is not
| something I miss. Websites that should have just been static
| html, like a restaurant's website for their menu, were
| getting turned into monstrously inefficient interactive
| nightmares that wouldn't even load at all if you didn't have
| flash (which btw, broke constantly with Linux.)
|
| This kind of superfluous interactivity is still possible with
| javascript/etc, but it seems to be less popular and is more
| likely to gracefully degrade (usually the relevant content
| still displays even if you have JS disabled.)
| matteoraso wrote:
| Websites have gotten way more bloated since Flash died. I
| used to have a smartphone with 2GB of RAM, and certain
| websites would just crash the browser because it used up
| too much resources. Flash apps look light by comparison.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Yeah the beauty of flash is that it would crash your
| browser using way less than 2GB of RAM.
| TheDong wrote:
| > the rest of the web is better off with flash gone and
| nothing new to fill that role.
|
| What has filled the role of flash for commercial websites
| is native iOS and android apps, which still somehow end up
| being way larger than a flash payload and also drain
| battery faster.
|
| The truly magical bit of flash though was the small scale
| culture of making tiny little once-off things to share for
| the love of it, for free. Hacker culture, if you will.
|
| In the flash days, you could make a little toy for fun as a
| 10 year old kid without a credit card, post it on
| newgrounds for free to let others see it, brag to your
| friends, and feel good. Now, you need to buy a macbook
| ($1000) and apple dev account ($100/yr) to be able to share
| your dumb joke with your friends at school.
|
| No wonder young kids instead use the even more closed
| roblox platform to make dumb jokes rather than building iOS
| apps.
| andrepd wrote:
| > Websites that should have just been static html, like a
| restaurant's website for their menu, were getting turned
| into monstrously inefficient interactive nightmares
|
| > This kind of superfluous interactivity is still possible
| with javascript/etc, but it seems to be less popular and is
| more likely to gracefully degrade
|
| I'm sorry but-- do we live in the same planet??
|
| Either you only browse websites you find on marginalia.ru
| or there's no way you're possibly serious about this.
| danaris wrote:
| > Flash shouldn't have died.
|
| The only way this could ever have been possible is if a
| widely-available and -adopted Flash runtime was made that was
| ironclad in security _and_ reasonably performant. Ideally, it
| would also have been open-source.
|
| Honestly, while I absolutely sympathize with you and people
| who share your feelings on Flash, I genuinely believe that
| its demise was better for the web, _especially_ given that
| Adobe very clearly had either no interest in or no ability to
| make such a runtime. With Flash dead, there was huge impetus
| to make reasonably open and widely-accepted standards for
| more explicit layout, animation, and other kinds of
| presentation on the web--and now we have that! It may not
| reproduce absolutely everything Flash did (particularly on
| highly Flash-specific sites like Newgrounds, where you 're
| guaranteed to have people trying to push the boundaries of
| the medium), but it does reproduce the vast majority of what
| Flash was _actively used for_ on the web in general.
|
| Like, my God, do you remember the restaurants that used Flash
| just to do simple mouseover drop-down menus? Do you _really_
| think that kind of bullshit should still be done in Flash?
| silenced_trope wrote:
| My first job was doing Actionscript + mxml. It was fine for
| the web, even as people talked about things like crashes
| and/or security vulnerabilities. The same can be said to be
| true of Javascript today (to a much lesser extent though).
|
| But the iPhone and iOS really killed it by not supporting it,
| at least that's my memory of it. I remember feeling
| fundamentally "uncool" by doing Flash/Actionscript/Mxml
| because right when I got that first job out of college was
| when Steve Jobs was doing the "Flash sucks" rounds. "It's
| dead." etc.
|
| I remember a couple of the Flash folks at my job went to a
| Flash conference where they would do cool things with art and
| animation. When they got back they bumped into some members
| of the iOS team who back then were the new hot commodity
| (both in demand and salary). And they said to the flash
| folks: "Oh people still use Flash?" _snicker snicker_.
|
| As an entry-level at the start of my career it made me feel
| like I was deprecated out of the gate working with legacy
| tech.
|
| I still remember Actionscript fondly though as well as all
| the web games I'd play.
| phire wrote:
| Flash didn't die because it was bad.
|
| The reason why Flash became so popular is that while the
| development tools cost money, the player was free for anyone
| to install. Browsers eventually started installing Flash by
| default (mostly so they could solve some of the security
| issues with prompt updates). By 2005, Adobe had a major
| monopoly on dynamic web content.
|
| And then smartphones and tablets became a thing. Adobe didn't
| want to keep giving flash away for free, they wanted to
| exploit their monopoly for profit, by charging phone
| manufactures 25 cents per device for the right to include the
| flash runtime on their phones. Many Symbian, Windows CE, and
| later Android phones were paying this licensing fee to Adobe.
|
| I suspect this royalty fee is large part of the reason why
| Job's "Thought's on Flash" letter came about. The letter
| mostly talks about need for open standards, and it is right.
| But I think Adobe's insistence on royalty fees really rubbed
| Apple the wrong way. Maybe if Adobe wasn't trying to extort
| smartphone vendors for royalty fees, it would have survived,
| and Adobe could still be charging money for the flash
| creative tool today.
|
| Hell, if Adobe weren't trying to profit of the runtime, they
| wouldn't have had any objection to making the runtime an open
| standard and allowing anyone (including apple) create their
| own flash runtime implementations.
|
| Flash didn't die because it was bad. Flash died because Adobe
| tried to exploit their monopoly for profit, and the wider
| industry responded to the threat.
| justinclift wrote:
| > Flash didn't die because it was bad.
|
| Well, it certainly wasn't helped by the Flash Player being
| a never ending source of serious security exploits, sandbox
| bypasses, and more. :(
| phire wrote:
| Yes, but that's only a problem with the runtime
| implementation.
|
| I remember a number of people pushing Adobe to transform
| the runtime into an open standard. Then every browser
| would have been allowed to create their own
| implementations that actually fit with their security
| model.
| Guy_w_Keyboard wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective. I always liked Flash.
| The web, frankly, was a lot better when it was in its
| prime.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| > Flash didn't die because it was bad.
|
| Which is a shame because it was _bad_. Like having to run
| an app from Adobe to clear out pernicious tracking cookies
| kinda bad.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Adobe still offers Animate as part of Creative Cloud and you
| can use that to build AS3 movies. If you want AS2 you have to
| go back to at least CS6, though CS5.5 is preferred as it has
| significantly wider FLA support. (Don't ask me why that was
| removed in CS6.)
|
| If you don't like the idea of paying Adobe money you _can_ use
| Apache Flex, which is the FOSS version of Adobe 's toolchain.
| That's a command line compiler tool, of course, and it only
| compiles AS3 files, so you'll still need to author and link
| graphics separately, and for vector art stuff you'd probably
| need to find a way to convert SVGs to SWFs, embed them in your
| main SWF thru some weird class declaration magic in Flex, and
| deal with the subtle masking problems that would cause.
| neverdied wrote:
| is the authorship of bew titles possible? yes, it never
| stopped. check out the flash forward jam NG hosts annually
|
| there are a few open source tools that can create SWFs, but the
| old adobe tools are the best unfortunately (up until cs6)
| thankfully those programs are floating around out there
|
| the only thing about flash that really seemed to die was
| support from adobe (and they had long since stopped caring,
| good riddance) and the browser plugin itself. all the rest is
| all still up and going
| jezzamon wrote:
| Yes, it's still possible. Unity has a lot more mindshare
| though. I think what made flash work was everything was made
| with flash, so there was a community around it
| grishka wrote:
| On Windows, you can still run old versions of Flash no problem.
| On macOS, however, it's more complicated because all those
| versions are 32-bit. On an M1 Mac you would be better off
| setting up a Windows VM and running Flash in that. On Intel you
| can install macOS Mojave, the last one with 32-bit support, on
| a separate partition.
| dur-randir wrote:
| >Is authorship of new titles even a possibility
|
| We still write fresh new AS3 code at $work. All IDEs and
| tooling are running fine on W10/W11.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Why? For what? Flash/flex is dead?
| JoeyJoJoJr wrote:
| Curious, are you writing Adobe Air apps? I assume the only
| reason anyone would be writing new AS3 code is to maintain an
| old Adobe Air app. I ask because the I maintain one and I
| find the tooling and IDE experience brittle and horrible.
| dur-randir wrote:
| We had one Air app, but it got rewritten into Unity
| (mobile) and is now retired. No, this one is a real Flash
| app (MMO game), users run it in one of two ways:
|
| - flash plugin bundled into electron, for players with old
| hardware, ~30% user base - Flash transpiled into TypeScript
| transpiled into ES5 JS, with custom runtime based on WebGL
|
| The whole runtime is kinda like Ruffle, but we don't
| support all Flash capabilities, just what was required to
| make app running (but it's still a lot of API surface).
| neverdied wrote:
| The Ruffle dev team are a bunch of wizards. There have been other
| projects out there trying to do what they are and they took years
| and years to get there.
|
| I'm not sure how they got as far as they have in a fraction of
| the other's time, but they're doing something right. the adoption
| of it is very noticable. eat shit, Jobs.
| dividendpayee wrote:
| This is neat. I hadn't seen it before. I'm still convinced that
| the internet -- and young, first-time programmers -- lost a
| really valuable tool with Flash. It's a shame they could never
| get the security paradigm to work. Flash Applets had a lot of
| capability and a rare low barrier to entry.
| dikei wrote:
| Back when being a student, I remembered following GNU Gnash
| effort to support for AS2 and AS3, they took years, but in the
| end, still could only make it work partially. Flash was still
| dominant in the browsers at the time, yet nobody managed to port
| to Gnash before it died.
|
| I wonder how Ruffle get it working so fast.
| neverdied wrote:
| they were probably less anal than GNU over licences
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Why would the license matter to implementation speed?
| neverdied wrote:
| it tends to be hard to reverse engineer something with an
| explicit agreement that if you use it, you will not reverse
| it
|
| or at least, that was the fear at the time so, imagine
| making a program like gnash, without installing flash
|
| as it turned out, adobe never could actually enforce such a
| thing, but that didn't stop gnash from absolutely turning
| into a ghost town
|
| memory is a bit hazy, but thats the gist I got back then
|
| they were so careful, they buried the project, well done
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Oh, you mean they were careful about licensing on the
| _in_ side, not the output side. I wouldn 't call it
| "anal" to want to avoid lawsuits.
|
| Edit: You can't edit in
|
| > as it turned out, adobe never could actually enforce
| such a thing,
|
| and not explain it - did the courts change their whole
| view of reverse engineering or something?
| haolez wrote:
| I don't have knowledge specific to this case, but the
| license limits who you can accept code from.
| Nevin1901 wrote:
| Is there a website where I can play old flash games using ruffle?
| neverdied wrote:
| Newgrounds, armorgames and bubblebox all use Ruffle for their
| flash games
| ackfoobar wrote:
| You can install their browser plugin. I think all Orisinal
| games run fine with it.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Where do you find the Orisinal games? Looks like the original
| Ferry Halim website has taken them down.
| nosamu wrote:
| They're still up! http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/
|
| You'll need to install the Ruffle extension in your browser
| to view them.
| dhbradshaw wrote:
| https://www.coolmathgames.com/coolmath-games-and-flash
| bitwize wrote:
| A.k.a. the project which is keeping Homestar Runner content alive
| in its original form.
| neverdied wrote:
| quite a lot more than that, but aw yes, homestar runner
| bitwize wrote:
| Indeed, but honestly it would have been worth all the effort
| to keep h*r going in its original form alone.
| liquidpele wrote:
| I hate Adobe with the passion of 100 suns for killing flash like
| they did... yea it had problems, most software does, but it was
| like 20 years ahead of its time ffs, and the web has been
| ridiculously bland since they killed it. My conspiracy theory is
| that apple and google paid them to kill it to force sites to
| support mobile.
| netcraft wrote:
| Adobe capitulated, but apple killed it when it didnt support it
| on ios.
| neverdied wrote:
| apple killed it after Jobs had a hissy fit
| liquidpele wrote:
| Android did support it for a time though, it was a pretty
| good selling point in fact... but then google dropped it too
| :(
| kergonath wrote:
| Google never dropped it. Adobe did, when they realised that
| they could make money from HTML5 instead: https://web.archi
| ve.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.ado... .
| keepamovin wrote:
| I'm working on bringing Flash to iOS via browser proxy^0.
| Basically, what we do is run the browser on the server and
| stream the viewport to your regular mobile browser (ie,
| Safari). Then we use Ruffle injected into the remote page.
|
| Basically it's a "monkey patch" to give you extensions-like
| capabilities but on mobile devices!
|
| 0: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424
| circuit10 wrote:
| I remember using a browser called Puffin that worked like
| this to use Flash on iOS
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| I'm no Apple fan, but Apple killed it because Adobe was
| letting Flash be an awful, unreliable piece of software for
| years, and seemed fine with letting that be the status quo
| for a decade more. If Adobe did a better job of improving the
| stability and resource management of the Flash clients, they
| wouldn't have had to "capitulate".
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Citation needed. Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable
| or awful than browsers were. I think that flash got a bad
| rap because browser vendors didn't like it's monopoly on
| content and they wanted a slice.
| kergonath wrote:
| Adobe worked on it, and even they could not show anything
| convincing. This was the time when Flash was causing the vast
| majority of crashes on OS X. Even on Android they could not
| make it work reliably and it was plagued with security,
| performance, and overheating issues.
|
| Adobe had stopped trying years before Apple officially
| stopped caring.
| bobajeff wrote:
| If they hadn't EOLed Flash then projects like Ruffle would have
| the difficult job of playing catch up with a proprietary
| runtime that would still be in wide use.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| Flash died so Ruffle can live. <3
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Who needs a conspiracy when your product creates such a
| terrible user experience? I've never written a lick of flash,
| and I don't care to. I still have awful memories of just how
| broken Flash sites were. They'd stick out like a sore thumb
| since none of the widgets ever worked like native ones, there
| were constantly keyboard focus issues in Firefox, video never
| seemed to be accelerated and would decimate battery life, the
| privacy nightmare of the persistent cookies you'd need to load
| a flash app from Adobe to clear (permissions as with everything
| else gave the finger to the host system/browser). Who could
| forget the near constant security and stability issues? I, for
| one, am glad flash died.
|
| Flash died because while it sucked on desktop systems, it was
| somehow way worse on mobile just as mobile was becoming more
| important.
| pjmlp wrote:
| If only Web development 10 years later was half of the
| developer experience of using Flash.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Is it though? Folks using the current tech stack du jour
| have still managed to recreate the user hostility that
| Flash pioneered.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Just because I can cook in the middle of the forest,
| doesn't mean the tooling is the same as on a Michelan
| restaurant.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Well, we've now gone from "none of the widgets ever worked
| like native ones" to "there is nothing even remotely in the
| same category as OS widgets available to the developer". Not
| sure if it's an improvement.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Flash sucked. It was bad for accessibility, it was closed, it
| was slow, it was a way to force ads on us. Sure you could do
| animations, but that was not what most of use needed/wished at
| the time.
|
| The only population that liked flash were: - marketing
| departments - wanna be game devs and the teenagers that played
| their games
| zelly wrote:
| I remember celebrating when it died but looking back it wasn't
| so bad. At least from a dev perspective, working with a
| batteries-included sdk from a single vendor is a lot nicer than
| this node_modules cancer.
| dirtyhippiefree wrote:
| Video LAN Client (VLC) makes most codecs and emulators extra
| work, as even Flash plays using VLC.
| neverdied wrote:
| I have never seen VLC run an SWF file and if somehow it can,
| definitely won't be much more than embedded videos.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Media Player Classic supported SWF files, basically by using
| the ActiveX Flash Player.
| netcraft wrote:
| I wrote AS3 and mxml for adobe flex for several years. AS3 was in
| many ways ecmascript 4, and was IMO pretty far ahead of its time.
| Lots of things we get excited for today feels like stuff we took
| for granted on the web in the flash player ecosystem years ago.
| Don't get me wrong, there were times where it was a nightmare,
| but back when cross browser javascript was a struggle if it was
| even possible, we were able to ship a lot of great stuff.
| keyle wrote:
| I too did that for many years.
|
| I'd say that AS3 wasn't ahead of its time, I'd say that we were
| sent back in time when we had to abandon Flash thanks to Steve
| Jobs and the bend-over Adobe CEO at the time.
|
| AS3 was super cool, easy to learn and safe to scale amongst
| many developers. Flash had gotten pretty darn fast near the
| end... And it was all sent down the toilet.
| kergonath wrote:
| > we had to abandon Flash thanks to Steve Jobs and the bend-
| over Adobe CEO at the time
|
| For the record, that is exactly how it did not happen.
| taylorius wrote:
| I totally agree. I developed a 3D rendering engine using Flash
| + as3, and I think it's my favourite platform I've ever
| developed for. AS3 is a great language - Brendan Eich referred
| to it briefly in his Lex Fiedman interview, apparently it was
| essentially a potential successor to Javascript that never made
| it into the browser, which I found interesting. I wish it had
| become a new standard.
| dugite-code wrote:
| Oh man you can load local files. Just mucked around with the
| first game I ever made in high school, man I miss doing that
| stuff.
| accrual wrote:
| That's awesome you still have the files! I made a point to go
| and collect some of my favorite old flash games and keep them
| in a folder along with Ruffle - makes it super easy to spin
| them up again, especially as the hosts slowly go away.
|
| Some examples: Age of War, Bloons, Bowman, Charlie the Unicorn,
| Frog Blender, Impossible Quiz, Interactive Buddy, Line Rider,
| Madness Interactive, N+, Pandemic 2, Dinorun, Ratmaze, Portal,
| Red., Snowcraft, Fancy Pants Adventure
| danShumway wrote:
| There's no technical or organizational reason why it shouldn't
| have ended up this way, and I have absolutely no grounds to be
| mad about it, and Ruffle is a great project. Flash preservation
| is really valuable, and I love that Ruffle is still being
| actively developed and improved, and I wish the project all the
| best.
|
| But I am still irrationally bitter that Shumway ended up getting
| abandoned by Mozilla and that Ruffle took its place, for obvious
| reasons.
| mauricioc wrote:
| Shumway happened before Flash EOL, so it's likely that Adobe
| forced development to stop. Although Ruffle existed before
| January 2021, it flew under the radar back then. Even if Adobe
| had no hand in it, it's much easier (and less risky) to fund an
| implementation after the official one reaches EOL.
| ehPReth wrote:
| great project! I've used it to bring back some nostalgia for
| myself :)
| amjoshuamichael wrote:
| Discussions about Flash emulation always delve to Flash games,
| but beyond that, I think one of the big benefits is several
| informational websites that still rely on flash that haven't been
| able to catch up. The New York Historical Society exhibit Slavery
| in New York has a page called [The Merchant's
| House](https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/gallery_3_1.htm) where
| they go through items and explain how "Everything was touched by
| slavery." The online version of the exhibit has a lot of
| information bits that rely on flash, but that one was personally
| my favorite. One of the benefits of a project like Ruffle is that
| we can maintain these works-now that the exhibit is gone, it's
| the only way to view this written work, and reap the benefits of
| the extensive historical research done.
|
| The only thing I've seen it fail with is the [video galleries]htt
| ps://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/gallery_2_responses.htm) on the
| same exhibit site. They're supposed to be video clips that people
| took in dedicated booths after going through the exhibit. I've
| read about the exhibit extensively and it seems like these videos
| were a really good insight into the way the New York public
| viewed slavery at the time: "They have the awkwardness of amateur
| home videos: background noise, long silences, people looking away
| from the camera." (taken from The Anger and Shock of a City's
| Slave Past, New York Times) It's supposed to be a subset of some
| 400 videos, but I can't get Ruffle to work on these pages
| specifically. I've had a couple flashes of audio come out of the
| tab while trying to view one, so I know that something is going
| on, but I've never been able to watch any of the videos. Does
| anyone with more knowledge than me know what's going on here? I'd
| hate to see all that disappear.
| nosamu wrote:
| I've passed this on to the Ruffle team, thanks! They are
| working on improving support for external videos, which was
| added only a few months ago.
| ab9k wrote:
| doit
| pjmlp wrote:
| The only thing that makes me happy about Web Assembly is that we
| got our plugins back.
|
| Sure the Web stagnated a decade catching up with 2011, but thanks
| to Unity, Flutter and Blazor, among others, we're getting there.
| wg0 wrote:
| Adobe Flash is dead? I mean Adobe isn't selling it as product? If
| so, why they didn't open source the Flash player part?
|
| I wish there were a law to ensure that if you're not selling a
| software anymore, you have to leave it in public domain.
| grishka wrote:
| I asked the same question in one of the previous threads. Was
| told that most likely Flash player includes too much licensed
| third-party code that it would be too much work, if at all
| possible, to strip it out or relicense it for open-sourcing.
|
| At least all the relevant specifications are freely available
| from Adobe themselves.
|
| > I wish there were a law to ensure that if you're not selling
| a software anymore, you have to leave it in public domain.
|
| Shortening the copyright to something sensible like 5 years
| would've been nice too. Or better yet, require an exponentially
| increasing tax every year for copyright to be maintained.
| returnInfinity wrote:
| Correct, its the third parties.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Shortening the copyright to something sensible like 5 years
| would've been nice too.
|
| Even juste going down to 20 years like it used to be before
| IP portfolio owners lobbied to extend it would be a massive
| improvement already.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Usually companies don't so this because of legal risks - ie.
| Some of the libraries they used perhaps they didn't license in
| a way that allowed opensourcing.
|
| A law change could fix this. Ie. A new antique software
| preservation law could enable any software be opensourced, yet
| prevent any lawsuits relating to any actions taken under that
| law. The law could give extra incentives too, for example
| requiring that any software ever sold commercially either be
| archived in perpetuity, or opensourced. Legally archiving
| something forever is expensive, so many will opt to opensource
| it.
| kevincox wrote:
| The problem is that these products often used third-party
| proprietary components. So it often isn't possible to open-
| source it without pruning large parts of the codebase which is
| expensive and makes the released code much less useful.
| est wrote:
| > If so, why they didn't open source the Flash player part?
|
| The code quality would be an embarrassment. So many exploits
| yet to be discovered.
| trenchgun wrote:
| There is also OpenFL built on HaXe: https://www.openfl.org/
|
| Which is not an emulator, but more of a spiritual successor,
| following the same API, and with tools to convert Actionscript
| projects
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| Very exciting, I recently installed Ruffle, as I do multiple
| times per year, to check if it already supports one of my
| favourite games, but sadly it's still not there. (The game in
| referring to is Crystal Saga) It's an MMORPG, which is probably
| why it still doesn't work. But I'm sure that in time, we'll get
| there! Exciting times!!
| Dwedit wrote:
| One issue I'm having is poor audio-video sync, like off by over
| 500ms.
| shultays wrote:
| No rust in title? I am shocked
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