There are other flash "replacements", the one I like the most being Haxe [0] (transpiler to flash bytecode, javascript, and more) + OpenFL [1].
OpenFL replicates flash API [2], can work with Adobe Animate (formerly flash), and can use swf assets [3]. There are also converters from AS3 to Haxe, both available and not yet released (like the one used to migrate Forge of Empires [4]).
Haxe + OpenFL can export to flash player, HTML5 but also to native (desktop, mobile, consoles).
I think this project is aimed more at Flash's authoring story. Haxe etc. are fine as frameworks, but what really made Flash popular and useful was the IDE.
Eh, maybe I was primed, but it got me too for a second. I scanned for the usernames wondering what might be the issue, and then I noticed there was two users with similar names, k_12 and k_8 - that must be the confusion!
Because your username ends in an underscore, my brain wants to associate the number from the timestamp with your username. So I really want to read "k_ 3 hours ago" as "k_3" for your username.
A lot of others here talk about authoring being what made Flash popular, but the other big part of it is the SWF format itself, which is highly efficient because of its compact encoding and ease of parsing. Those who played Flash games on computers over a decade ago may remember what I mean --- a tiny file provides high quality vector graphics and interactivity (and the ads, although I hear that these days they're just as obnoxious even without Flash...) HTML/CSS/JS doesn't even come close, although it feels like they're slowly reinventing bits of Flash with things like WASM.
Tbf, you can produce very similar output to .swf with the likes of WebGL, Canvas, SVGs, or a combination of those technologies. But the authoring tools fostered a community of developers who didn't see themselves as programmers at all.
They saw themselves as artists. And users benefited a great deal from that.
In fact, some aspects of the IDE were so good, that some 'developers' didn't even care to use it to develop programs. They produced cartoons instead. I think Craig McCracken's Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends was the most successful work of this kind.
In the place of that creativity now, we have cleaner code, to be sure, but we now also have an awfully boring technology war, and a load of unnecessarily complicated UI code.
I might miss Flash a whole lot less, if someone created a HTML5 authoring tool with the same toolkit the Flash IDE once had.
Isn't that what Adobe Animate still tries to be? It has HTML5 authoring support, and inherits from the Flash IDE directly (not just in spirit).
Arguably I think the saddest difference between Flash and Animate is the business model. In the old web, Flash was also partly so ubiquitous because it was sometimes so commonly pirated and passed around among aspiring developers/artists. In the Creative Cloud era it is a lot tougher to pirate, and can be a huge cost overhead for small or aspiring artists.
This. And this is also the reason why gaming on HTML5 hasn't picked up yet: there's no widely supported container format. I can't easily share/distribute/version HTML5 games like it was possible with SWF containers.
On top of that, it's also not easy to "watermark" HTML5 games. With SWF, you could create custom loaders and force ads and logos, both core revenue models for gaming websites.
Do you have an email address? Your app has a bug where it's popping up some kind of Laravel debugger, and it's exposing things...like where the web-world-readable file with all the collected emails is.
I never used flash, but if this is what it was like I can see why flash was so popular. I'm loving it. Reminds of the time I spent doing WC3 maps when I was younger.
Don't listen to the naysayers, just keep at it. You got something here.
Negative comments make much stronger impressions than positive ones, alas, but when I survey this thread I don't see it as so negative (other than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21750978 which is a trollish post that we moderated).
Based on a lot of experience moderating these things, I think the issue was primarily your title. HN users react badly to grandiose claims. Also, the title "Flash replacement" is so large and generic that it was inevitably going to evoke comments about Flash replacements in general.
This is obviously a nice piece of work, and the best way to present it would have been with a more neutral title that depicted what you've built so far, and then a first comment in the thread giving the backstory of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it. That tends to seed discussion in a better direction. And in your comment you could certainly have explained that your intention is to work on a Flash replacement.
Ah I missed that. Yes, the submitted title was "Show HN: Flash is dead? Here is a replacement – version 3". Not sure that's less baity though. Arguably more, which is probably why a moderator edited it.
In some ways Unity is the new flash. It isn't pretty but it is accessible, it lets you prototype and throw together highly graphical creations with minimal technical knowledge, and then ship them on all platforms (including the web). And it's free.
The scripting interface and stored actions actually remind me more of Shockwave then Flash. I bring it up because while Shockwave was simpler to use in some ways, it also couldn't compete with Flash in terms of broader flexibility.
How about advising me on how to develop this further? I am looking for people like you :-) - those who like animations and have some experience in Shockwave / Flash. If interested please shoot me an email leisenming AT protonmail DOTcom
The advice I would give you is to maybe decide whether you want to build an animation tool or a game tool, and stick with that for now. Flash is still one of my favorite runtimes just because of how powerful it was, but there was a lot of complexity under the hood and isn't something I would recommend someone replicate as a side project.
If you want to focus on an animation tool, you'll want to think about things in terms of timelines, and how you can create independent animations with their own timelines and combine them into other timelines. A good example from your website would be the santa walk animation is one timeline, which is placed inside another timeline that moves from left to right, which is in another timeline that that controls the top level animation. Nothing needs to be scripted in this case, you just visually lay out when a timeline should start and stop and appear or disappear like any other video editor. Timelines can be played in parallel or one after the other etc...
On the other hand if you're thinking of creating a game engine you would focus creating a canvas that can programmatically add or remove VisualObjects (static images or animations that you could create in a simple timeline format) and then be able to provide other devs control over the x,y coords of where to position that visual object for every fps time interval that the game is running at. They would additionally need to be able to control which frame in the visual object to show so they can control forward, backward, stop, etc...
Sorry not much more I can provide for guidance but that would be a general start
OP here. I am looking for user advisors with some animation experience who can direct future developments (which features to develop further). Anyone interested please shoot me an email leisenming AT protonmail DOT com
Also, the Dilbert and related characters used in the demo are Scott Adams copyright and are used only for Demo purposes.
Hi const-me, darkwater2, adamzeglin,
Thanks for pointing out the error. I have found the bug, but this is not a quick fix one. Will include it in the next version.
Thanks again for the heads up.
This is not even close to the first Canvas-based animation tool, nor is it a valid replacement for Flash. It's an MVP at the level of tutorial code. A nice effort but don't oversell it.
Hi siddartpai,
By any chance are you reopening a previously created animation? If so, it may get 404'd. The server ran out of disk space and I had to delete a large number of animations.
If not, can you provide some more details: are you landing directly on the url https://its-near.me/flash2/editor? What OS/browser? Are you getting any other errors that may help me narrow things down?
There's a ton of competitors in a similar space but I think mine is the best if you want to make cartoon stories quickly. It also exports to MP4/GIF and is free. It doesn't have scripting, but if you're just looking to drag/drop things on a canvas and animate them on a Flash-like timeline, SuperAnimo is great option.
And if it wasn't bad enough that the site is using Laravel, that framework is also exposing a ton of sensitive data about the server. Perhaps disable dev mode? Anyway horrible choice of a framework.
OpenFL replicates flash API [2], can work with Adobe Animate (formerly flash), and can use swf assets [3]. There are also converters from AS3 to Haxe, both available and not yet released (like the one used to migrate Forge of Empires [4]).
Haxe + OpenFL can export to flash player, HTML5 but also to native (desktop, mobile, consoles).
[0]: https://haxe.org [1]: https://openfl.org [2]: https://api.openfl.org/ [3]: https://www.openfl.org/learn/haxelib/tutorials/using-swf-ass... [4]: https://haxe.org/videos/conferences/haxeup-sessions-2019/dan...