animated vector graphics? Browsers only have data-intensive pixel graphics codecs. Also, the vector graphics support that they do have is pretty limited and slow. Anyways, I'm glad that flash is dead, because it was proprietary software and constant source for security bugs.
You say that, but Flash was basically a drawing program with a timeline - this makes it much easier to doodle all sorts of things compared to building a site with Javascript and HTML.
Yeah, despite all its shortcomings Flash had one thing and that was opening up the web to a rich UX. Today, despite all the progress in JS, CSS and browser support for page manipulation, we’re nowhere near what used to be possible with Flash
The demise of Flash killed plenty of online interactive art project, unfortunately. HTML5 didn't replace Flash as a medium for artistic experiments on the web, or it performs so bad on decent computers it's just useless.
Probably only me - but to my mind that's a shame. It's only my opinion, but I think Flash is nuts for anything new except video at the moment. I think Flash is:
- slow
- fairly unstable, even on Windows
- a privacy nightmare (cookie system)
- being left behind by browser vendors, where there is competition
Excanvas on IE and the canvas tag are really well placed for visualisations like these. I built a donut chart in Canvas recently for something I'm working on, and I'm glad I did, because I was able to do an impromptu demo with someone just the other day on my phone.
I know it's not a critical piece of engineering, and it doesn't actually matter, but I do personally find Flash dulls my enthusiasm for otherwise very nice things!
Capabilities are better, thanks to WebGL and modern JavaScript - and no proprietary tooling is needed, but the overall barrier for entry now is much higher: during the heyday of Flash any teenager could put together something silly, adapt, learn, improve, and beyond. You can’t do that anymore because there is no good, well-supported, code-free way of making art and animations without writing any code for HTML5+Canvas.
None of the kids that got started by making silly animations in Flash back in 1999-2007 could do that today: there is no paintbrush tool for the web.
Flash sucks balls because it only works well where Adobe wants it to work well, as opposed to openly accepted standards like HTML/CSS that work good enough on nearly every computer in operation.
I'm not sure if I agree with all of this. People forget flash kinda sucked.
One of the most significant ways in which flash sucked was the performance. Imo, the most famous flash game of all time is Binding of Isaac, which basically couldn't achieve a respectable, consistent frame rate even on the most powerful rigs. It's native rewrite, Rebirth, never had performance issues.
>You can't do pixel-perfect rendering
Sure you can, with canvas, and if you want to have absolutely perfect control, there's WebGL (and nice stuff like PixiJS)
>No nice pipeline for integrating vector animations/art into games
You can render SVG sprites into bitmaps, and use them in WebGL or canvas, as you mentioned, you needed to do this too in flash as well if you wanted decent performance.
>easy to make fancy + good-looking interactive UIs
If I remember correctly, most fancy game UIs were built with some framework, like flixel, which used low-level drawing primitives and built-up the UI from scratch. Alternatively you could use the full power of HTML+Js frameworks to build arbitrarily complex UIs and overlay them on your game scene.
>many of the html runtimes for new engines (Unity for instance) feel waay heavier/more sluggish in the browser
True, but they are meant to be, and meant for bigger games than flash/html5+js is. But for modern engines, HTML5 export sucks, there's no doubt about that. But that's a failure of execution, not technology. I remember Epic citadel a decade ago, which ran by compiling C++ to js with emscripten, and it worked pretty well:
Also, there' a few Electron based indie games, most notably CrossCode, which is a fun, and technically pretty well executed game, and by the devs' own admission, it's built on pretty ancient tech.
Sure. But comparatively few of those samples represent things that you would actually want to use in the real world, while there is a lot of overly shiny eye-candy, poor user interfaces and non-native widgets - things that Flash has always been notorious for.
Flash has always served a niche for what HTML and JavaScript can't easily do; the problem is that over time this is diminishing, and it's looking like over the long term Canvas and SVG will be one more nail in the coffin.
My mom was on windows, using an old version of IE. Never had any problems. Flash player compat wasn't perfect but it was more than enough to create vibrant scenes like Kongregate, Newgrounds, and ArmorGames. Anecdotal sure, but it was good enough for the scene to exist.
The main thing about the single-file thing is that it afforded the flash portal ecosystem. It was really easy to share your work as a creator without a lot of technical experience.
> but if you send someone a link to a canvas-based animation, they are more likely to be able to play it today than they ever were in the days of Flash. They can even play it on mobile.
Yeah but the problem is creating that canvas-based animation is insane, so there aren't any canvas-based animations, compared to the output of flash cartoons.
Nowadays everybody bakes out their animations to 100x the size with compression artifacts and stick them on Youtube with LESS features than flash had, a direct consequence of the decline of Flash and HTML5's inability as a platform stack to fill the gap.
I love Linux and the open web, I'm glad they exist and I want things to work on them. I just wish HTML5 as a platform had actually delivered on its promises by not missing the forest for the trees.
In 2007 flash could run 3d games, do shaders, have multiplayer, run physics manipulation, have 3d sound, do bitmap manipulation, socket programming, and had documentation built into the editor.
Even now html/J's can't do all of the things and most of the things that you can do, are not as fast. While browsers are stuck with legacies to uphold. Flash had no dom to worry about, untyped language (as3) or had css holding it back.
General argument was flash sucks because people make terrible content with it. Which is like saying I hate having hands because I trip things over.. so no limbs = no mess PERFECT.
In turn I think it helped push native apps. Since plain Js/html app just sucked in comparison when it comes to experience and capabilities.
Flash should have been open sourced. Hopefully with webgl and web assembly someone can step in and create something similar
SVG is much better at vector art use cases. Flash was horrible from user pov (constant os and browser compatibility problems, unending stream of weekly "ads can pwn your computer" level security holes, proprietary black box nature, ate your battery, hard to procedurally generate, didn't integrate with the web and dom, etc etc).
Even Flash doesn't offer hard guarantees of smooth, artifact-free animation. It has a fairly sophisticated timing model, and you can improve your chances with the "direct" wmode (vs. the default "normal"), which makes Flash draw "on top of" the browser instead of "inside" it, but it eventually comes down to the specific platform and drivers, I think.
Bullshit. Without Flash or some other plugin there'd at best have been a different standard for each browser, with the only one worth caring about being whatever IE implemented.
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