Building a new Flash

bill.newgrounds.com

・

528 points

・

TechPlasma

・

13 hours ago

159 comments

cableshaft ・ 11 hours ago

I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/

One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc.

That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file.

But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game.

Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.

qingcharles ・ 4 hours ago

Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
I remember trying to produce a Flash renderer in C# when we wrote DudeFactory to render out the characters after you used the Flash app to put all their clothes and accessories on. I think we cheated in the end and pre-rendered large PNGs of them all and used .NET to just layer them all with instructions sent from Flash.
https://dudefactory.com/
- pjmlp ・ an hour ago
  
  2D and 3D games, with good developer and debugging tools.
- troupo ・ 3 hours ago
  
  > Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
  This sounds like a "is there anything you can do in C++ or Javascript that you couldn't do in Brainfuck?".
  Flash was a complete authoring environment. Yes, you can replicste the output in JS+CSS (or more likely JS+Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU), but at what cost and with how much effort?
rtpg ・ 3 hours ago

It feels like we're fairly close yet so far. Lots of newer tools do have animation and tweening of arbitrary properties but then will just have bitmap image editors instead of a built-in vector editor for example. Or just make it really hard to tie all the stuff together.
The ease at which Flash CSx would just let you draw a circle in a spot, then click on it to get its script file and immediately add a little bit of behavior is magic for prototyping
notpushkin ・ 5 hours ago

I feel we need a modular verdion of Flash: standalone editor that produces just the animations with Flash-like mechanics, SDKs for major OSS game frameworks, and possibly an editor component you can use in IDEs. You then drop in animation file(s) and track them in VCS like any other asset.
Edit: but of course, the standalone variant should work for non-game animations as well!
nosrepa ・ 10 hours ago

Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used to be fun.
- fuzzy_biscuit ・ 9 hours ago
  
  Strawberry Clock is our king!
  
  Dwedit ・ 7 hours ago
  
  I was in some instant-message conversations (Romhacking related I think) with CoolBoyMan before he told me that he was Strawberry Clock.
  
  barbs ・ 8 hours ago
  
  B
gf000 ・ 2 hours ago

> is an environment that both coders and artists could use.
Maybe Rive fits this well enough? (Not affiliated, just looked into it at a time from a render engine perspective)
shminge ・ 6 hours ago

I've tried Love2D and enjoyed it but just found the lack of support for Lua was tough - how do you handle debugging and things?
wesammikhail ・ 4 hours ago

God I love the look of those old school sites. Takes me back to a happier time. Whatever happened? :(
- throawayonthe ・ 36 minutes ago
  
  newgrounds is still around though

random3 ・ 10 hours ago

I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that.

We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place.

Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area.

The tool uncovered a ton of security issues.

It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.

adithyassekhar ・ 10 hours ago

Thanks for sharing. It's stories like these I've read since childhood that got me into this. Those little adventures into remote places to work on some computers. This was my version of Indiana jones.
But everyone's in an AWS world right now.
- random3 ・ 6 hours ago
  
  It looks like there's a a bit of reversal in some areas (e.g. ML) and it may make sense to have more geographically distributed (edge) compute so maybe we'll get more diversity in the currently cloud-dominated space.
  This said, it was always cool when we could control the entire stack, but the reality was that once we scaled things up, we had to throw things over the fence to IT, DevOps, SRE and whatever name evolutions there were and the reality is AWS/GCE/Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally.
  
  viccis ・ 2 hours ago
  
  >we had to throw things over the fence to IT, DevOps, SRE and whatever name evolutions there were and the reality is AWS/GCE/Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally
  Anyone who was a dev during the "everyone is devops" fad for a while knows the pain of building something with these kinds of dependencies. Being able to claw back my time from operations on my company's dime is enticing.
mmooss ・ 8 hours ago

Very interesting. What was the objective?
- random3 ・ 6 hours ago
  
  This was around when we were trying to get Flash to work on the first iPhone, so we had a hackathon for a week. Since I was a distributed systems "hacker", I ended up doing what was needed :) and there were lots of questions related to the sizing of flash on web pages and what not. That's what started it - I simple python script that I refined during the hackathon to get the embed parameters etc.
  But once I started processing the data, it became a thing and we made a small cross-team team to get this going. We eventually expanded the effort in a few different directions and wanted to do a Flash analytics, but ended up with the internal tool only due to privacy concerns.
  
  fenomas ・ 5 hours ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  I remember using that tool internally! Personally I think I only used it to get stats of which features/APIs were popular. But I think other teams used it for QA/conformance, like finding content that occurred in the wild but wasn't covered by test cases.
  
  random3 ・ 4 hours ago
  
  Hahaha. Always cool to find users of the tools/products you build, including the obscure ones, and on HN no less :))

SonnyTark ・ 6 minutes ago

I thought about doing this for a while, I was a Flash gamedev as an indie then professionally.

Back then, once Flash projects start to scale up to get more commercial/competitive, the flash editor is no longer as useful for development and transforms to an assets creation platform that outputs loadable SWF files.

The code moves to use Air/Flex SDKs which were more or less equivalent to the tooling we nowadays get with Go/dotnet etc.

So while Flash was an amazing expression tool for learners/hobbyists and is amazing for gamejams since assets creation is part of the workflow, it did hold devs back at higher levels of production.

Many Flash devs moved to Haxe to continue creating on that platform and it managed to survive and thrive.

tombert ・ 8 hours ago

Heck yeah.

I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made.

Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember).

Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did.

If we can have a new Flash, I will be very happy.

moolcool ・ 7 hours ago

I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.
- idreyn ・ 6 hours ago
  
  Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.
  
  tombert ・ 5 hours ago
  
  Well said, and I completely agree.
  Since Flash was an animation-first piece of software that still had a fairly robust scripting system, it was able to create very unique and interesting pieces of media that can kind of only exist as they are.
  People aren't making full on TV cartoons in Construct or GameMaker. This isn't a dig at those tools, they're good software, but the animation parts of them are targeted much more towards "animation for games".
- tombert ・ 7 hours ago
  
  I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago.
  If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020.
  If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.
  
  fenomas ・ 5 hours ago
  
  They would have if they could have - answered here:
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256093
  
  odo1242 ・ 5 hours ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  There would still be the security issues, but yea this is still true
  
  tombert ・ 5 hours ago
  
  Sure, maybe, but I think if it were FOSS'd back in ~2005, then these security issues could be addressed by a larger set of eyes, including the browser-makers themselves.
  If this hypothetical universe happened, I think we'd have had something akin to WASM much earlier. Flash already had its own bytecode and VM, and even had something roughly like Emscripten [1] to compile existing C++ code to Flash.
  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossBridge
pjmlp ・ an hour ago

I disagree with it being the most fun, because I would also consider TP/Delphi and C++ Builder.
Now I do agree that even something like Unity or PlayCanvas fail short of Flash's game development experience, because the browser debugging for 2D and 3D development sucks.
- tombert ・ 35 minutes ago
  
  I have heard lovely things about Delphi’s and C++ builder’s fun factor (maybe from you on this very forum actually :) ), but I have not used those so I cannot speak to it.
  At least of the stuff I have used, Flash is the most fun. Admittedly I never really got into any other kind of graphics-first development like VisualBasic and the like. Flash just spoke to me for some reason.
Brajeshwar ・ 6 hours ago

I started my career as a Programmer and did a lot of programmatic designs. Unfortunately, I’m not artistic. So, my tools of choice for Design were Code and Mathematics.
Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn’t notice anything that interested me. I don’t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called “ASfunction” inside Flash, “What? You can write code to make the drawings do stuff?”
So, that was the magic; I can code and see things happen in real-time (no compilation, no render). And that was the only thing I did for quite a while.
Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth. I spend most of my time writing ActionScript in TextPad and compiling it with a CLI called MTASC (from the same developer behind HAXE.org).[1] If memory serves me well, I used to maintain the ActionScript syntax for TextPad.[2]
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2005/haxe-programming-language/
2. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/textpad-syntax-file-for-asmx/
- tombert ・ 5 hours ago
  
  Yeah, I actually got into Flash because I wanted to be an animator some day. I made some crappy cartoons but sadly my art skills never really improved, even with a fair amount of practice.
  But in the process I learned about ActionScript and found I had a lot of fun coding things and playing with different programming constructs.
  I keep meaning to try out haxe, it looks neat enough, but to me it's still kind of missing half of what I liked about Flash, which was the animation tooling.
casey2 ・ 7 hours ago

It's just selling a scam. I've never been impressed by a flash game, but I'm impressed by programs written in general languages daily and for longer than flash has existed.
The worst thing about tech is people who don't know any better get advertised tools that aren't sustainable and aren't suited to the job. If someone sees a flash game and says "WOW! that's so cool I wanna do that", then I don't have problem with it. But if people want to learn a language and are handed an SRS app, or want to make a unique game and are told to use an engine that's when it becomes harmful (and in many cases viral due to network effects)
- tombert ・ 6 hours ago
  
  I gotta admit I don't really know what you're talking about.
  I think Flash was fun to develop in. It was easy and fun to write a game in it and it was something a lot more approachable and easier to distribute than trying to cobble together something with OpenGL or DirectX.
  Also, I think a lot of the games on Flash actually are fun. I played through Mystery of Time and Space a few months ago and it still holds up. The puzzles are clever, the jokes are funny, the art is likeable, it's a good game.
  But what I liked about Flash was that, because it was so approachable, there was a lot of creativity to stuff. A lot of the games weren't good in any kind of "objective" sense, but there was at least a distinct lack of cynicism with a lot of them. The people who made the games weren't doing it for money, they were doing it because they thought it would be cool to make a game. Some games, like Pico's School for example, were unlike basically anything that had come before it. Is Pico's School a masterpiece of game design? Nah, but it's certainly unique, and it was something that could be played on pretty much anyone's computer.
  
  wisemang ・ 6 hours ago
  
  Totally. I remember a thing where there were four horses that each had an a capella part and you could click each horse to bring that part in or silence it. They all harmonized together and the silly little animations for each was a nice touch. I want to say circa 2005.
  [edit] well that wasn't hard to find: https://www.numuki.com/game/singing-horses/
  Anyways yes the security was abysmal but I’m sure it enabled creativity that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise.
- Nekorosu ・ 9 minutes ago
  
  That's absurd.
- ajkjk ・ 2 hours ago
  
  a "scam"? really? I don't think there's one person who used flash and felt scammed somehow.

HanClinto ・ 12 hours ago

> .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them.

The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.

adrian17 ・ 11 hours ago

AFAIK the .fla format was never fully documented or reverse engineered by anyone (FFDEC has an exporter, but not importer), so this alone would be a bold claim.
- samsartor ・ 12 minutes ago
  
  https://ruffle.rs/ is pretty solid
- undefined ・ 9 hours ago
  
  [deleted]
gs17 ・ 8 hours ago

I'm very curious if the "ActionScript-to-C# transpiler" will actually work as well as he's hoping.
- tombert ・ 6 hours ago
  
  I'm cautiously optimistic that it could work.
  It's been quite awhile since I've written ActionScript [1], but I remember when I wrote it I didn't write it significantly differently than C#. You still have similar Java-style OOP semantics with types that I think wouldn't be too hard to map into C#, especially if you're willing to be dirty and use reflection.
  [1] Gah, has it really been almost fourteen years? Time is stupid.

pushedx ・ 8 hours ago

Every so often over the past 15 years I've had this exact thought, "The world needs something which is exactly like flash. Not kind of like flash, exactly like flash."

A whole generation of people learned how to create art, games, music, animations, using flash, and the same kind of tool hasn't existed since then.

I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.

tombert ・ 7 hours ago

I agree, I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer, and it's one of the few things I miss about moving to Linux away from Windows.
I can still run Flash MX 2004 via Wine and play with that there, so it's not "lost media" or anything, but what I want is something as close to Flash as possible, that runs on Linux, and gets regular updates, and that doesn't require I subscribe to it for forever.
I have a perpetual license to ToonBoom (that I bought when they were still doing perpetual licenses), and ToonBoom is very cool software, but it's purely an animation software. I also have a license to Scirra Construct 2, and that's pretty neat as well, but in my mind that's basically a game engine. Flash was this cool, weird hybrid of both a game engine and artistic software that I haven't found a good replacement for.
With Flash, you could make a cartoon without touching ActionScript. It was designed around animation. If you wanted to extend the cartoon you could then add code, piecemeal, and if you wanted to make a full game then you could make a full game. It was great.

spondyl ・ 9 hours ago

This post raises a few flags in my mind that it was at least partly generated by an LLM? That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful.

The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spelling and grammar with em-dashes.

The "Not just" parts stick out like "Not just play them back — edit them" as well as "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment."

Anyway, best of luck to the author with their project!

sneak ・ 9 hours ago

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LL...
- roywiggins ・ 8 hours ago
  
  > This document has been through ten editing passes and it still has tells in it.
  The big one it missed: the headers are mostly "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]". LLMs (maybe just Claude?) love these. Every heading sounds like it could be a Robert Ludlum novel (The Listicle Instinct, The Empathy Performance, The Prometheus Deception).
- zahlman ・ an hour ago
  
  Huh. This page claims "This website requires JavaScript." at the top, yet I can read everything fine. TFA on the other hand is blank without JavaScript.
GaggiX ・ 9 hours ago

>That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful.
If you look at the icons of the tools in the image they appear to have been generated using a LLM. So yeah it's probably vibecoded a lot, it would be cool if the author reports how much and how it was used but I don't think newgrounds would like it much.

bouncyhat ・ 8 hours ago

It makes me so happy to see this. When I was in high school Flash was THE way that you could practice programming games with the instant feedback of graphics animation, key input, and playing sound. I enjoyed it so much that out of college I joined the Adobe Platform team right around 2008. I worked in the SF office which was formerly the Macromedia HQ before Adobe bought them out.

There were some really cool Flash tools in the works around then. Some internal developers had gotten some version of Flash Alchemy to run Doom in the browser. There was a lot of work going on to add proper GPU integration into the platform. I got to see some cool prototypes. Ultimately though, my timing was poor. This was right around when Steve Jobs decided that the iPhone shouldn't run Flash. The internal lore/rumor mill was that some PM had missed Steve Jobs reporting crashes in Safari enough times that Jobs was just DONE with Flash and had decided to kill it on his platform. I have no idea how true that was.

There was a mad scramble at Adobe to try to figure out how to keep Flash running on the iPhone. The AIR team was actively looking into reverse engineering solutions so they could essentially deploy Flash apps that didn't look like they were written in Flash. They tried to rally the community with a "We <3 Flash" campaign. It didn't matter. Flash was taken off the iPhone and Adobe made the call to give up. In 2009 after a few waves of 2008 recession cuts they slashed a huge part of the platform team and I knew it was over.

There were a lot of reasons that Flash probably needed to go, but I wonder about what the web would have been if it hadn't been killed around that time. Regardless I hope this project succeeds. <3 Flash.

whywhywhywhy ・ 10 hours ago

Think in this day and age starting your project off saying it's open source but making sure to open the patreon first and take money before the repo is a bad start when the reason for the project existing is a closed source paid product is being discontinued.

Especially if the dev is working on a sound editor, something Flash doesn't actually need before even having an outputted example up and running or even a video of it working.

K0balt ・ 9 hours ago

Hmm.

socalgal2 ・ 5 hours ago

I get that Flash hit a sweet spot. I'm not sure I get why nothing has really replaced it. There are other apps that give you animated vector graphics, in an IDE, with coding.

Here's 2?

https://rive.app/editor

https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/

I believe Unity doesn't do flash style vector animations. It will take in SVGs, turn them into meshes and apply skeletons. That said, it has replaced Flash in turns of the 1000s and 1000s of web games made with it.

https://poki.com/en/unity

https://itch.io/games/platform-web (majorty are Unity?)

Fun history: There was a flash like (vector animation program) for the Apple II called Fantavision.

https://youtu.be/8_Bm8bidrpE?t=40

It would export executables IIRC.

pjmlp ・ an hour ago

All of those alternatives fail at debugging, because to this day browser teams don't consider 2D and 3D debugging tools something worthwhile having on developer tooling.
So in some cases you need a native build to try to replicate browser issues, and then being able to plug into RenderDoc, Instruments, PIX,....
Flash had the tools.
emi2k01 ・ 4 hours ago

I tried Rive Editor and I could not export my animation unless I upgraded to a paid plan, not even to a proprietary format. The free plan is is just a demo with no real world usage, not even for hobby.
A bit mad because I spent more time playing with it than I would like to admit

999900000999 ・ 10 hours ago

Unless this is open source I don't see the point.

We can't trust closed source software for content creation tools.

What happens when he gets bored?

However, I LOVE C# and would totally be down to contribute if it's open source.

grimgrin ・ 10 hours ago

".fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them."
as to when they share the source, idk!
- 999900000999 ・ 9 hours ago
  
  Great.
  I'd feel better if he had some other core contributors, but this is a great start.

pjmlp ・ an hour ago

This is a very great idea, Flash authoring was gold, and we already had a class of games in 2010, that 16 years later WebGL/WebGPU still fail to repeat, in available games and development tools.

alhazrod ・ 11 hours ago

I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...

fenomas ・ 8 hours ago

If it was possible they would have loved to - certainly by 2012 or so, and more likely by 2008-9. The reason I heard they couldn't is that by that time Flash Player was a massive 10+ year old codebase with lots of parts that were licensed or external, and nobody had ever tracked which parts would be to be relicensed or rewritten.
Source: I worked there at the time and knew the relevant PMs.
- tombert ・ 5 hours ago
  
  That doesn't surprise me, honestly.
  I wish they had been able to figure out how to do it, but licensing and patents and whatnot have held back lots of innovation.
Dwedit ・ 3 hours ago

Adobe open-sourced the ActionScript 3 interpreter way back in 2006.
cube00 ・ 10 hours ago

They couldn't because it lives on in Adobe Animate which Disney as a customer among others.
- egypturnash ・ 10 hours ago
  
  Which they have recently said they will be dropping all support for: https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-...
  A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".
  
  lelandfe ・ 8 hours ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  If you follow their mea culpa link, it says they're keeping (a type of) support.
  > Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers...
  > Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features.
  Of course, in my experience, such a lifeline never lasts much longer than the furor that earned it...
  
  egypturnash ・ 6 hours ago
  
  Yeah, if I was in a Animate studio I sure would be putting some energy for the entire last month into finding a good crack for it so we could deal with our old files, and talking about our plans for how to deal with the major hit the production pipeline would take when we picked a new animation program and started retraining everyone on it.
  
  PaulDavisThe1st ・ 9 hours ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents.
  I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.
  
  egypturnash ・ 7 hours ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  There were zero open-source options at the time. Flash/Animate was the only digital ink-n-paint solution that was even vaguely affordable to the hobbyist or small studio for many years. Most studio-quality 2D programs were proprietary solutions developed in big studios like Disney.
  People started using Flash for professional work around 1995. "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the name "open source" was coined in 1998 and it took a while before anyone but programmers gave even half a damn about it.
  The first open-source studio-quality 2D animation package I know of was OpenToonz from 2016, which was a relicensing of a commercial package that dates back to the late eighties or the early nineties - Wikipedia just mentions v3 from 1993.
  But anyway now there is a dude working on an open-source Flash clone that can read the editor source files, so all these people you have next to no sympathy for have something to celebrate.
  
  PaulDavisThe1st ・ 4 hours ago
  
  > "Open source" barely existed as a concept then,
  I was introduced to "free software" and the GPL in 1986, as a PhD student at the European Molecular Biology Lab (Heidelberg).
  Your historical revisionism doesn't sit well. Yes, "open source" came later because some people didn't like the specifics of the GPL and wanted a term that could describe "source available" software under a variety of license. But by 1998, I'd already been contributing to GPL'ed projects for more than a decade.
  I'm well aware of the lack of free/libre alternatives to Flash. But that wasn't my point at all. I'm not saying that people failed by choosing Flash over some (mythical) free/libre alternative. I'm saying they failed by choosing Flash, period.
  Before proprietary software, there were almost no creative tools that were proprietary. Nobody bought proprietary paint, or proprietary paint brushes, or proprietary table saws, or propriety anything. The software showed up, and everyone was so gaga about what you could do with it that they just forget about the fact that XYZ Corp. controlled the tools 100%, and dived in. There were people warning them, but those people were ignored.
- undefined ・ 8 hours ago
  
  [deleted]

IvanK_net ・ 9 hours ago

In 2012, I created IvanK.js - a Javascript library with the "Flash API" for quickly remaking ActionScript 3 games into the web environment. But it required WebGL, which as not very well supported back then.

I could remake several of my flash games quickly into web.

https://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=bitmaps

lukan ・ 37 minutes ago

I used it, thanks for making it. (Did not released something with it, though)
I switched to EaselJS, as this was supposedly the official supported libary of Adobe Animate, but then later settled with pixijs.

graypegg ・ 10 hours ago

Exciting! But I can't seem to find any where I can take a peek. It looks like a lot of UI is at least there, and the post makes some big promises about what's already done.

The vector icons in the side bar have the distinct cruft of LLM-generated SVGs, so just ideally hoping it isn't a quickly-made UI shell. The big claims about .fla import make me a bit skeptical. Though even so, we're not owed anything and I think it's a cool idea to share!

01100011 ・ 8 hours ago

I know very little about this space, but wasn't Haxe(https://haxe.org/) supposed to be a sort of next-gen, modern Flash replacement?

gs17 ・ 8 hours ago

That's more of an ActionScript replacement if anything. What made Flash great to use was the combination of a good art/animation tool with scripting support in an easy to use package that exports to a format anyone can (well, could) run fairly consistently in their browser. I don't think a lot of people miss AS3 without the rest of the tooling.
benoau ・ 8 hours ago

Haxe provides a similar syntax to ActionScript, but it was OpenFL built on top of Haxe that provided similar APIs.
https://www.openfl.org/
Brajeshwar ・ 5 hours ago

Yes, not the Flash IDE per se, but an ActionScript Editor/Compiler. Nicolas from motiontwin.com released a tool called MTASC, which later gave birth to HAXE.
Dwedit ・ 3 hours ago

Notably, Dead Cells was made using Haxe.

theanonymousone ・ 38 minutes ago

Isn't that Flutter, i.e. an exotic language plus skipping DOM and drawing into a canvas?

Brajeshwar ・ 6 hours ago

I personally believe that Flash has had its day and should die a Hero, rather than be resurrected to become a villain.

For being open-sourced, it was a pretty hot topic, especially at an interesting gathering inside Macromedia in the summer of 2005. Little did we know (or kinda) that it was going to take a different path with Adobe that Christmas.

Honestly, I think, Flash kinda died way before the iPhone was released.

ivanjermakov ・ 40 minutes ago

New Flash that can't run in the browser?

Dectanable ・ 4 hours ago

This is exactly the Ardour model (and what Aseprite did before their license change). It's a highly viable way to sustain a niche FOSS desktop app in 2026. Make the repo open source, but put a price tag on the official, signed binaries on the main website. The professionals who need this to get work done will gladly pay a fee to avoid spending an afternoon fighting with Avalonia dependencies and build environments. The starving students and FOSS purists can clone the repo and run the build scripts themselves.

hu3 ・ 7 minutes ago

Isn't it dangerous to give up all the code of a commercial software in the age of LLM?
Competition can clone the project in another language and lipstick it to look different.

ccppurcell ・ 39 minutes ago

The creativity and range of newgrounds content was mind blowing. The focus on fun as opposed to money making was really clear to me even as a kid. I've always had this little conspiracy theory that they killed flash because it was a threat, too easy for us to make our own culture and fun without a wealth extraction step in the middle. I know it's not true but it's just a weird little feeling I have.

tw04 ・ 8 hours ago

It's not flash until it supports homestar runner.

outlore ・ 5 hours ago

For someone like me who never got the opportunity to play with Flash, what are some modern equivalents? Is it Rive or Three.js? Or even Godot Web?

lukan ・ 35 minutes ago

Rive is closest sonce they have scripring support.
Threejs is a 3D graphic libary, something different. And godot web I never used but know of as a game engine, not a scriptable animation tool.

noelfranthomas ・ 11 hours ago

Don't know much about this space, just curious why build this when we have Rive, Spline, etc?

egypturnash ・ 10 hours ago

Approximately a quarter century of editor UI muscle memory in everyone who's used Flash/Animate professionally. And a quarter century of people being used to the precise quirks of how Flash/Animate organizes the parts for a cartoon. And a quarter century of source files in a private format that can only be read and understood by Flash/Animate.
- j45 ・ 2 hours ago
  
  Reminded me of this list of cartoons cerated with Adobe Animate (formerly flash)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...
- PaulDavisThe1st ・ 9 hours ago
  
  Who has authored anything they actually cared about using Flash in the last 15 years?
  I don't know Animate - is it basically Flash Updated (I've read here that Adobe kept some elements of Flash in Animate, but it is unclear what).
  Also, there are non-Flash players for .fla files (not editors, however).
  
  egypturnash ・ 7 hours ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Animation studios. I know for a fact that Teen Titans was animated in Flash/Animate for its entire life, for instance; that’s directly from a former co-worker who was the animation director there. Lots of small productions, too. Animate is a lot cheaper than Toon Boom Harmony so tons of hobbyists use it.
  The only difference between Animate and Flash is that SWF export got dropped eventually. And a haphazard smattering of new features got added.
  You don’t play FLAs. You load them into the editor and output SWFs. Or various video formats. There are reverse engineered SWF players, most prominently Ruffle, but this is the first I’ve heard of anyone parsing FLA files.
  FLA is the source format, it is to a SWF (or other video file exported from the editor) as a PSD is to a JPEG, or a .c file to an executable program compiled with all debug info off.
  
  PaulDavisThe1st ・ 4 hours ago
  
  OK, my mistake on .fla vs. .swf ...
  so the story is that Flash basically disappeared from the web, but evolved into a tool to do more general/extensive animation (Animate) that continues to be used today even though the output is (essentially) never .swf files? is that more or less correct?

intellix ・ 4 hours ago

I think Rive is quickly becoming a good Flash replacement. They started with vector animation and timelines and then started adding components and coding etc.

Piraty ・ an hour ago

there is electron already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087381

AndrewDucker ・ 12 hours ago

This doesn't make it clear how people will run the end products.

Is it targeting the web? If not then it's not going to be useful for the same things as Flash was.

lbourdages ・ 10 hours ago

Apart from the HTML5 export mentioned by another commenter, there exists Ruffle[1], a Rust + WASM reimplementation of Flash that can play swf files. It's used a lot on archive.org or on some websites like https://homestarrunner.com.
[1] https://ruffle.rs/
- j45 ・ 2 hours ago
  
  Ruffle looks pretty amazing.
hendersonreed ・ 11 hours ago

It says:
> HTML5/Canvas export — Export to self-contained HTML5 with JavaScript Canvas 2D playback.
- AndrewDucker ・ 10 hours ago
  
  Thank you, I missed that. Excellent news!
undefined ・ 11 hours ago

[deleted]
adampunk ・ 11 hours ago

Call me crazy, but I think the folks at newgrounds will figure out what to do with this new flash.
- nacs ・ 10 hours ago
  
  They may but note that this isn't an official Newgrounds project - this is just a user ("Bill") posting on his own Newgrounds blog that he has made this (its not Newgrounds' official blog).
  
  adampunk ・ 9 hours ago
  
  I meant Newgrounds the community.

undefined ・ 6 hours ago

[deleted]

ellg ・ 9 hours ago

Whats the key difference between this and Rive? Especially now that Rive has full scripting support? Just curious more than anything, this does seem neat, especially the fla / xfl support (although for new things this doesnt seem like a huge killer feature)

nickpsecurity ・ 12 hours ago

I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial.

(Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.)

It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source.

I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?

cosmic_cheese ・ 12 hours ago

Of the two, I think Adobe is most responsible for the decline of Flash. Even if smartphones had never entered the picture, laptops (where efficiency is important) were quickly becoming the most common form of PC, which would've eventually made Flash as it existed under Adobe untenable as well. The timeline was just accelerated by smartphones.
Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads of Adobe execs at the time. Yes, cleaning up the ball of mud that the Flash codebase had become and making it not so battery hungry wouldn't have been an easy task, but it would've futureproofed it significantly. Instead they decided to keep tacking on new features which ended up being entirely the wrong decision.
EDIT: The constant stream of zero-days certainly didn't help things either. A rewrite would've been worthwhile if only to get a handle on that.
- Shebanator ・ 10 hours ago
  
  I think Apple is more responsible. One of Flash's chief benefits to the customers who paid the big bucks was that it 'just worked' everywhere. Once Apple stopped supporting Flash on the iPhone, that story was a lot less attractive.
  The bugs were definitely Adobe's fault: as with most tech companies, they were far more interested in expanding the feature set than they were on fixing the bugs and stabilizing the platform.
  
  raw_anon_1111 ・ 6 hours ago
  
  This is a myth that needs to die.
  The first iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor and could barely run Safari. If you scrolled to fast you would get a checkerbox while Safari was trying to catch up.
  https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1732478
  If it couldn’t run Safari with decent performance, how was it going to run Safari + Flash?
  In fact when Flash finally did come to Android in 2010, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it barely ran then and killed the battery. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
  Another anecdote is that the Motorola Xoom was supposed to to be the “iPad killer” because it could show you the “real web” with Flash.
  But it came out without Flash because Adobe was late. You couldn’t even see the Xoom home page on the Xoom when it was first introduced because it required Flash.
- Marazan ・ 11 hours ago
  
  Flash was not particularly battery hungry (My go to example when HTML 5 demos started coming out was rebuilding a HTML 5 demo that was using 100% of 1 core into a flash app that used 5%).
  The reason it burned CPU cycles is that non-coders could make programs with it and they would produce the world's worst code doing so that "worked". The runtime itself was fine (efficiency wise, not all the other things).
- j45 ・ 2 hours ago
  
  It was probably hard to imagine the rise of laptops, internet, and Flash.
  Flash itself was acquired via Macromedia as well.
  Adobe's business is keeping technologies billing, and while Flash had it's flaws, the world was not ready for it to depart as soon as it did, because there was not a capable replacement available.
mikepurvis ・ 12 hours ago

The "pay to sell your work" model is basically what Autodesk does to provide a version of Fusion that's free/accessible to the hobby 3d printing market while still protecting their b2b revenue.
I haven't looked in a while, but I believe there's music and audio production tools with similar approaches.
- sfifs ・ 8 hours ago
  
  More impressively, Da Vinci Resolve is actually free with no restrictions. It is a high end video editor that film makers and professional film studios use (together with hardware and some paid features) from black magic design. Incredibly impressive. Affinity Photo and PhotoPea are also now free without restrictions.

jezzamon ・ 8 hours ago

Seems fun, I would've loved for this to be a web app though. Given flash is so tied to the web, it would be fitting if the editor itself worked like that

immy ・ 10 hours ago

Hype (YC W11) is for animators to produce HTML5 https://tumult.com/hype/

alcover ・ 10 hours ago

May the Gods be with him. The nostalgia is very strong. Opening Flash and start a new project was an immense source of joy to me in the 00's.

agnishom ・ 8 hours ago

I hope there is a feature that will let people export the artefacts to HTML5/JS.

undefined ・ 4 hours ago

[deleted]

Retr0id ・ 10 hours ago

It's impressive what people are able to vibecode these days!

latexr ・ 9 hours ago

There’s no mention of any vibe coding in the post. Believe it or not, there are people who are still able to program by themselves.
- roywiggins ・ 9 hours ago
  
  The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc. It's fine, it seems like a fun project to vibe code. Not sure about raising money on Patreon for it, but
  
  latexr ・ 8 hours ago
  ・ 9 more
  
  > The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc.
  No, not “etc”. What else looks LLM-formatted about them? Because em-dashes are not enough to claim LLM.
  Look, I get that you don’t care about proper typographic characters. You don’t have to, that’s fine. But many of us humans do.
  https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
  And going from “LLM-formatted lists” (without any certainty) to vibe-coded project is a huge leap.
  
  roywiggins ・ 8 hours ago
  
  They are very even. They are uniformly bolded. They're long and comprehensive. Most humans would have more variation in length unless they were working to a template or a style guide. A long catalogue of tools is also just way more detail than most people would put into an announcement post... but an LLM doesn't get tired and will barf all that out if you don't stop it.
  A more robust and perhaps more vivid indicator are sentences like this: "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment."
  "It's not X, it's Y" is an LLM tell. "It's a real Z" is another. Together? I'm going to conclude it's LLM generated to like a 90% certainty.
  And as the sibling notes, the icons look like LLM SVG output. They're more mangled than even a rushed human would do.
  Again, it's fine. If I had more time I'd love to try to vibecode a Flash clone.
  
  Retr0id ・ 7 hours ago
  ・ 5 more
  
  This isn't just some em-dashes, it's 126 of them in a single announcement post.
  
  latexr ・ 6 hours ago
  ・ 3 more
  
  The number is irrelevant. They are being used as separators on every list item, of course there are many. They could all be hyphens or arrows or colons and it would be exactly the same.
  Look, I’m not saying this wasn’t written with an LLM. What I’m saying is that you don’t know that judging by the em-dashes alone.
  
  Retr0id ・ 6 hours ago
  
  The number is relevant when the comment with the most em-dashes on HN (prior to 2023) had only 31. It's also not the only signal here.
  
  roywiggins ・ 6 hours ago
  
  There are no colons or semicolons, anyone who really is a stickler for punctuation would not write exclusively with em-dashes.
  
  roywiggins ・ 7 hours ago
  
  And not a single colon! Well, outside the smiley in the opening paragraph.
  Just read the first two paragraphs and there's a full stylistic whiplash. I'd bet $100 that the first paragraph was human-written and the rest were almost fully Claude.
  It's kind of creepy, like a human rolling their eyes back partway through a paragraph and suddenly speaking like Microsoft Bob.
  
  casey2 ・ 6 hours ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Nor any semicolons. Also full of nonsense. SWF fundamentally runs action script. The idea that you are going to have a AS3 to C# transpiler and a C# scripting engine AND export SWFs is incongruous. Again, "C# code executed when the playhead enters a keyframe." Now I'd love the oppurinity to learn, but ctrl+f c# here [1] shows 0 results. Though I'm sure I'm just misunderstanding the meaning here ( ≖_≖).
  [1] https://open-flash.github.io/mirrors/swf-spec-19.pdf
  
  roywiggins ・ 6 hours ago
  
  only thing I can imagine is that they are building it with Unity, hence the C#. You can compile other languages to SWF bytecode, that's what Haxe is.
- undefined ・ 7 hours ago
  
  [deleted]
- GaggiX ・ 9 hours ago
  
  I'm not the parent comment but if you look at the images they posted you can see that the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM (the SVGs).
  
  latexr ・ 8 hours ago
  ・ 5 more
  
  > the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM
  They just look like bad rushed placeholder icons. And why does that immediately scream vibe-coded?
  
  Retr0id ・ 8 hours ago
  ・ 2 more
  
  Humans tend to use free icon collections or search the web for suitable images, rather than hand-writing SVG markup.
  
  foresto ・ 7 hours ago
  
  Why even consider hand-written SVG when drawing tools like Inkscape exist?
  Sure, there are occasions to write markup from scratch, but vanishingly few in my experience.
  
  GaggiX ・ 8 hours ago
  
  They have the same same inconsistencies and incoherencies that I have encounter with LLMs creating SVG. Very different from what a human would have created (and I don't think you have to train your eyes to see it).
  
  Sebguer ・ 6 hours ago
  
  if you truly can't clock that this is AI written, you probably need to desperately develop this skill as soon as possible, because everything outside of the first sentence is so very, very clearly slop.

agumonkey ・ 11 hours ago

I wonder how much this would impact the react world

graypegg ・ 10 hours ago

I don't think a modern flash would come after web app UI in the same way it once did. The niche this would fill would be in web games/interactive media I think.

markstos ・ 9 hours ago

But will there be a browser plugin?

Dwedit ・ 3 hours ago

There is the Ruffle browser extension which will restore Flash functionality to very old websites.

purplejacket ・ 8 hours ago

Sorry, but can someone explain to me why Flash failed? Was it because Apple killed it, or other reasons? Because not open source? Too heavy? I never really got the story, or only got bits and pieces. I know a lot of people liked Flash.

raw_anon_1111 ・ 6 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257159

phendrenad2 ・ 7 hours ago

If this ships, it'll fulfill the "editor" piece of the flash equation. We're still missing the "runtime" though (if we want that old flash feeling). We'll probably need to strongarm Google into supporting it in Chrome, but that's not impossible (especially with AI-enabled coding eroding Google's moat).

cynicalsecurity ・ 10 hours ago

I feel young again.

luxuryballs ・ 3 hours ago

Now THIS is Claude Maxing! /anakin-podracer-meme

mock-possum ・ 10 hours ago

I just noticed in a dev stream for Cult Of The Lamb that they were using .fla files, what a throwback. I remember those days well!

Dwedit ・ 3 hours ago

Mewgenics had assets created using Flash.

LoganDark ・ 11 hours ago

Article title could use capitalizing Flash -- I thought it was about NAND at first.

functionmouse ・ 8 hours ago

also thought it was NAND
Computer0 ・ 11 hours ago

I thought it was a camera accessory.
- recursive ・ 9 hours ago
  
  I thought it was about inappropriate exposure in public while wearing a trenchcoat.
dmd ・ 9 hours ago

God forbid anyone read past the title.