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.
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.
But everyone's in an AWS world right now.
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.
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.
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!
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.
The big one it missed: the headers are mostly "The [Noun|Adjective] [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).
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.
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.
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.
I could remake several of my flash games quickly into web.
Source: I worked there at the time and knew the relevant PMs.
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".
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.
> 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...
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.
as to when they share the source, idk!
I'd feel better if he had some other core contributors, but this is a great start.
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!
Is it targeting the web? If not then it's not going to be useful for the same things as Flash was.
> HTML5/Canvas export — Export to self-contained HTML5 with JavaScript Canvas 2D playback.
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).
(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?
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.
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.
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).
I haven't looked in a while, but I believe there's music and audio production tools with similar approaches.
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.
A far more robust 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.
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.
They just look like bad rushed placeholder icons. And why does that immediately scream vibe-coded?