[HN Gopher] Building a new Flash
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Building a new Flash
Author : TechPlasma
Score : 128 points
Date : 2026-03-04 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bill.newgrounds.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bill.newgrounds.com)
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| 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?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 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.
| Marazan wrote:
| 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).
| HanClinto wrote:
| > .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 wrote:
| 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.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| 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.
| adampunk wrote:
| Call me crazy, but I think the folks at newgrounds will figure
| out what to do with this new flash.
| hendersonreed wrote:
| It says:
|
| > HTML5/Canvas export -- Export to self-contained HTML5 with
| JavaScript Canvas 2D playback.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Thank you, I missed that. Excellent news!
| lbourdages wrote:
| 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/
| cableshaft wrote:
| 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.
| nosrepa wrote:
| Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used
| to be fun.
| alhazrod wrote:
| 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...
| LoganDark wrote:
| Article title could use capitalizing Flash -- I thought it was
| about NAND at first.
| Computer0 wrote:
| I thought it was a camera accessory.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wonder how much this would impact the react world
| graypegg wrote:
| 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.
| noelfranthomas wrote:
| Don't know much about this space, just curious why build this
| when we have Rive, Spline, etc?
| alcover wrote:
| 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.
| graypegg wrote:
| 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!
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