The Death of Flash

[HeRetiK]

So this is it, by the end of this year the Flash plugin will officially have drawn its last breath.

The good news is though that I have finally taken it upon myself to convert all of my remaining old movies to mp4 and webm video. This means they are once again easily available and will remain so for the foreseeable future. All the good, bad and ugly of almost 20 years of animation. Well, 10 years, if you subtract my years of inactivity.

As far as the games are concerned... I'm not quite sure yet how to keep those accessible but I'll have a look at some of the few available options.

See you around!

[Guitar_clock]

Oh my freaking gosh. SO THAT'S IT THEN????



Where will you go, my man?

[HeRetiK]

Oh, that sounded more like a farewell then I meant it to be.

I'm not going anywhere, I just know that at my current pace it will be another 3 years before I post an update :p

[Spaced Ape]

The games you'll probably have no choice but to offer them to download and be playable only through a platform that supports Flash.

Honestly, the virus one was pretty fun, I think if you could find some way to develop it into a mobile game you might have something. Especially with Covid still ongoing. As much as folks hate the virus, they do love a timely theme.

[HeRetiK]

Amazingly I've stumbled upon a few efforts to create a JavaScript-based Flash environment that runs directly in the browser, some of which look rather promising. If one of those work out that would be the most preferable solution in my book.

I never really got into mobile gaming which is why I never really bothered with mobile development. Good point though.

[Spaced Ape]

Don't blame you, it looks like a killer industry to try and get anything with traction, without having to also find some way to monetize the fuck out of it.

I think it could be done, I think it could do well, but there's so many 'what ifs' there, I don't blame you at all for not even considering it.

[Azgarth]

The internet archive has a flash emulator for games and movies. With which they, as you'd expect, archive all the old gems. Works on practically every browser as well.
Per their blog you can upload your own stuff too, so that might work if it hasn't already been uploaded.
I remember being disappointed when Kol Belov (Das Produkt, Pustota, others) switched his .swf files for YouTube vids years ago. The originals were basically vector work, and resize and zoom to any degree you wanted with it looking crisp. 720p YouTube... not so much.

Be fun to play the old stuff again some time. Flash's death makes sense, it was a beast and with the inroads of alternative ways to achieve what flash was used for, it just didn't make sense anymore. Still, what an era.

[HeRetiK]

Hey, glad the account recovery finally worked Azgarth!

The Internet Archive is using Ruffle, which, as it turns out, is already being used by Newgrounds! So I've already been gradually enabling and testing Ruffle emulation on my stuff on there and I have to say it's working surprisingly well so far. Performance can still be an issue at times and I haven't yet gotten to the more complex games and the ones written in AS3 (I think the latter is not yet fully supported by Ruffle) but it gives me hope that my games will be able to run in the browser again.

There's a few other similar projects that I'm keeping an eye on: Swf2JS, which unfortunately seems to be dead, CheerpX and WAFlash.

Currently Ruffle seems to be the best candidate but I'll keep watching these projects for a couple more weeks / months before I decide which one to use for MINDistortion.

[Guitar_clock]

The originals were basically vector work, and resize and zoom to any degree you wanted with it looking crisp. 720p YouTube... not so much.

I feel this so hard

Hey there Azgarth