Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet's Least Favorite Tool

Re:Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet's Least Fa... by white-flame on Saturday April 11, 2015 @06:59PM (#9361164)

Out of all the Facebook, King.com, & other social/casual web games I've seen my family play, 100% of them have been Flash. I think in years past some have been Java, but I've not yet seen a HTML5 game in use on the big sites as played here.

Since my family doesn't pay money into these games, their style involves playing broad coverage of games: They play each for a little bit until the life meter runs out, and often try new games. Again, 100% have been flash.

There are also tools & frameworks like Starling for converting either AS3 code, Flash assets, or full SWF files to other non-Flash platforms. For instance, I wrote the sorting algorithm in as3isolib, and noticed that Ubisoft ported one of their games using it to iOS, using Starling.

Flash is certainly alive and well.

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Re:Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet's Least Fa... by krilnon on Saturday April 11, 2015 @07:56PM (#9361312)

> I wrote the sorting algorithm in as3isolib

Oh neat. I don't recognize your username, but I submitted the first entry in the logo contest for that library in 2008, which ended up being fairly close to the final logo.

> Flash is certainly alive and well.

There's plenty of developer activity, but I'm pretty sure Adobe only has a life support team maintaining most things now.

AS4 was cancelled, so Falcon was the last notable language change. Most of the AoT iOS/Android targeting stuff was completed years ago, so now AFAICT it's just being kept compatible with new releases.

FP12 was supposed to be a huge jump, but now 12-17 (and the accompanying AIR APIs) have come and gone without pushing things forward meaningfully.

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