Wow, I'm amazed by the number of contributors that a relatively niche product like this has managed to gather - very cool!
Ruffle is one of the most important pieces of game preservation currently out there, and it warms my heart to see it constantly improving!
Are flash games still a thing? I remember those old sticky fighting flash games on newsgroupe.
Someone kind enough in webdev to elaborate why someone would care to revive/reimplemente old flash player tech?
Adobe Flash Player was deprecated some years ago, so there is no longer any functioning official software that can play Flash games. The modern equivalent are mobile games.
The reason why reimplementing it is a worthy thing to do is to preserve old software, same reason why console emulators exist.
No, the modern equivalent is Web HTML5 games.
From a technical point of view you are right. But commercially, I am pretty sure many companies and developers that used to make Flash games now make mobile games. There are many mobile games that are ports of old Flash games.
I see mobile games as the commercial successor of Facebook games. But the spirit of flash games stated in the Web scene for sure.
In November 2011, about a year after Jobs' open letter, Adobe announced it would no longer be developing Flash and advised developers to switch to HTML5.
You can see why someone might think it was ten years ago based off this.
Yeah but it was an unsecure piece of shit for more than the past decade
I remember much earlier announces.
It was on its way out when smartphones and HTML5 became widely adopted. Smartphones didn't support Flash and HTML5 made sure that the things you used to need Flash for were just implemented in web browsers. Maybe you remember something along those lines.
What I remembered was abandoning Linux NPAPI Flash plugin in 2012. The PPAPI plugin indeed existed for longer time.
Game and media preservation, for one. But I'm sure part of it is the technical challenge. There's still websites where you can download those old flash games to run them locally, but one day Adobe Flash player will cease to work on modern operating systems.
Exactly. Flash was hugely popular, there's a wealth of content, media, projects and entire websites made with Flash (not just games) that would otherwise be lost and this unbelievable effort brings all that content back to life.
I miss the old flash games honestly
Thanks :) !
Adding to sleepyTonia's comment, many flash games have been preserved through Flashpoint Archive, which is like an epic DRM-free Steam client for flash games (as well as other web game technologies, like the shockwave player). However, Flashpoint uses old flash player binaries that, as stated, may one day stop working as hardware and operating systems evolve. If that happens, it'll be great to have a replacement interpreter ready to go that can be compiled to run on newer tech.
Homestuck
blog updates seem to be signed by someone named Dinnerbone
ɐɯ I ʇɥᴉuʞᴉuƃ oɟ ʇɥǝ ɹᴉƃɥʇ pᴉuuǝɹqouǝ ɥǝɹǝ¿
Looks like it. There's a direct link to Nathan Adam's GitHub within that article
Incredible improvements! Love seeing people so dedicated to such an important project
Nice to see older projects being rejuvenated 👍
I really like this project, but may be it's just a my desktop problem the nitrome games I downloaded like to lag using it. It's still really cool, though.
The performance is really bad though, can't see it improving any time soon. Maybe it has to do with how it relies on wasm.
my experience with it is that it performs significantly better than the official Flash Player
I tried a few games that are considered classics and didn't notice any performance problems, maybe open an issue with a test case?
People keep talking about preservation whenever Ruffle is brought up for some reason. Deprecated or not, the old Flash Player (which is still on Flathub) still works perfectly fine and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Flash games have never been in any immediate preservation danger. Ruffle is cool because it's more secure, it performs better and it works in modern web browsers. It's not really preserving anything.
Which browser even supports installing flash player?
Falkon. It's the only web browser I can think of that still has PPAPI. Maybe Konqueror and Angelfish also do? Would have to check. Either way, these browsers all kinda suck and obviously any browser you'd want to use has dropped support, as I already conceded. Ruffle works in most modern web browsers, Flash does not.
I just didn't really consider that necessary for strictly preservation purposes. All you need is an archive of SWF files you can download like flashpoint and software that can launch them. Flash Player and Ruffle are both perfectly suitable for this.
It's the same concept as old DOS games. Sure you could install a super old version of windows but by giving a more accessible, secure, and free version, the games are essentially preserved from becoming totally abandoned.
Fun fact- Dinnerbone, from Minecraft, works on this for free!
I was wandering if it's him.
This project just warms the cockles of my nerdy old heart :)
Bringing a crappy CRAPPY old protocol to life with awesome, secure, new 100% FLOSS technology so boatloads of homegrown art and culture can be saved?
YES PLEASE! :)
But I thought ppl didn't do work for free...
They certainly can if it's a passion project! :)
Wow, I'm amazed by the number of contributors that a relatively niche product like this has managed to gather - very cool!
Ruffle is one of the most important pieces of game preservation currently out there, and it warms my heart to see it constantly improving!
Are flash games still a thing? I remember those old sticky fighting flash games on newsgroupe.
Someone kind enough in webdev to elaborate why someone would care to revive/reimplemente old flash player tech?
Adobe Flash Player was deprecated some years ago, so there is no longer any functioning official software that can play Flash games. The modern equivalent are mobile games.
The reason why reimplementing it is a worthy thing to do is to preserve old software, same reason why console emulators exist.
No, the modern equivalent is Web HTML5 games.
From a technical point of view you are right. But commercially, I am pretty sure many companies and developers that used to make Flash games now make mobile games. There are many mobile games that are ports of old Flash games.
I see mobile games as the commercial successor of Facebook games. But the spirit of flash games stated in the Web scene for sure.
Some? It was more than 10 years ago iirc.
Wikipedia says at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#End_of_life that the EOL was announced in 2017 and took effect in 2020, much less than 10 years ago.
Same section also has this:
You can see why someone might think it was ten years ago based off this.
Yeah but it was an unsecure piece of shit for more than the past decade
I remember much earlier announces.
It was on its way out when smartphones and HTML5 became widely adopted. Smartphones didn't support Flash and HTML5 made sure that the things you used to need Flash for were just implemented in web browsers. Maybe you remember something along those lines.
What I remembered was abandoning Linux NPAPI Flash plugin in 2012. The PPAPI plugin indeed existed for longer time.
Game and media preservation, for one. But I'm sure part of it is the technical challenge. There's still websites where you can download those old flash games to run them locally, but one day Adobe Flash player will cease to work on modern operating systems.
Exactly. Flash was hugely popular, there's a wealth of content, media, projects and entire websites made with Flash (not just games) that would otherwise be lost and this unbelievable effort brings all that content back to life.
I miss the old flash games honestly
Thanks :) !
Adding to sleepyTonia's comment, many flash games have been preserved through Flashpoint Archive, which is like an epic DRM-free Steam client for flash games (as well as other web game technologies, like the shockwave player). However, Flashpoint uses old flash player binaries that, as stated, may one day stop working as hardware and operating systems evolve. If that happens, it'll be great to have a replacement interpreter ready to go that can be compiled to run on newer tech.
Homestuck
blog updates seem to be signed by someone named Dinnerbone
ɐɯ I ʇɥᴉuʞᴉuƃ oɟ ʇɥǝ ɹᴉƃɥʇ pᴉuuǝɹqouǝ ɥǝɹǝ¿
Looks like it. There's a direct link to Nathan Adam's GitHub within that article
Incredible improvements! Love seeing people so dedicated to such an important project
Nice to see older projects being rejuvenated 👍
I really like this project, but may be it's just a my desktop problem the nitrome games I downloaded like to lag using it. It's still really cool, though.
The performance is really bad though, can't see it improving any time soon. Maybe it has to do with how it relies on wasm.
my experience with it is that it performs significantly better than the official Flash Player
I tried a few games that are considered classics and didn't notice any performance problems, maybe open an issue with a test case?
People keep talking about preservation whenever Ruffle is brought up for some reason. Deprecated or not, the old Flash Player (which is still on Flathub) still works perfectly fine and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Flash games have never been in any immediate preservation danger. Ruffle is cool because it's more secure, it performs better and it works in modern web browsers. It's not really preserving anything.
Which browser even supports installing flash player?
Falkon. It's the only web browser I can think of that still has PPAPI. Maybe Konqueror and Angelfish also do? Would have to check. Either way, these browsers all kinda suck and obviously any browser you'd want to use has dropped support, as I already conceded. Ruffle works in most modern web browsers, Flash does not.
I just didn't really consider that necessary for strictly preservation purposes. All you need is an archive of SWF files you can download like flashpoint and software that can launch them. Flash Player and Ruffle are both perfectly suitable for this.
It's the same concept as old DOS games. Sure you could install a super old version of windows but by giving a more accessible, secure, and free version, the games are essentially preserved from becoming totally abandoned.