Hi.

My Chrome out of no where started to block Flash; I discovered I had to turn on "ask first" now but now it shows the message "There won't be compatibility with Flash Player at December 2020" everytime I opens it, and because of this it made me think:

What will happen to Flash contents (people who does animations, games, etc) or future projects onwards, once every company will start to reject flash in their sites (except e621; they explained in previous topics that the flash content will still be hosted so you can just download it)? Will people continue doing content regardless that? Or Flash will turn an obsolete thing in future?

forum #275447
forum #273012
forum #273019

Far less people will use flash.

What I really wonder is what's gonna happen with future interactive animations/browser games? On what technology are they going to be based on and how will they be hosted on e621?

randomguy85 said:
What I really wonder is what's gonna happen with future interactive animations/browser games? On what technology are they going to be based on and how will they be hosted on e621?

There is a lot of advancements with interactivity on HTML5, so much so that e.g. games made with RPG Maker MV are actually just a chrome based browser running the game utilizing WebGL.

If you haven't seen already, the amount of interactive content played on browsers specifically has gone down for years now. Because with animations focus has kinda shifted from making small loops with next button into longer and/or more detailed content. With games the focus has shifted into games being downloaded as portable executables or made into mobile app, because much more people use their phones to play free content nowdays rather than school computers internet explorer.

Because even the flash games that do still come out, looking trough flash_game tag, huge majority are goddamn text games which would work with whatever they decided to use instead of flash and then stuff like post #1855272 which specifically warns that the version of the game you are playing is flash version which is objectively worse from the download version.

As for interactive content still played in browser, it still exsists outside flash, if you click on something like tasuric animations e.g. post #1853604, there is link to interactive version on artists website made without flash and does indeed work well even with mobile phone. However at the same time you can kinda see that the interactive webpage isn't something like .swf file embedded which you can rip, instead it's made with javascript and HTML5 which rely on loading many individual files on the server and this is kinda where the main difference comes to play:

Most of the interactive HTML5 content is made in a way that it cannot be ripped and reposted, so it most likely need to be hosted by whoever made it, because even though there are some containers already, there's nothing universal like .swf. This simply shifts the focus from tiny files being shared around and being compiled on dedicated meme websites, they are now more focused on specific areas, e.g. games website offering demo without requirement to download the game. Also flashes were heavily relying on stuff like vector graphics in order to keep their filesizes manageable, but as people want to create and see more, lately I have seen almost zero vectors being utilized with interactive flash animations and they are simply flash videos being toggled with a button instead, which in return does increase the filesizes heavily, which will make it much harder to share the files even if they were in single container.

Flash isn't going anywhere, it's just transforming into stuff similar to that game from the 90's you loved: when you insert the disc to your system, you realize that you don't even have a disc drive on modern machines anymore and double pressing executable isn't always working. Similarly with flash you have to get the flash file, get the flash projector, open the flash file with flash projector and pray for gods that nobody tampered with the flash file with vulnerability found after the support ended.

As for e621, I have already huge issue with text games because those are tagged based on text and we do not tag anything else here based on text and we already delete posts which are text only, so the games are already outlier as they are now. If there is a support for something in future, that's neat, but I'm not losing my sleep over this at all. Altough it would be nice for there to be a way to rip HTML5 game pages for offline and archive use at some point if not already.

Mairo said:
There is a lot of advancements with interactivity on HTML5, so much so that e.g. games made with RPG Maker MV are actually just a chrome based browser running the game utilizing WebGL.

If you haven't seen already, the amount of interactive content played on browsers specifically has gone down for years now. Because with animations focus has kinda shifted from making small loops with next button into longer and/or more detailed content. With games the focus has shifted into games being downloaded as portable executables or made into mobile app, because much more people use their phones to play free content nowdays rather than school computers internet explorer.

Because even the flash games that do still come out, looking trough flash_game tag, huge majority are goddamn text games which would work with whatever they decided to use instead of flash and then stuff like post #1855272 which specifically warns that the version of the game you are playing is flash version which is objectively worse from the download version.

As for interactive content still played in browser, it still exsists outside flash, if you click on something like tasuric animations e.g. post #1853604, there is link to interactive version on artists website made without flash and does indeed work well even with mobile phone. However at the same time you can kinda see that the interactive webpage isn't something like .swf file embedded which you can rip, instead it's made with javascript and HTML5 which rely on loading many individual files on the server and this is kinda where the main difference comes to play:

Most of the interactive HTML5 content is made in a way that it cannot be ripped and reposted, so it most likely need to be hosted by whoever made it, because even though there are some containers already, there's nothing universal like .swf. This simply shifts the focus from tiny files being shared around and being compiled on dedicated meme websites, they are now more focused on specific areas, e.g. games website offering demo without requirement to download the game. Also flashes were heavily relying on stuff like vector graphics in order to keep their filesizes manageable, but as people want to create and see more, lately I have seen almost zero vectors being utilized with interactive flash animations and they are simply flash videos being toggled with a button instead, which in return does increase the filesizes heavily, which will make it much harder to share the files even if they were in single container.

Flash isn't going anywhere, it's just transforming into stuff similar to that game from the 90's you loved: when you insert the disc to your system, you realize that you don't even have a disc drive on modern machines anymore and double pressing executable isn't always working. Similarly with flash you have to get the flash file, get the flash projector, open the flash file with flash projector and pray for gods that nobody tampered with the flash file with vulnerability found after the support ended.

As for e621, I have already huge issue with text games because those are tagged based on text and we do not tag anything else here based on text and we already delete posts which are text only, so the games are already outlier as they are now. If there is a support for something in future, that's neat, but I'm not losing my sleep over this at all. Altough it would be nice for there to be a way to rip HTML5 game pages for offline and archive use at some point if not already.

What about full, albeit small file sized games which are in flash? Not the text based games, but ones with full animations and pictures? Not just interactive animations, but stuff like post #20275, for example? Stuff which was made in flash, and only exists in flash?

Downunda_Thunda said:
What about full, albeit small file sized games which are in flash? Not the text based games, but ones with full animations and pictures? Not just interactive animations, but stuff like post #20275, for example? Stuff which was made in flash, and only exists in flash?

Yeah, I was thinking games like Monster Mind or animations like post #1822370

There was a forum post on this just the other day. Can people please quit making new forum posts on this subject?

Mairo said:
There is a lot of advancements with interactivity on HTML5, so much so that e.g. games made with RPG Maker MV are actually just a chrome based browser running the game utilizing WebGL.

If you haven't seen already, the amount of interactive content played on browsers specifically has gone down for years now. Because with animations focus has kinda shifted from making small loops with next button into longer and/or more detailed content. With games the focus has shifted into games being downloaded as portable executables or made into mobile app, because much more people use their phones to play free content nowdays rather than school computers internet explorer.

Because even the flash games that do still come out, looking trough flash_game tag, huge majority are goddamn text games which would work with whatever they decided to use instead of flash and then stuff like post #1855272 which specifically warns that the version of the game you are playing is flash version which is objectively worse from the download version.

As for interactive content still played in browser, it still exsists outside flash, if you click on something like tasuric animations e.g. post #1853604, there is link to interactive version on artists website made without flash and does indeed work well even with mobile phone. However at the same time you can kinda see that the interactive webpage isn't something like .swf file embedded which you can rip, instead it's made with javascript and HTML5 which rely on loading many individual files on the server and this is kinda where the main difference comes to play:

Most of the interactive HTML5 content is made in a way that it cannot be ripped and reposted, so it most likely need to be hosted by whoever made it, because even though there are some containers already, there's nothing universal like .swf. This simply shifts the focus from tiny files being shared around and being compiled on dedicated meme websites, they are now more focused on specific areas, e.g. games website offering demo without requirement to download the game. Also flashes were heavily relying on stuff like vector graphics in order to keep their filesizes manageable, but as people want to create and see more, lately I have seen almost zero vectors being utilized with interactive flash animations and they are simply flash videos being toggled with a button instead, which in return does increase the filesizes heavily, which will make it much harder to share the files even if they were in single container.

Flash isn't going anywhere, it's just transforming into stuff similar to that game from the 90's you loved: when you insert the disc to your system, you realize that you don't even have a disc drive on modern machines anymore and double pressing executable isn't always working. Similarly with flash you have to get the flash file, get the flash projector, open the flash file with flash projector and pray for gods that nobody tampered with the flash file with vulnerability found after the support ended.

As for e621, I have already huge issue with text games because those are tagged based on text and we do not tag anything else here based on text and we already delete posts which are text only, so the games are already outlier as they are now. If there is a support for something in future, that's neat, but I'm not losing my sleep over this at all. Altough it would be nice for there to be a way to rip HTML5 game pages for offline and archive use at some point if not already.

Good grief, you're smart.

Downunda_Thunda said:
What about full, albeit small file sized games which are in flash? Not the text based games, but ones with full animations and pictures? Not just interactive animations, but stuff like post #20275, for example? Stuff which was made in flash, and only exists in flash?

The nature of vector graphics is that they take almost no space compared to bitmaps and everything always looks sharp as nothing is using lossy compression. This was the reason why flash was so popular because it dates back to dialup connections.

There really isn't any way to create and share vector based animations so in that sense I can definitely feel the lack of flash bit sad.

However even that example is from 10 years ago. Take any interactive animation from last years and pretty much all of them are using bitmaps, either images or video files, instead of vector graphics. Also Flash CC which was rebranded as Animate CC, exports stuff as video primarily. So vectors have already been dead for long while already.

Henlein_TheKobold said:
Yeah, I was thinking games like Monster Mind or animations like post #1822370

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Monster Mind should be done with HaxeFlixel rather than flash, so technically native windows application should be possible. There is also source code for the game available.

Even if you just use the flash build, you can still use Flash projector even once the support for browsers have ended.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/493558352920707072/606614930669436935/2018-04-25_20-56-17.mp4

Mairo said:

There really isn't any way to create and share vector based animations so in that sense I can definitely feel the lack of flash bit sad.

Is the animation model used by Animate CC substantially different from SVG?
If not, extending their current static SVG export support to animated SVG is possible.
Though the same basic point you made about cessation of bandwidth pressure may also apply here (ie. they just won't bother doing that because it doesn't have enough ROI)

Well flash is permadisabled for me right now on chrome, any way past this or are we boned?

*Edit*
chrome://settings/content/flash this seems to allow.

savageorange said:
Is the animation model used by Animate CC substantially different from SVG?
If not, extending their current static SVG export support to animated SVG is possible.
Though the same basic point you made about cessation of bandwidth pressure may also apply here (ie. they just won't bother doing that because it doesn't have enough ROI)

The problem with animated SVG is that they rely on JavaScript execution or CSS rules, both of which have security implications. This is compounded by the fact that if you load a SVG in a tab by itself it executes JS within the context of the domain, forcing a new top level domain for all static content. It's a real mess of a situation, and why I'm not in love with SVG.

Technically tl:dr spoken, Flash is what browsers became today: a virtual machine running scripts to render images on a screen, play audio, interact on user input, even do some file io and so on. A SWF is an "image" for that virtual machine.

In contrariety with HTML5 (except for streamable video, like done with NetFlix and similar), it's hard to extract/steal content from a Flash. You need other applications too extract the content. In HTML5 you have to open developer tools of your browser and there you go.

Most of the SWFs are still playable with Flash Player Projector, as long as your OS support running 32-bit applications.

I think flash and browse games will be not so popular. I think many people start to play different new or old online games like warcraft, csgo,fortnite or consoles games. I like to play games with others for example fortnite I play with players whichI found on https://dreamteam.gg/fortnite/lfg

kamui43 said:
I think flash and browse games will be not so popular. I think many people start to play different new or old online games like warcraft, csgo,fortnite or consoles games.

1. This discussion includes also animations, not only games.
2. Console games and such are not comparable to web games and flash content. You need to pay up to hudreds of dollars to play them, while grand majority of flash games and web games in general are free. Flash being discontinued is not going to cause surge to people moving to completely different niche in video games. It's just going to make people move to html5 games
3. Are you purposely trying to find threads that contain even slightest excuse to bring up games you like or what? This is like third time you bring up fortnite and other shit in threads that are related in games in any way.

It is insecure, and had multiple new exploits popping up daily the obvious solution was "Remove it". Just because you have to open an app to see/extract flash file's contents makes it no different from html5, it was also hard for browsers to optimize it, because it was ran in its own VM and the VM was its own package provided by a company, another part of why removing it was the right choice, the next alternative interactive tool developers have like flash that can actually offer code obscuring and asset protection (Why not just file a DMCA if your copyrighted content is stolen btw? If you dont do that anyway you have no rights legally in the US, all obscured software will arise curiosity, and it can be reversed as long as it runs normally, not a good reason) will be webasm/webassembly. Which has been used to create some amazing things already yet it isnt well known about or used, yet. Can load a fully pre-compiled C/C++/Rust written openGL game in your browser, sandboxed or not. From there, instead of a big company being in charge of security, its your browser and the dev of the program, browsers were the ones noticing the flaws and fixing them until they gave up. I wouldn't doubt if right now there are 100+ security bugs open for flash even with it being removed. On WebGL too, webasm fixes its perf problems.