The Fall of Flash

I think it's about time we usurped the throne from Flash on web game development. I think this new update for unity will tip the scales, the 4.6 GUI update. We also have the advantage of 3D. So come on guys, what are we waiting for?

UNITY STRIKES BACK

 

...Flash has been practically dead for years.

 

What exactly is it you think we'd be doing differently if we weren't waiting for something?

 

HTML 5 and CSS 3 plus all the other new developments for the web were created to replace Flash and the need for the Flash plugin. As Flash was primarily a tool for web design and development, even if a lot of games were made with it, Flash games are not really a Unity target. Unity will never replace Flash in open web game developers minds, in point of fact Spil Games recently announced they were commissioning 1000 HTML 5 games to start replacing their Flash catalogue. Plus Phaser, which is a HTML 5 game engine, is free, why would anyone buy unity pro and the webGL plugin to make small open web games? Never going to happen. The current Unity webplayer is a big negative factor for many online game publishers.

 

Flash is losing support at an extreme rate, it's fading into irrelevance for most developers out there and Adobe is also pulling out from it.

Flash unfortunately still does a lot of things well that most other web based technologies arent, especially with it's vector based approach to illustrated content and a strong unified video playback system. Flash could do a lot of things well that browsers just simply couldn't in the past and this is why it became popular for the "rich" web experiences, but was also unfortunately a bloated mess that often ran very poorly.

Apple made the first major push against Flash with iOS back in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone and caused a revolution in the web development industry, kickstarting a very rapid development in expanding web browser features after the demise of Flash.

HTML5, Javascript, WebGL and Emscripten have become the much better replacement for Flash as it is multiple times more efficient in execution and far more extendible. I am really curious to see how well Unity WebGL works, but the fact that engines like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 can deploy directly to a web browser is incredible progress.

 

People still use Flash?

 

I used to develop in Flash and made all my own websites in it from 2000 and made alot of money developing for others with it..but it started to tick me off bad.... I dropped it like a hot potato when i found Unity ion 2009.. Now I have to rebuild my site as my former business partner did all the web design stuff..but now I have to retool the site. I tried WordPress this morning..what a mess. it doesn't seem intuitive to me and I ran into the same BS with html4..put a banner or pic in and all of a sudden blank space..look at the scripting..what a crap mess of tags and this and that.. I had tried HYPE prior as a demo but it ran out and I was still not thrilled with it. What to use now that is a good WYSIWYG htm5 editor for OSX.??. I ain't got a week to set aside for redevelopment of a frickin' website as I am up to my neck in venture capitalist funded prototyping products? Suggestions anyone...

 

Yeah, I don't like to use Flash anymore. Terrible for making apps.
But the best thing about it was you could draw right in the IDE. Like circles, rectangles, lines, shapes, basically it was like InkScape. If they could reproduce that in Unity that would be nice.

Also, it is often used (via ScaleForm) for making GUI and HUDs. For instance in the Unreal engine.

 

I learned how to script in Flash because I could do some artwork, look up what I wanted it to do, script it and then compile and reiterate hundreds of times a day. It is why I took to Unity like a fish to water. I want a similar experience for html5 to develop a new portfolio site. WordPress don't cut the mustard IMHO. None of the templates did what I need. Art, video, music, creative writing and Unity..

 

Just don't use Wordpress templates in general unless they are custom made for you or you have extended them to fit your need, but it's not that hard to make a template from scratch if you know what you want.

And i would think that you would love working with HTML5, Javascript and so forth if you like to work with a strong iterative process.

 

If you haven't found JSFiddle, it's the closest thing I've found for testing/tweaking in javascript - http://jsfiddle.net/

 

If flash dies, what will happen to Newgrounds?

 

I finally went the wp route and got a drag and drop theme going.. I used a set of plugins called Virtue Tools and UnityDog plugin so I ca embed Unity web players. Thing is I am so frickin' busy that the time to devote i very limited.. But my site had a quick placeholder site done in a WYSIWYG html5 editor..but it just did not have the stuff I needed and I did not like the experiment I was messing with occupying said site..

 

They become Extinctgrounds?

 

At least 2 billion do.

 

Yes, in Unreal 3 Flash is still used but Unreal 4 isn't, so it'll be interesting what'll happen on that end.

The thing is that it's hard to get people to install the Unity Web Player, much more so than Flash which is still installed on most computers.

 

I doubt there are many out of those 2 billion currently using HTML5, as it's in the early-adopter phase, and it's not enabled by default.

But yeah, eventually HTML5 will outphase Flash in the browser, since Adobe has publicly stated that's what they want for the future.

 

It's actually enabled randomly now and has been for a good long while. Also, those views include things like the youtube mobile app on iOS and Android.

 

What do they use instead? I've been trying to find out how Unreal make GUIs but they don't seem to have any documentation. Why can no game engine have good GUI API (hey Unity? )

 

Good GUI API doesn't really exist because it's exactly the same as saying "good 3d modelling api" or "good paint brush api".

Game GUIs are a creative endeavour. It's an application otherwise.

 

They have a new framework called Slate that's now Epic's UI system. Information on it can be found here. I haven't used it too terribly much yet, but I assume I will in the near future.

The nice thing with Flash with Scaleform is that the content creation and the implementation were the same tool. The UI system if it's Scaleform, Slate, UnityGUI, or NGUI it's just the implementation of it. You still use other tools to create the content or visual representation if you don't want it to be defaulted.

 

@ippdev : If you want a simple and powerfull wordpress theme you can check Enfold.

UE3 + scaleform could do some pretty awsome UI relatively fast.

In UE4, Slate is a beast hard to master as it is now, i believe they will extends the tools to use it. You can already do anything you want but be ready to do a bunch of code to do simple stuff, but you will feel that they put a lot of though into it. Scaleforme was able to do some nice fake 3d UI within the Flash environment which seems hard to reproduce with other tech. (Borderlands 2 UI for example)

I could be wrong but I believe Flash is much more efficient for game (on desktop browser), anyway i did make a few games using Phaser, CreateJS and also the soft Construct2 but if i had the choice i still prefer Flash. You just do more faster.
Flash had a bad reputation because it was easily accessible and there was a bunch of crap out there, you can see the same happening with unity at a lesser extend. In some people minds Unity is to make cheap / easy to make games because there is a lots of crappy Unity games.

Now people want all there website / webapp in html5 and expect the same quality as what Flash could do, but not everything is possible yet and often not within the same price range, but it's coming i guess.

Flash as a plugin had it's time, it did some really nice stuff (and still do).
Right now you can still use Flash CC and combine it with createJS to make html5 games or webapp and use Flash for all graphics stuff and animation. So it's still pretty cool i would say