As someone who got into game development by making Flash games as a kid, I would love to see Flash open sourced. I don't think it's necessarily true to say they have nothing to lose by open-sourcing it though. Who knows how many private shared libraries are in there that are still required by other still-active Adobe software. And they're also probably not excited to give up rights to a massive pile of code which they could conceivably want to use in future projects.
In other words Flash likely isn't some isolated directory they can just zip and share to the world, and even if it is they might want to pick the bones later so why throw it away? (from their perspective)
Can relate. Flash literally changed my life. I wouldn't have been the person I am without it. And my career path would've definitely been very different. I wouldn't have known most of my friends without those VKontakte Flash apps, because the connections to most of the people I know right now can be traced back to someone from that Flash app developer community.
I'm somewhat hopeful that Ruffle will somehow drive its resurgence. Older versions of Flash (the authoring software) aren't that hard to find, and maybe in due time someone would even build an open-source reimplementation of that, too. The SWF format itself definitely won't ever be dead by any means.
My own personal use case for flash is to access baseboard management interfaces on servers. e.g. the Cisco UCS220B3 series uses a flash based interface. No dice with ruffle. It can do the login form and that's all there is.
> My own personal use case for flash is to access baseboard management interfaces on servers. e.g. the Cisco UCS220B3 series uses a flash based interface. No dice with ruffle.
Networking is the one thing that can't be fully reproduced by using a wasm thing vs a browser plugin, requiring changes on the receiving side. Flash player did cross-origin security quite differently. When you sent the first request to a new origin, it would first fetch /crossdomain.xml from that domain to see if you're allowed to do that, and only then proceed. Browsers rely on the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header instead. Then there are sockets, for Flash it's mostly the same idea: you could specify an arbitrary host and TCP domain, then Flash player would connect to it itself and send the string "<policy-file-request/>". The server is supposed to respond with the contents of a crossdomain.xml and close the connection. Flash would then connect again and this time hand over the socket to your code. Websockets don't work anything like that; you get one by upgrading an existing HTTP connection, and you can't have that on an arbitrary port either, and there's mandatory encryption.
ActionScript 3? Bitmap filters and blending modes? I tried throwing all the swf's I have laying around at it, and the older one is the more likely it will work. Some AS2 games are fully playable even.
It'll get there eventually of course as it's very much WIP. I wonder when will it stop calling itself a "flash player emulator" tho. It plays flash files. It's literally a flash player.
This, in particular, is limited by manpower and reverse engineering. Simply documenting what Flash actually does would be a huge help. Volunteers welcome.
Rendering flash requires that you be pixel compatible to something that is not documented anywhere. That requires someone to do a lot of experiments on something that barely runs anywhere anymore, document what they find, and then have someone convert that into code.
In other words Flash likely isn't some isolated directory they can just zip and share to the world, and even if it is they might want to pick the bones later so why throw it away? (from their perspective)