• dan@upvote.au
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    11 months ago

    IMO there’s still nothing that’s quite as good as Flash. Efficient vector animations that perform consistently across all major browsers are still unusually hard for non-developers. There are some solutions, but they usually aren’t as designer or animator-friendly and require a huge JavaScript library to be loaded. The barrier to entry for non-developers (or inexperienced developers) creating games that run well cross-browser is still quite high too.

    I remember creating a Flash-based chat system back in the day. Before WebSockets and Server Sent Events, Flash was the only way to get bidirectional sockets in a web browser, other than Java applets of course (which were pretty locked down by that point).

    • mindbleach
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      11 months ago

      Ruffle is obviously as good as Flash, by emulating Flash - but yeah, the creative environment is missing. We need some .io page that clones the old way of churning out 2D games and animations.

      We’re in a stupid period of computing where a legitimate way to get games on smartphones and computers is to publish software for DOS because everything has some kind of emulator for that archaic platform.

      • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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        11 months ago

        I’ve heard it phrased as “the only stable API for Linux games is Win32.”

        Somewhere I have a boxed copy of Hexen for Linux and I doubt it will run on Void (holding with kernel 6.6.6)