How was it tracked, and by whom? I've downloaded SWFs from the project system on unpublished projects just recently with no notices to date. Is it related to copyright?

Well I would assume it's related to end of Flash. The SWF is an asset collection that someone made for me to download.

Edit: oh not like DMCA or something, just browser-related.

Oh I see, I thought it was a DMCA warning of sorts.

I downloaded a file from the project system and I'm getting no alerts. I suppose that might be because I'm using firefox which is more laissez-faire than chrome/brave/etc.?

I started an adventure into shaders. It took a bit of playing and digging, but I actually understand what they're doing now.

Also, every single blog post or stackoverflow answer about shaders for beginners is complete shit. AS3 of all things had the best explanation and visual examples that I ran into.

I forgot what shaders were, looked them up again, and now I'm even more confused as to how they work.

Honestly I feel like this game is the easiest way for a noob to learn them. I switched to using drawTriangles, which I'm pretty sure is a better approach. It's just very obvious what the triangles are doing when there aren't 1000 of them approximating a curve. It's just a color fill now, but you can apply textures and that's where I'll be next.

Which game is this?

NG snowboarding game I'm working on with @Noodle. Hopefully we finish before it starts to warm up lol, our respective jobs are limiting how much time we have.

The idea of a hill with straight line slopes, where each segment is a trapezoid/two triangles, makes it visually easy to understand what drawTriangles is doing and easy to play around with it. Like how the slope at the far right is just a triangle and not a pair of triangles.

Ah I see! I thought it was some sort of educational game about shaders that was already available online. With Pico in it for some reason.

Like Line Rider!

Hi guys, I used to be a Flash reg... now I'm a Ruffle Reg... I miss the good 'ol days of the Flash Reg Lounge Boss Battle collab that never got finished.

What are you building your snowboarding game in?

I'm curious what you were trying to look up about shaders and couldn't find. I've been trying to find gaps that aren't explained well on the web to write about. My "Beginner's guide to shaders" (https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/a-beginners-guide-to-coding-graphics-shaders--cms-23313) is by far the most successful article I've ever written (and helped my get 2 jobs, including my current).

EDIT: Also hi BoMToons!! So cool to see you around. I've been a huge fan.

Haxe, OpenFL.

I forgot you sent me this a while back. I bookmarked it but then never looked at it. A lot of the ones I saw explained what shaders are in great detail but not why you might want to use one or where you can apply them in general. I think your GLSL and example in part 3 where the light Y axis is inverted is the best one. The normal map stuff looks good as well, like the line where you say the normal map looks funny puts it into perspective and helps me understand generally why you'd do this.

A lot of other ones are very tooling and 3D-specific, like "load this into Unity and then..." or follow the unhelpful programming tutorial stereotype. This image from Adobe's drawTriangles explainer is perfect because it's completely abstracted from code or implementation. I personally don't care what the GPU is actually doing as long as it makes this happen.

Thanks! Yeah I think the best explanations usually come out of the author having tried to do something specific. I remember being really frustrated at the lighting thing and finally after figuring it out being like "why didn't anyone just tell me the normal map was just the vector the surface is pointing at at every pixel". It feels "too obvious to explain" now. I feel like graphics has a lot of concepts like that. Once you figure it out you realize it's actually not that complicated at all, but it does take a lot of effort to unravel these things.

I like Adobe example you shared.

Speaking of Ruffle, I'm pretty impressed with the pace it's going. Especially seeing Portal the flash version & Toss the turtle running with it

I just assumed games would take way longer to emulate since writing a complete enough implementation of AS2 sounded pretty hard.

I made my first contribution to Ruffle a few weeks ago. I picked something minor just to familiarize myself with how it works and it was really cool to see it mentioned in Tom's NG news post: https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1463448

That's really cool, I didn't know you did that! It may very well have been a "minor" bug to fix, but it was a high-impact one due to the number of submissions it affected and how common an issue it was.

It was holding Abobo back so yeah really cool. I feel like my Ruffle calling will be text-related stuff in AVM2, since I've been essentially doing the same thing in OpenFL for years. It's... a massive pain in the ass. But we're getting there.

I will gladly admit that I'm having fun doing super nerd stuff in this typing hell prototype. I split X and Y into individual parametric functions, basically math equations. The X equation starts and ends at the same spot here, and I specify the initial and final speed. I can specify more stuff like speed after 1 second, just makes a higher order function.

I'd like to make it generic so I can just specify game stuff and have the code figure out the math. Kinda like @GeoKureli's dial a platformer. Math may not look as good as other options for a bouncing pattern and nonlinear stuff like that, but I'm having fun so who cares.

I guess that makes this character thing the math teacher? Idk

Add more letters and you got a bullet hell! Or alphabet soup.

what about words traveling in a snake pattern, that'd be pretty neat. Obviously I don't know what game you're making so that might not make sense.

Also I didn't know this thread was still active

I don’t either. I’ve been getting a feel that it’s kids at school in different classes and you have to type to win. Snakes are in biology class then?

The first classroom example that came to mind was math class, where like “5 x 5” shoots at you normally, then 25 comes super quickly that you have some time to prep for.

Gotta keep resuscitating it.

its hit or miss. I think it can handle most interactions but some games still have bugs

Could be cool. I'm keeping all the random patterns I discover in a list, so I'll revisit it at some point.

Nice to see some familiar faces in here :) I visited the front page for the first time in a while, and I couldn't help but feel a bit emotional. It's heartwarming to see Newgrounds still chugging along. For Newgrounds to have remained an independent, unwavering well of creativity over the past 15 years of internet history is nothing short of a miracle. As a teenager browsing these forums I didn't fully appreciate how much pressure Tom and others must have been over to sell out, and it's not hard to imagine an alternate history where Newgrounds instead went the way of Kongregate, Reddit, YouTube, Vine. I'm super happy to see NG stay relevant with projects like Ruffle, which I see praised quite frequently on places like Hacker News.

I check in on the front page every so often, and every few years I'm surprised by another ad revenue check for $100.34 or so, but other than that I haven't been active here for almost a decade. My life has changed quite substantially since then, but the older I get, the more I understand how Newgrounds shaped my perspective on the world: on creativity, on software development, on mentorship, on knowledge sharing, on connecting with people. In everything I do, I try to pay forward the generosity shown to me as a bumbling kid on the NG BBS back in the day.

Anyway, you guys are the best and I hope you're all doing well <3

Glad to see more people around. I am doing great. Living life and trying to find creative fulfillment through side projects. Completely sick of working out of my home though. Ha!

Thank you!! Yeah initially I was just trying to contribute to Ruffle as a learning exercise since I don't have a lot of time to commit but it is really motivating contributing to something that is highly user-facing. I think there's still a lot of things that are low hanging fruit but still impact a lot of people.

Ah, I didn't realize you contributed to OpenFL, that's really cool! Do you have any links to that? AVM2 work sounds kind of scary to me since I know very little about that but I'm curious.

Hi Archawn!! It's really cool to see your name here again. I think we got our start on NG at just about the same time. My username was 4urentertainment if you don't recognize me.

Your work at EmbodyMe sounds really cool.

Any fussy or confusing text-related stuff is probably me lol openfl/TextEngine.hx at develop · openfl/openfl (github.com)

It's written in Haxe, so I'm not doing anything specifically with the AVM. And I'm not exactly sure where the VM ends and Ruffle begins, but text is complicated and new features like RTL support should be added. So I figure I can be helpful somewhere down the line.

Shader update: I finally understand shaders and how to use them! My biggest hangup was realizing that the triangles (vertices) get created by me and the vertex shader pushes them around. I thought the shader did everything.

Baby's first vertex shader, pushing the purple down.

This is now my shader thread. MSGhero/FlxSpotlightShader: A spotlight shader in flixel (github.com)

You lot should go outside.

Of all the times to say this, you picked 2020-21?

i have half my vaccine i can go outside for an hour or two.