better than it being the new politics forum now

Make Canada Great again! More international music performances! And less snow!

Then where will I ask all my Flash-related questions when I come out of retirement??

Met Tom, Luis, and Squidly! Too many people at Too Many Games for photos but it’s true I promise.

and MindChamber now

And NinjaMuffin

Wayy too many game

"noots" when

oh hi. my last post here was in 2017. how have you all been since then? its good to see this thread still cruising along. 🫡

I've been thinking about how cool it would be to team up with Speedo on a PUNCH PUNCH FOREVER game for Flash Forward 2024, although I haven't actually brought it up to Speedo.

Oh hell yeah

That would be awesome. I want to skip next year FF and do a pico day thing instead!

My yearly ‘those were the good old days’ post.

We're all still here Xeptic

and we're still waiting for Ball Revamped 5

this inspired me to get back to work on my flash stuff. good jorb.

6* but absolutely yes

🤮 is also a good idea, incase you see something disgusting.

What's up guys, used to be active here around '05-'08, came back for some nostalgia. Good to see some familiar names are still around!

hello

hi luis

good times, fuckin killing me <3

hope everyone is doing ok

Upload day for two collab projects

Are there any major downsides to AS2 compared to AS3? For games, would I get sluggish slowdown in certain situations I wouldn't get with AS3?

You could do more with AS3 and make it run well, although lots of AS2 stuff runs fine in Ruffle too.

Oh no, tom, I was asking about the performance in general, not about ruffle support. Like I see comments online that AS3 was cleaner and engineered to be faster. But does that mean AS2 isn't worth investing into?

The thing with AS2 is it has a lot of baked in code that is always imported, and always executes, even if you don't actually need it. That can add some unwanted overhead, BUT, having that stuff always present makes it a little easier to just use, especially if you like doing a lot of code right on objects and timelines via the Flash IDE.

AS3 requires you to import everything you need, and it only runs what you import. It also has a much richer set of features. Everything you do in AS3 is strictly typed, eich can make it more rigid than AS2, but also makes debugging much easier.

The other interesting thing with AS3 is you can dig up some tools like FlashDevelop to make games 100% free without needing a copy of Flash at all. You don't get the stage and IDE so you'll either have to work with exported swc libraries, or use raster art for most things. If you go that route, Starling was a pretty cool framework for managing sprites as textures that get rendered on the GPU.

That said, if you were going to dive into AS3 and use something like FlashDevelop, I'd strongly suggest just not using Flash at all and look at something like Phaser.io which does a lot of the same stuff with similar sensibilities, and it's all native HTML5 so you don't have to worry about Ruffle supporting everything you want. They also have a Flash-like program called PhaserEditor that now has a 30 day free trial if you wanted to go that route.

In fact, if you are just getting started with making games, I'd honestly avoid using Flash at all. While it can be fun and easy, you'll pick up habits and sensibilities that don't translate as well to real gamedev frameworks, and then if you ever want to move on to something bigger, you are back at square 1 of learning that stuff. Just learn it now!

I was considering phaser.io, are there any javascript books you suggest that are modern and relevant?

PsychoGoldfish answered this better and as much as I love making games with AS2, I agree that it's best to invest in something that doesn't require dead software (not to mention software Adobe actively tries to stop people from having access to).

if you want to learn pure JavaScript, I succeeded with https://javascript.info

Anyone get permanently overwhelmed with stale notifications and obligations?

Someone sends a PM, or writes a comment, or submits a pull request, and I think in the moment "I can handle it later this weekend".

Then the weekend becomes the next because I'm too tired to handle it then, and so I push it later. In the meantime more notifications, more obligations, more this and that arrive.

Rinse and repeat until what was 1 thing that I had to complete grows into an insurmountable pile of "1 thing to complete". Such that I open the site, look around and decide to nope out of it since that's faster and easier than actually address them.

I assume others get it too, I see one of my favourite game's authors posting regularly in a game dev forum when their website hasn't received updates for 10 years and counting, or a repo's maintainer having activity on his other repos while ignoring the pull requests that were in a pretty much complete state for the last X months, you get the idea...

Responsibilities fucking suck. How the fuck do you guys adult with shit like this? No wonder so many people seemingly disappear without a trace - it's much easier to lurk than to be active.

The more concerning part is that this lack of energy seems to be spreading to my work as well. Ah this bug is too much of a bother, I'll handle it later...only the threat of deadlines and appearing like a slackoff get me to finish stuff. Am I becoming a lazy fuck or is this a sign of something worse?