Harman / CheerpX / AIR ? What the ...

tarwin

Hi all,

I've been away from the Flash community for many years now. I miss you all - it was a good time.

So to my surprise I stumbled upon a few things.

Firstly "CheerpX for Flash" (https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/), which seems to be a WASM wrapper for, what I find next ...

... Harman (https://airsdk.harman.com/) now somehow owning AIR and thus kind of owning Flash?

Does anyone have any good timeline on what happened here? For years it has annoyed me that Adobe didn't simply open source Flash - which I'm sure a lot of people here are also kind of pissed off about. I know there are some pretty good solutions for some Flash files like Ruffle, but why the hell didn't Adobe just open source the whole thing?

There is a FAQ section on Harman's site asking "hey where's our web browser target" and they reply with some wishy washy crap about licensing (which I'm sure has to do with CheerpX doing that already).

All seems like a giant dogs turd of a mess - we could have just had a nice open source WASM player by now that you could install on a site and have Flash just working again ... at least it seems that way.

Anyway ... sorry for the long post. Mostly just trying to understand what happened while I was away 😃

Artemix

tarwin Look, after many years of participating in one way or another in tech, you start understanding that everything is very chaotic, and not many things are born from common sense. Many interests from different corporations pulling strings twist logic and reasoning into the mess we have.

That's why we can't have nice things.

joshtynjala

tarwin Harman (https://airsdk.harman.com/) now somehow owning AIR

Here's Adobe's official announcement back in 2019 that Harman would be taking over AIR maintenance and development:

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2019/05/30/the-future-of-adobe-air

tarwin we could have just had a nice open source WASM player by now that you could install on a site and have Flash just working again ... at least it seems that way.

I don't know anything about CheerpX, but you might also want to check out Ruffle. It's getting quite good these days!

https://ruffle.rs/

kupo_games

Adobe AIR is still viable for desktop and mobile apps and HARMAN appear to be supporting it well, even if it costs a bit now. I'm planning on using Ruffle for my future web and desktop games since it runs vector graphics much faster than Flashplayer does and I like that it's open source.

Adobe's authoring tools still suck - you have to pay a subscription for laggy, unreliable software that hasn't improved at all in a decade - that's the main drawback of using Flash in the current year in my opinion.

Artemix

kupo_games What are alternatives for 2D games? other than I guess Unity.

General

kupo_games In fact, you don't need Flash to compile AIR application.

kupo_games

Artemix Godot and GameMaker seem quite popular. I've never used them, but they seem cheap and easy to use.

Shaun_Max

Artemix Try https://defold.com/