New Flash/AS3 -> WASM Attempt Announced about open-source-flash HOT 41 OPEN

Could you kindly stay on-topic, thanks! 🙏

from open-source-flash.

@pakastin Sure I will do that, Was hoping to also open up some sort of discussion as well about what people think of this. I found AJC by accident since I obsessively Google where Flash currently stands on a regular basis, so this is an extremely new project that has been under wraps for the past several months.

from open-source-flash.

Nah, it's just investment capital companies that happen to invest in the whole industry. Overlap is to be expected.
Doesn't mean that there's any direct link - there might be, but Google has no direct interest in GitHub, so the connection is pretty weak.

from open-source-flash.

This topic should have been about the AJC project.

If you want to discuss code licenses and "behind-the-scene interests", I recommend you:

• Too big to fail, please upvote
• Adobe tracker to vote for an actionscrpt to webassembly on future versions of their web softwares
• About technology statistics on the web

Every single issue on this repo discusses Flash, it does not mean that every issue should discuss the same thing.

from open-source-flash.

@Brian151 it seems that major software companies started to adapt their software with wasm
like autocad, adobe also apparently and was the reason why they abandoned a lot of as3->C++ projects
MS and other major websites are impatient to convert their tons of javascrap in binary too...

from open-source-flash.

Another promising Flash emulator project to check out is Ruffle, which is also using WebAssembly.

Ruffle: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

There's even a PR to include it into this repo: #127

from open-source-flash.

excellent! I just received an email about it (thanks Cleod9)
more and more projects (Adobe should be aware of it) like this is needed absolutely
to avoid any monolithic communist internet development

from open-source-flash.

I'm still skeptical of WASM, myself. Sounds promising, but seems already it's being basically ignored by the people that effectively make the rules of the internet.

Last major milestone I heard from them is cross-browser consensus... alright, now what?

Also, I personally don't like the proposed text format, the last time I saw it. Very unappealing.

Regardless, neat to hear of projects like this!

from open-source-flash.

(Thanks @pakastin for updating the readme, i was about to finally make a PR this morning 😅 )

@Brian151 Yeah I've also been skeptical of WASM for exactly that reason, but I do think it has the potential to make the web a more appropriate target for games and rich interactive content if given some love. Since the majority of web devs don't have a need for this kind of rich content that leaves it up to ex-Flash devs and game engine developers (e.g. Unity's WebGL target) to push for it.

Also I just noticed my Smash Flash project is actually in the readme as well, I feel honored! :D

from open-source-flash.

@Cleod9
Whoops!
Forgot to mention I actually hope WASM works out. It sounds promising, at least.
I actually went to the site mainly to look at the format and maybe get a handle on the instruction set.
Can't say I comprehend either right now.
I kinda hope that WASM easier allows some new flexibilities that JavaScript doesn't even really have. (like a viable dll/module system)
I may or may not open an issue and/or PR in regards to that text format, though.
In trying to make it more readable, I'd say they accomplished quite the opposite.

congratz on that!

@ROBERT-MCDOWELL
A little lost because of the format of what you said.

from open-source-flash.

@ROBERT-MCDOWELL
Did you mention the wrong person, there?

From what I gather, you're talking to me, right?

TBH, I'm disappointed how the icon works-out. It's so bland, and it honestly needs context to be understood...

I do recall the official WASM site mentioning the idea people might want to write it directly. How many people actually will? hard to say. Besides they want a view source option.

The current text format is kinda ambiguous and honestly not well explained. If the goal is to at least have the ability to understand a compiled WASM module, they failed...

I challenge the readability statement.
Well-designed Assembly or Psuedo-Assembly languages are fairly easy to read. For example, Lingo and ActionScript (well, AS3, anyways).
Not to say I understand, for example, Intel x86 Assembly as a whole, but when I look at any example of it, I at least can get some idea of what it is doing. If I looked at the source, or even an attempted decompilation, I can better understand what it is, and I can see how the instructions in the executable program relate to the source that was used to generate them. I also have a clear idea of what the instructions even are doing, though I might have to look it up. The example on the WASM site, which is probably outdated, yes, there is a bit too much effort required to understand what the WASM instructions are doing, compared to what the C++ source code says they are doing. With a piece of x86, or Lingo (assuming my team's decompiler was done yet), or Flash Actionscript, if you look at the "source" of the scripts, and compare it to the disassembly of the bytecode, you can understand WHAT that bytecode does. Actually, you can probably understand the "assembly" all by itself. WASM seems to lack that. So, imagine someone makes a game, or a game engine in WASM. At some point, view-source is used, or the WASM module is disassembled by a third-party tool. Great! Now what? Sure, it's not going to be entirely EASY to understand, but if the text format is designed more carefully, it will not take someone terribly long to understand something from it, and say for example, understand one of the data structures a given function (let's say spawnEnemy) actually is creating/accessing.

Hope that makes sense?

from open-source-flash.

@ROBERT-MCDOWELL Just a reminder that we're all on the same side here! 🙂 I don't think anyone would even find this repo if they weren't remotely interested in preserving flash. I'm saddened and angered what's happening with Flash too, but the most productive thing we can do now is spread awareness about these projects as they come up.

Speaking of, does anyone know how to get in touch with Jason Huang, the creator of AJC? He seems to have gone silent since the new year, which doesn't look good for its momentum.

from open-source-flash.

@Sandstedt Sadly there is no progress... You would have to speak with Jason directly for details but what I can say is that he is no longer involved in that project, and I am not sure of its current state.

from open-source-flash.

Sorry, the original AJC project has been suspended for some reasons. I will be contributing to emscripten repo, mainly focusing on embind, and hopefully writing an As3 to wasm compiler which is similar with the solution for TS-> Assembly script-> wasm.

from open-source-flash.

@tsunamicoding , I went to see, I don't see anything related to flash or SWF in the code, nor in the JS files that I opened, they use Players JS (https://videojs.com/) and for games it's Unity 3D, so JS also at final.

from open-source-flash.

@Alama32
there are definitely still flash based games out on newgrounds, so maybe the specific games you're playing are unity-based?

and as for JS files, release code usually is minimized/obfuscated. you may or may not be able to find anything generally without spending a sickeningly long time reverse-engineering it. sad to say, i know just how true this statement is, having tried it a few times... T-T

from open-source-flash.

Please just create a pull request with edited readme, thanks!

from open-source-flash.

That is cool! 🤘😎

from open-source-flash.

@Cleod9, they still are building the spec, so I think the best creative and useful idea would be accepted there... but from what I understood wasm would not be done to directly code on it because of the pseudo assembly language which is not really easy to read, but rather as a final format after conversion. Also there is apache royale working on it.

from open-source-flash.

Sorry I forgot to add your name for the follow up. I think it would be worth to copy/paste your comment directly to the webassembly git repo, it seems you are well experienced on it and for sure if they don't have any logical answer about the choice they are making so something is wrong. I agree with you that if a text format must be adopted so more it will be easy to understand better it will be, if not what's the reason to create a text format? An assembly developer from Japan complained about it some months ago, but they just answered vaguely.

from open-source-flash.

@ROBERT-MCDOWELL
Might I see where this took place?

Although, if they basically over-looked input from that type of individual, I can't say it sounds promising...

from open-source-flash.

@Brian151, as always isn't it? ;) development never been a question of Ego, those who think that their ideas are better than other is not what is called open source community, and if then they just ignore it, so it sounds wrong for sure. there are plenty of git projects claiming to be open source as long as you are just a pleb dev working for free (i.e. bitcoin git).
Also to complete the scene we must not forget that github itself is a google property (ex googlecode).
so it's always good to truly challenge and test as simple human with good intention. and btw fork is done for that if you don't agree to them. just fork webassembly and do it your own, and if your choices are better than the original so for sure more developers will switch to your fork.
I change subject, I was wondering if avmplus would be easily integrated in webassembly or something like that https://github.com/adobe/avmplus
Also if any would like to contribute to SWFtoWASM bridge at apache-royale git I think the door is widely open https://github.com/apache/royale-asjs

from open-source-flash.

@ROBERT-MCDOWELL
The W3C needs to learn this, outright ignoring actual developers and asserting that they're always right...

github is owned by google? Didn't realize that!

Honestly, I'd like to see some native code translations.
I'm kinda rushing this reply atm btw... sry
I have time, but I'm doing other stuff

from open-source-flash.

No, Robert is just spreading misinformation here.
Neither Google for Alphabet owns GitHub. Both companies are owned by multiple investment capital firms, that's all.
I assume the idea that Google owns GitHub is because Googlecode projects typically migrated to GitHub, but that was just a technical decision: Google was pulling the plug on Googlecode, looked around for companies to recommend for migration, and the only serious contenders were SourceForge (which was in horrible shape at the time) and GitHub. So Google decided to write a small script to help migrating to GitHub.
No nefarious plots here.

from open-source-flash.

@toolforger
my mistake, my fingers just wrote the wrong name...
some interesting articles
http://fortune.com/2015/09/29/github-ceo-40-under-40/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/08/17/github-ceo-chris-wanstrath-to-step-down/#268a9eb19ead

According to https://equityzen.com/trending/github/

Investor Track Record
Andreessen Horowitz
Lyft, Airbnb, Magic Leap, Pinterest, Dollar Shave Club, Jawbone, Slack, Instacart, Affirm, Box
SV Angel
Snap, Pinterest, Jawbone, Slack, Cloudera, Instacart, Zenefits, Stripe, Okta,
Institutional Venture Partners
Snap, AppDynamics, SoFi, Slack, Twitter, Domo, Zenefits, Prosper, Tanium
Sequoia Capital
Airbnb, Jawbone, Square, Instacart, Dropbox, Ola, MongoDB, Prosper, Guardant Health, 23andMe
Thrive Capital
Slack, Instacart, Oscar, Unity Technologies, Stripe, Opendoor, Addepar, Warby Parker, ClassPass

let's say github is owned by the whole W3C club by proxy....

from open-source-flash.

--- Nah, it's just investment capital companies
sure, $350 millions is just investment capital companies.
btw I really doubt that google will friendly make a link from googlecode to github if they didn't have any
interest. if it was the case, why not SVN which was the pioneer of source code project management?
but I guess you are working for github right? if not, how are you so sure of what you are saying?

from open-source-flash.

well, you like or not, it's absolutely not off topic
since we are talking about release open source a proprietary plugin.
so if you don't want to understand the reality of how the code license and what's the interests behind the scene to really understand why it's so hard to get flash as open source so just ignore my comments, but please try to open your mind and accept the reality thanks.

from open-source-flash.

--- demurgos
you are right, I'm enough to talk about all of that...

from open-source-flash.

@toolforger
Kinda figured it might be a mistake, and I see where that could have come from
I don't think it was an attentional attempt at misinformation

@toolforger @ROBERT-MCDOWELL
re: "just investment firms"
I'm going to have to agree with Robert on this one, "investors" tend to be awarded levels of authority over the company/product that they honestly should never be given. Also, there's a tendency for one of the parties to absorb the other when this level of cooperation takes place. And that's not assumption, it's fact. and lol... Only #350 mil? Surprised it's no at least $1 bil!

@pakastin @ROBERT-MCDOWELL
re : "off-topic"
While I agree, there is a point to addressing these matters...
The corporations, whom, largely rely on being proprietary (some BRAG about this, even though newer generations despise trade secret ism) , have massive levels of influence over the "open-source" community. They designed/own most of the programming languages, the IDEs, the engines, the platforms by which to share your creations, etc... And, they have ungodly levels of influence on the government. They have all the tools to force "open-source" around as much as they want. Projects like this are wise to be wary of the corporations and what interests and/or influences they may have. Many don't want Flash around, One basically gave-up on it. Even the "indies" and the open-source community now stray from Flash. For example, John Cooney made a presentation (and recorded it) about Flash, its history, his use of it, etc... He mentioned his family was phoning him freaking-out about him using Flash, because of fear-mongering in regards to security. And he's not the only one with similar problems. Likewise, that fear-mongering has been used to attack this project, as well. That causes a lot of damage, because they paint they picture we're a bunch of crazed fanatics or similar (basically, anything to make us sound at best, not credible, and at worse, insane). Sorry for again bringing this up, but I do hope you're seriously considering what kinds of challenges, some of which are from the corporations, that this project may face.

@demurgos
re : "VARIETY DISCUSSIONS!"
I won't argue, there, and even I am finding it tiring, as I didn't come here to find every issue go off on the same tangent. Perhaps we just need a dedicated issue to talk about... ...the recurring topic.... It's still very much relevant to this repo/organization as a whole.

@Cleod9
re : "stop fighting!"
Good to see we have a peacemaker. I can normally function at that capacity, until which point I become involved in the argument myself. I agree. We're on the same side, let's quit fighting. And let's quit constantly bringing-up the corporations on every issue... It is indeed angering, though, that Flash is honestly, well, it's being bullied, plain and simple. HTML5 is the "cool kid", now... Flash is the nerd/geek whose own parents just ignore, having given-up. It is sad...
re : "Jason?"
Nope. Reminds me (slightly borderline off-topic) of the origins of my Earthquake team. Our initial research was pulled from fileformats.archiveteam.org, and what seems to be a dead shockwave preservation project called "shockabsorber" (we absorbed the code from this, but never got far with it). Indeed having the creator/owner MIA doesn't help. Know anyone who could take it over if Jason can't be found?

Now, with all that said, I hope to see future discussions here actually be relevant to the WASM thing

from open-source-flash.

Now, with all that said, I hope to see future discussions here actually be relevant to the WASM thing

Me too.

from open-source-flash.

@Brian151

Indeed having the creator/owner MIA doesn't help. Know anyone who could take it over if Jason can't be found?

Without any kind of knowledge transfer it would be pretty difficult to take over a project like that. Perhaps Jason is just waiting specifically on a response from Adobe before he jumps back into the conversation. Either that or he is just on vacation, or too busy with other projects...

from open-source-flash.

@Cleod9
Indeed it'd be a challenge...
Could be the case that he's waiting...

from open-source-flash.

@Cleod9 seems like the example links is broken, is there any progress with this plugin? Anyone heard from @JasonHuang3D? Found a fork here for everyone interested: https://github.com/shanewfx/AJC-Flash-WebAssembly-Examples

from open-source-flash.

Thanks for the answer @JasonHuang3D! Sad to hear about the cancelation of the AJC project, but exciting with the emscripten As3 compiler. Would be a wonderful contribution to be able to both continue working with the tools many of us is used to work with for years, and also be able to let old flash-projects continue to live in the future without Adobe's involvement.

from open-source-flash.

Here we are in 2020 and WASM is very promising, more and more languages have made efforts to be able to compile in WebAssembly. Hopefully AS3-WASM does not become an unicorn..

from open-source-flash.

@hako, thanks for the info! I went to see .. I am a little sad to see that 2 similar projects exist. Why did the efforts not focus on a single work? Because of the language used? An emulator, so a player, right? the ideal would be to be able to compile directly in webassembly from source code AS3> WASM and that FlashDevelop can target it. I read Ruffle's roadmap I knew Alchemy, I had built an installer that I had published on the French FlashXpress site. Then tests in AGAL (assembler for GPU). I see that there are more collaborators for Ruffle project, I will see to force the project. The ideal would be to have support from Adobe or Mozilla fondation which already has FLEX.

from open-source-flash.

Ruffle is still nowhere with AS3, he is still developing the AVM1 for AS1 and 2.
As for Jason Huang, he abandoned his project.
So, for the moment, the idea of one day seeing a FlashPlayer in Webassembly remains a Unicorn.

from open-source-flash.

AVM is probably the hardest part of any full flash player to get right. To me, it kinda makes sense to maintain a branch/module for every individual version of that language/VM. Not sure how the official flash player works, but it's personally what I'd do. Also, I'm pretty sure shumway didn't have AS3 before mozilla canned it. AS3 is more complicated than the previous dialects. And I'd hate to think what's needed to optimize an AS3 virtual machine running in the browser's js engine!

on compiling AS3 code directly to web assembly, this is more or less how i plan to use the flash format in the future, to have the code compiled to something platform-specific and not even have a VM at all.

the similar projects is a side effect of us not being a coherent group. we're all in this for our own reasons, and we all have our own ideas of how to do things. i wouldn't say this is bad until it delays/stops progress. i don't think that's what's happening here, though. most of us are busy, and this is an extremely involved project to spend time on. For me, the commitments I would make are related to the asset formats and the preservation/resurrections of content I specifically care about. AS just isn't as important to me, and I don't expect that I would do a good job of implementing it, either. Despite not having a specific focus or tools/language, most of us are willing to collaborate, and to share our findings. [Also, even despite the internet, it's still possible for people to discover this project for the first time TODAY, after already making efforts towards their own solutions. ]

sad to hear jason has folded...

from open-source-flash.

At the end of the day, wouldn't it be easier to transpose an AS3 source code into another, like OpenFL or C # (blazor) or TypeScrip, then compile it to WASM or HTML5 Canvas. ? For the SWF without source code, there are reverse engineering softwares like Sothink or AS3 sourcerer. I know, it's strage, but why not? And It would allow lovers of AS3 like me, to continue to use this language / Framework: D
Because redo the AVM2 in Webassembly .. lol
Otherwise, the source is here https://github.com/whitequark/furnace-avm2

from open-source-flash.

just compiling straight to web assembly would make more sense if that were the end goal. transcription/transpilation also still involves the more complicated parts of compiling, anyways, like parsing/lexing the source code. it might actually be slightly more feasible to JIT re-compile the bytecode, but even that has its problems.

some flash games/applications use obfuscation, so recovering the source is not always viable. even then, people seem to gravely under-estimate how much work and how difficult this kind of process really is.

re-doing the AVM in web assembly actually isn't too bad. and WASM is typically compiled from C++ or similar, anyways.

from open-source-flash.

Newgrounds has its own flash player that you can launch from within the web browser! The ads still work and all! I wonder if all other flash websites will follow this method.

from open-source-flash.