Thanks to FK!

I wanted to say thanks to Flash Kit and the mods for being such an important resource to the Flash community over all the years. Many is the time I found answers here to really difficult, intricate optimization problems that I couldn't find anywhere else. There were legends on this board. And contributing my own knowledge, working through other members' questions, helped me learn to think in ways that made me a better coder.

It's a sad day for all of us who devoted many years of our lives to building experiences in AS1/2 and 3. I have hundreds of thousands of lines of code, whole gaming platforms, that will never run again. Flash gave us the open-ended flexibility to design experiments, games, art projects and user interfaces that were only limited by our imagination, and deploy them everywhere. No two Flash sites ever looked or functioned the same. That always bothered the UX consistency police (Apple). But it allowed for a flood of wild creativity. Some of them were so out of the normal realm that they belong in museums. All of them were labors of love.

Although now, after many years, the JS/HTML5 front-end world can finally provide cross-browser analogues to most of what we were already doing by 2008, you rarely see the same kind of creativity as we saw everywhere during the early days of Flash.

Flash made coders out of artists, and artists out of coders. This site made me better at both, and for that I'm forever grateful.

Best wishes to you all, may you carry on making great things.

Josh Strike
1/1/2021

I want to add a thought to my post, because today is the first day I learned of the "kill switch" in FP 32 (and maybe 31?) I archived my debug / non-debug FP versions (for Mac) back to FP 10, so if anyone needs one, get in touch.

But my thought was: This move by Adobe feels like someone setting fire to my house with all my paintings in it. I'm 40 years old. I started working in Flash around 1998 and was still building new things until around 2015. The large part of my creative output from my 20s and early 30s is in Actionscript.

It's one thing to retire the player. But I can go online and play Atari games from the 70s. I can play any Nintendo game that ever existed. Has a language ever been fully eradicated along with all of its art and culture before, in one day?

I know the douches wanted to kill flash forever, and make everything clean and easier to index and easier to commercialize, and we're living in a post-Jobs/Zuck world now. People have profiles, not websites. If you have a personal website, it's Wordpress or some other template. No one is designing new UIs from scratch for their personal site. No one is taking ThreeJS and PixiJS and building a radically new interface for an art site.

But it's not just the loss of that culture that I'm mourning, I'm realizing. It's the actual destruction of my life's work. It's one thing to see hardware and software retired. It's another to have the company who built the tool that I spent 90% of my creative career on, actively demolish everything I built. It feels like an attack on a whole generation and a whole way of thought.

I know that we coders are "writing in sand" as my older brother, an old Assembly / C coder, told me when he gave my his TRS-80. And it's always like that. But his code will live on. Mine won't.

If I take anything from the tens of thousands of hours I spent learning how to really leverage the AVM, delving into bytecode, writing platforms, I guess the one thing I find consolation in is that I learned how to navigate an opaque system and built a deep understanding -- for a scripter -- of how things worked under the surface. Which serves me well now using Typescript and other things. But the tons and tons of experiments... stretching all the way back... who will translate them? Who will remember them? We should be remembered, at least be able to say "hey look at this thing I did 15 years ago that relates to what you're doing". And be able to pull it up.

It's wrong, and I really hope in a couple years we have a full on JS-based emulator so I can bring my art back. AS3 always ran faster than JS, especially faster than Safari's crummy JS implementation, and Jobs' was a cynical business decision.

Okay. It's wrong to destroy our work. End of my rant.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by joshstrike

I learned how to navigate an opaque system and built a deep understanding

---

this is a non opaque system:

PHP Code:

---

var colorOut={rOut:"",bOut:"",gOut:"",fullColor:""};
function combine2Colors1WithAlpha(b1,g1,r1,alph,b2,g2,r2){
colorOut["bOut"]=int(alph * (b1,g1,r1) + (1-0.5) * (b2,g2,r2))
colorOut["gOut"]=int(alph*(g1)+(1-alph)*(g2))
colorOut["rOut"]=int(alph*(b1)+(1-alph)*(b2))
colorOut["fullColor"]=RGBtoHEX(colorOut["rOut"],colorOut["gOut"],colorOut["bOut"])
return(colorOut);
}

function RGBtoHEX(r, g, b) {
var a = (r << 16 | g << 8 | b).toString(16);
while(a.length < 6) a="0"+a;
return a;
} 


---

Heheheh it's very transparent.

Now here's the all in home brew source code for StrikeSapphire's Poker hand evaluator in AS3. The same file had static functions that evaluated blackjack, video poker, real poker, 3 card, and omaha. Stripped those out for the post.

The great thing is I have NO idea if this was a good way to write a poker hand evaluator at all. It probably could have been optimized better but it worked for everything I threw at it. (After a few nasty accidents involving rare hands and disputes).

LanguageFilter was a static class that swapped a full translation for the text into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and a dozen other languages... WITH the right character sets and fonts loaded once I knew where the user was coming from.

I'm going out on a limb but I think after 4 years, 2008-2012, that was probably the largest solo Flash project ever built. This is not bragging. It's just the end of the career so... why not. Who will ever care?

(Edit; I'm just going to put this in a Pastebin for people who might be interested. https://pastebin.com/G6T2Pxfa )

I was working long hours on an as3 air project for the android webcam to detect multiple real cards on a table at once and display a 3d model over the cards, can I implement that with the paste bin program and give you the source to add to another pastebin?

That sounds like a fun one! (Pastebin just lets you paste text and share a link to it... not implement anything).

I still have to calibrate acouple more color ranges which I started doing today by hue, saturation, luminance, value, also look at the card as a whole object & last calculate how much percent of each color is in that object, and the card should be identified at various angles because its percentages. I will give you an update on that when I finish, I will do a screen record session.