In January, an anchor named QuackityHQ called on hundreds of thousands of viewers in the live room to log in to the virtual community game Habbo Hotel. In this way, he plans to bring down the server, thus letting the developers know that since the game was developed from Flash to the Unity engine, many old players have been quite unhappy about the loss of some core functions and the major changes in the user interface.
"Developers are destroying their own games and we have to stop them." The anchor said on the live broadcast.
As a programming language, Flash enables games and animations to run in a web browser. In 2017, developer Adobe announced plans to end support for the Flash browser plugin by the end of 2020. By 2021, Flash won't work in mainstream browsers — except domestically, which is another story, of course.
Harbay Guest House is one of many browser games forced to abandon Flash, but during this transition, developers encountered a series of challenges.
<h3>Not a calm transition</h3>
QuackityHQ's livestream sparked widespread attention on social media, and "#notmyhabbo" quickly became a hot topic on Twitter. Many Twitter users expressed dissatisfaction with the state of the game, including rapper Soulja Boy, who later that day also did a live broadcast of "Habao Guest House."
Sulake, a developer from Finland for Habao Guesthouse, revealed that the server did not crash that day, but it did come under a lot of pressure, making it difficult for players to log in during peak traffic periods. A month later, Sulake announced that it would launch an older version of The Harbah Hotel, a temporary solution that the development team had in mind before the game made a full transition to Unity, in order to appease disappointed players.
"It's clear that our work isn't going fast enough to get the Unity client to a satisfactory, playable state." Wrote in a blog post on the official website of Habao Guesthouse.
The "Hubble" series of games was born in 2000, which was the moment when Flash was in the limelight. The game has now been reborn on the web, but there have been many twists and turns
Flash experienced a period of rapid development in the early years of the century, with Flash game sites such as Newgrounds, Miniclip, and Neopts popular with young Internet users. These sites still exist today, but are undergoing major overhauls to accommodate the situation where browsers no longer support Flash.
Flash is easy to learn and versatile, and many creators have used it to design games. For example, Super Meat Brother was originally a Flash game, and VVVVV, which came out in 2010, was also ported to the Nintendo 3DS and Switch platforms. Sites like Newsgrounds are similar to YouTube in allowing creators to upload Flash artwork and helping them find users. On Newsgrounds, some of the most popular games have cumulatively hits of up to 20 million hits.
"Flash was very cutting-edge in those days, because most of the content on the web at the time was text and pictures, without much sound and interactive elements." Newsgrounds founder Tom Fulp said, "Flash really pushes the web forward. ”
Several large Flash game sites are looking for their own way out
Around 2005, the popularity of "Habao Hotel" reached its peak. It's a social game where players can create virtual rooms and add furniture to decorate, hang out together, or play games together. With the rise of social media, "Habao Hotel" is no longer as trendy as it used to be, but the number of monthly users is still between 600,000 and 1 million.
Sulake took precautions and began working on a Unity version of it in 2018, and in the process, the development team encountered a number of technical challenges. According to CEO Valatry Karoo, the Unity engine is less suited to be used to build this type of sandbox game.
"We had to rethink a lot of things." Karoo said.
The Unity version of Hubble Guest House had poor performance in its early stages, with a confusing user interface and lack of some key features. On the other hand, the development team wanted to use the opportunity of making a unity version to try out some new ideas, such as changing the way players trade items. But the new system they designed was too limited to allow players to trade furniture privately, and Karoo acknowledged that the change was "not very popular with users."
As a site that allows players to take care of virtual pets and play games, Neopets faces similar challenges in its transformation. In 2020, operators estimate that the site still has about 100,000 daily active users and 1.5 million monthly active users.
Neopets is 20 years old, and it's not easy to gradually get rid of flash dependencies while continuing the site
"We're not a big development team of 100 people who can't focus on everything at once." Stephanie Lorde, brand manager at Neopets, said, "So I had to prioritize the most important work. ”
Lord said the entire 2020 development team is busy to ensure the company can function without Flash, especially in December, as Neopts usually hosts special events to celebrate Christmas. During the event, users can access the Christmas calendar, receive daily gifts for free and watch a Flash animation. In addition to the annual celebrations, the development team also had to fix various issues that arose with the site.
"We're happy that Flash is gone." Lord said, "We all thought, well, it's finally gone. ”
While some of the features of the Neoputs site still don't work, the team at least doesn't have to rush to work, but can focus on solving problems step by step and completing features. According to the plan, they will prioritize the functions that users use most often, such as pet customization, daily activities, and Neopidan Pound, a place that allows users to adopt or abandon pets.
As Neoputes gradually improved its website, some of the old features gradually returned, and Wheel of Monotony was one of them. It's a turntable function that spins for hours in a row each day and then points to some kind of prize. The gameplay disappeared due to flash's death until February this year, when the development team successfully transferred it to HTML5.
<h3>Document a piece of the internet's history</h3>
Newsgrounds is a website that features nearly 100,000 web games, launched in the early 1990s, and by 1998 all games and animations on the site were running through Flash and continued until 2012. "After 2012, people's excitement about Flash dropped dramatically. For most of the last 10 years, we've been preparing for the future after Flash's exit. Fulp said.
According to Fulp, html5 games were in their infancy in the early 2010s, and video creation became increasingly popular — especially on platforms like YouTube. Newsgrounds noticed these trends, so it added a video player to the animated content and enabled users to upload HTML5 games. Still, in order for thousands of older Flash games to survive, the site still needs to find a solution.
Mike Welshe, a former web developer at Newgrounds, left in 2012 to write the open-source software Marvel, which allows users to convert Flash content into high-definition video for long-term preservation. Welsch later built a free Flash simulator, Ruffle, with other volunteers, that users can download as a desktop app or browser plugin and then access Flash content on web pages.
"We've been integrating Ruffle with the site, and until now, most of the content that people uploaded to Newsgrouds before 2007 could run on Ruffle." Fulp said, "Our goal is to make all Flash content capable of running in Ruffle. ”
Ruffle is a Flash Player provided by Newgrounds itself to run those old games
The new titles on Newsgrounds are already HTML5 games
Ruffle isn't the only project designed to save Flash games. Flashpoint is by far the largest project of its kind — it's like a 500GB library of about 79,000 Flash games. Flashpoint's team consists of about 200 volunteers, and all games on the platform are completely free.
"That's part of Flash culture, right?" Flashpoint founder Ben Ratimer said, "Everyone offers everything for free, and that tradition is great. ”
Ratimer, 26, an Australian who is passionate about digital preservation, has previously worked on similar projects, such as saving an ancient mobile game that runs on Jave. In 2017, shortly after Adobe announced that it would end support for the Flash browser plugin, Ratimore launched the Flashpoint project.
Ratimer was one of the first people to start saving Flash games. "Ruffle didn't show up at that time, and you couldn't find a project to save flash games." Still, he thinks the action is too slow. Ratimer felt he should have sensed the red flags about 10 years ago, when former Apple CEO Steve Jobs didn't allow Flash to run on the iPhone.
During the process of creating Flashpoint, Ratimer and the volunteer team had to overcome many tricky challenges. Among other complications, Flash files often have "security locks" that are restricted to running on specific websites or environments. To solve this problem, Ratimore had flashpoint simulate a pseudo-Internet: When you're not online, Flashpoint will mistake your computer for thinking you're online, so flash can run in the background — even if your computer doesn't have a Flash player.
Flashpoint has saved nearly 40,000 Flash games
"From a preservation point of view, this has played a huge role, because we can not only access the old Flash games, but also do not have to edit, and keep the original version."
Ratimer and his team scour the Flash games extensively, download them, and then save them to a growing library of works. He acknowledges that the game's makers were not consulted before the work was done, and some developers were indeed unhappy about it, but most were happy that such projects existed.
Ratimer believes that there are several features that make Flash unique, such as Flash games that encourage "free consumption" but do not have a class design such as unboxing. Flash also fosters an "unparalleled sense of community" as players spread the best of the best by word of mouth.
"In a few years, the idea of playing games through browser web pages may disappear completely. Usually, if a programming language is out of the ordinary, there will always be another language to replace it. But Flash is different because it used to be ubiquitous, making it relatively easy for people to learn and publish their work..." Ratimer said, "There has never been such a technology as Flash in the past, and it is likely that it will never be in the future." ”
This article is compiled from: washingtonpost.com
原文标题：《Flash is dead. These games from the early 2000s hope to live on.》
Originally written by Elise Favis/Shannon Liao