I've been testing old Flash entries with Ruffle, would you like it if I occasionally posted stuff here?

Also if you stumble on an old Flash that's trying to run with Ruffle but it doesn't work, please link me to it here and I can disable Ruffle and add it to my "stuff that doesn't work yet" spreadsheet. We sorta accidentally enabled Ruffle for a bunch of stuff that wasn't ready to have it enabled, long story.

Reminder: You can become a Ruffle Sponsor and support ongoing emulation efforts!

I have definitely noticed some uploads starting to use Ruffle over the NG Launcher and I really enjoy it, I haven't noticed any difference performance wise (it uses less of my CPU and RAM if anything). I am also really happy to see some of my favourite submissions being view-able in the browser again and I can't wait to start playing some classic flash games again as well!

Alien Hominid has gotten close enough that we're defaulting to the Ruffle version:

Also Bomb Droid:

Would I like a thread of the big man himself showcasing classic content and shooting the "Flash is dead" argument right in the foot?

Yes, I would like that very much.

Also if anyone is curious about all the "Bad NG Preloader" entries on the list... There is code in the preloaders to make their animation consistent regardless of the FLA frame rate and that code is now breaking them in Ruffle. Once Ruffle accommodates the code, a ton more movies will start working and we can party like these dinosaurs:

Update: Sorry for sharing that.

So far I've notices a few similar glitches that seem to occur in both games mainly being the lives and timers don't seem to show up. I've also noticed that after just one death in Alien Hominid the music completely stops until another song is queued to play. Other than that it all works very well.

Those are on Mike's radar. The music stopping is a result of how Flash handles stopping individual sounds vs how it's currently implemented in Ruffle. The timer and lives are both related to text boxes, which I think someone in the Ruffle group has been working on.

Stopping sounds are caused by the somewhat-weird way that the AS2 Sound object works. I have to keep track of which clip a Sound is playing on, but I'm doing it in a half-baked way currently, so it ends up stopping all sounds!

A lot of older games use the "Variable" setting on a text field to display text; this would automatically update the text whenever a variable changed, or vice versa. We don't support this yet but I'll be working on it soon; movie clips will have to listen for every variable change. This was quickly supplanted by TextField.text which is easier to implement and we do already support. It's kind of funny to look back on all these old features; makes me appreciate why the performance of the Flash Player could be so bad, but they still had to support these things for legacy reasons (until AS3 at least!)

Please feel free to file any bugs on the GitHub page (https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues). This helps us keep track of progress!

XD

Also yes, this sounds like a great idea. Starting to suddenly get this urge to go digging through old content again, it's been a while...

Don't think I've stumbled upon anything running Ruffle that hasn't been linked to.

Well then here's another!

The old player would need AS3 support which is further out and even then, would be optimal to have something from scratch that achieves the same thing with better performance.

Funny side-note, @liljim and I were just looking at some realtime html5 visualizers before I came to my notifications.

What is ruffle???

Ruffle is an open-source Flash emulator that can run in-browser. It was created by @Mike!

So what's the advantage of Ruffle over the NG Player?

Ruffle doesn't require installing anything on your computer and doesn't depend on the Flash runtime, which some day may not be compatible with devices. Ruffle also works on mobile and over time could become better than the Flash player, with hardware acceleration, gamepad support and more. There is also some content that doesn't work right in NG Player, while the goal for Ruffle is to run ALL content properly. For now though NG Player is still necessary for content that isn't supported by Ruffle.

Maybe you could test the old Absalom RPG series from the days of Flash 5 with it?

I tried the first one and a lot of it worked but all of the dialog boxes were empty - will test again when more text stuff is working.

We're only ten years out from this horrible future:

Probably a good thing I didn't stumble upon this one when I first stumbled onto the Grounds. XD Or maybe I did...

Probably wasn't as traumatizing as Happy Tree Friends though.

Nice! The original would be fun for nostalgia, but any kind of visualizer sounds awesome.

Used to stick to the spinning disc for performance, but that last one had a pretty impressive number of effects to toggle otherwise.

Speaking of performance though: for some reason this one makes the browser unresponsive as soon as I try to load it. RAM usage starts going up up up, from ~200MB to around ~2GB on that tab, at which point it can't really go any further for me. Wonder if there's some kind of memory leak there... using FireFox.

Doesn't seem like the preloader play button works on this one:

Movie loads but gets stuck there.

Another that just seems to get stuck right away after you hit PLAY:

Pretty much any movie with an animated NG preloader or NG Ads preloader doesn't work at the moment - these are good ones to catch and disable Ruffle on. This entry wasn't a huge deal because it defaults to the MP4 version but I've disabled Ruffle on that regardless.

I've gone through every front paged entry from 2010 and 2011 to make sure nothing there (without an MP4) is running Ruffle without working. I'm partway through 2012 and some of 2009, along with a few hundred other random movies. This thread is a great place for people to link to anything that isn't currently working!

Aha, unless you disable that setting/swap formats on your account then.

I believe I saw some kind of 'Test this with Ruffle' notice under some submission a while back, with the alternative to also go with the NG Player instead, but seems this isn't a default? Was it just a temporary thing? Seems useful to be able to switch between these yourself, in case one doesn't work.

That's a looot of stuff!

It would be ideal to give the user a toggle and also a way to log issues / confirm something works but hard to say how much front-end & database development should happen around something that wouldn't be a long-term fixture of the site (when I look back on NG, it can be frustrating how much our limited dev resources can get spent on short-term / temporary things vs the long-term features)... Movies will likely remain messy for a bit and then we'll move ahead more slowly with games when the time comes.

I notice Newgrounds Player still doesn't capture the background color of the original SWF. Any plans to rectify this?

Hmm I really thought I'd seen the notice already, thought you might have changed your mind about having it there, or that maybe the switch functionality wasn't all working as it should...

Having a way to log errors does sound like a more time-tasking addition, and maybe not a long-term one, but simply being able to switch between available formats seems like something that could be around for a long time. And an instant fix for any problems people might be having with Ruffle content, if it is a significant amount of content.

Exciting times with this development stuff though, and so much working already.

External links don't seem to work either: https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1448655

And maybe a fair share of other things: https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1443545

...since Ruffle seems like the long-term solution I guess that might be the priority though.

NG Player may get future updates but at the moment we're directing the funds into supporting Ruffle since that's an ideal future solution.

Definitely. Maybe sticky this somewhere?

This weekend I went through my spreadsheet and tried to note every SWF that wasn't working because it contained video, then whenever possible I found the source video elsewhere, updated the entry and removed it from the list. Ruffle probably won't support video for a good while and it's ideal to host the source video in the first place.

If you know of any Flash on the site that is actually a video file saved in an SWF, link it here and we can see about updating it to the source video! If you can find a link to the source video on another site, even better.