As of December 26th, 2018, it'll have been one year since I decided to go and preserve as many Flash games as I possibly could. With the future of Flash games uncertain and ticking ever closer towards a potential endless pit, it was time to act, or get off the pot.
Over the course of 365 days, we've created something incredible.
Flash games were huge. Massive. Games went viral. Developers jumped into the spotlight, many moving onto greatness in the wider industry. Genres were created. Communities formed, large and small. And that's just the games — Flash animations took up an even larger spot, and arguably an even larger place in the early internet cultural realm.
But as time wore on, Flash's dilapidated codebase of worm-eaten wood and rusted metal resulted in security leaks, performance problems and the outright denial of entry onto mobile platforms. Eventually, the death knell sounded. By the year 2020, Flash will disappear from most desktop internet browsers.
At this time last year, I didn't know anyone who was making an effort to save this unmatched historical artifact of 2000s internet society. You would see someone here and there saving a few SWFs, but it was otherwise complete silence from the usual crowd. So I started Flashpoint - an all in one archival project, museum and playable collection of Flash games, as safe as possible from the eventual death and server shutdowns of Flash game sites.
A few months of struggle and a sudden relocation all were worth it in the end, when I wrote my other article on the subject.
Our Discord was flooded with thankful pilgrims and former developers, giving us the leg up we needed to keep working. We went from one man maintaining the archive to over fifty people contributing in some way, from adding games to new features and testing.
And that was just the first month. Through a constant influx of new members, requests and ideas, Flashpoint has been evolving at a rate I didn't believe was possible. Let's go over just the highlights.
... Over the past six months we've ended up with support for nine different web game technologies. Adobe Flash, Adobe Shockwave, Unity Web Player, HTML5, PopCap Plugin, Java Applets, 3DVIA Player, Microsoft's Silverlight and the recently added 3D Groove GX. All of these are usable with no setup. It seems like we're eventually going to have support for every web game imaginable.
The upside to the way Flashpoint is constructed is that it's decentralized, not reliant on any kind of server at all, and keeps everything local, so there's no chance of losing anything.
Over the course of the months that we were adding all these features, though, LaunchBox was creaking and groaning under the weight. The several thousand games we'd been adding to it were causing it to lag and give up on lower-spec machines. Many of its features were either superfluous or required payment. And we had ideas for features we wanted in that we couldn't do. So around version 4.1 we started putting feelers out for someone who wanted to code a new launcher for us…and the call was answered by a great pillar. An obelisk, if you will.
Flashpoint Launcher, FPL for short, is our brand spanking new, Electron powered, cross platform, super speedy launcher meant entirely for Flashpoint. It supports everything we need and not an ounce more, and is infinitely faster for it. A quick listing of its benefits are below:
There's even more coming, too. That (alpha) in the top left corner isn't there for show, Flashpoint Launcher is always being worked on.
- Flashpoint can now be powered by 100% open source components. The Launcher, Redirector, web server (out-of-the-box Apache) and browsers (Pale Moon / Basilisk / K-Meleon) are all open, with the only closed-source programs being the binaries for the webgame tech, and the optional Fiddler Redirector replacement.
- Unbelievably fast. Can boot within a couple of seconds on my main machine. Icons load in like a snap of the fingers.
- We cut several hundred megabytes of bloat from LaunchBox that we just didn't need.
- Our server and redirector solution now launches on the fly, with no annoying batch file. We can even configure if you want to swap part of it out.
- The Home tab supports giving you a random game, if you just feel like grabbing something to play.
- Playlists! A fantastic little feature that lets people make a small collection of their favorite games based around any theme or idea. We even have a few from notable Flash devs from back in the day.
There are so many other highlights of what we've been up to related to Flashpoint that I'm going to have to summarize them all in simple images from now on, just to save time:
Flashpoint has been actively worked on and built by a staff of over fifty people every day over the past year. Anyone can come in and help:
Every little bit of help we can get along the way is appreciated. By myself I got about a thousand games in over the course of five months. With the team, I got 9,000 games in, in seven months. Even the smallest contribution helps — with Flash dying in one year, we're low on time. We have links at the end.
- If you're not great on the tech side of things, that's no problem, just load up Flashpoint and help us test the games and platform.
- If you have a good memory of the library, you can always help us by making new playlists and recommending games to put into the collection.
- If you can handle your way around a lightweight version of our platform, you can help us add games.
- If you're good at coding, we could always use people to help us code the tools we need.
Flashpoint 5.3, codenamed "Revolution", with 10,000 games included, should be out by the time you see this article. I've given Flashpoint codenames since version 3.0 to help signify version differences. 5.0's version names have been space-themed — Go for Launch to introduce Flashpoint Launcher, The Great Filter for Playlists, Type III because the last one was a Mesarthim reference, and originally, the code name for 5.3 was going to be 'Orbit', for us taking one full year around our sun. Someone told me just how wrong I was and suggested 'Revolution' as a codename instead.
That name sticks in more ways than one.
Revolution is really the only way to describe what's been done here.
Come join us. Share this article. Let the world know what they're losing, and what we've worked hard to keep. Have some fun along the way — these are all video games, after all — and help us out, with the more people we have, the more we can save before the sun sets on Flash.
- We have an intense amount of Flash content on our hard drives — some of the biggest archives of their kind.
- We've created the most robust system for saving even the most stubborn Flash files, and in the process, created the most robust system for saving several other kinds of web content as well.
- We've resurrected plugins that simply didn't work anymore, or were very close to dying out altogether, not just Flash. We've just added 3D Groove GX to Flashpoint — a browser plugin that only works in IE6.
- We have ten thousand pieces of content — more than Armor Games, AddictingGames and MaxGames combined — and more in the pipeline.
- We've devised ways to make this content easily accessible to people in the future, and it's almost all free of reliance on servers.
- It's all only a few clicks away from any Windows desktop…
- …and it happened in less than a year.
Downloads on the first link, community on the second link.
Much more at the link:
https://medium.com/@bluemaximax011/...web-game-preservation-revolution-51c2e5098209
Just saw this today through some subreddits excellent project, excuse the bad formatting and some quote and image copies dunno how to do it properly
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