Flash seemed like an evolved form of HyperCard, and the proprietary nature of both were ultimately their demise. I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity.
> the proprietary nature of both were ultimately their demise
Agree.
> I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools
Hard agree.
> on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity.
Wait what? Wouldn't you want it to be implemented at the very least on something like Godot, which is open source?
Aside from that, I think we are in full agreement on this - though my dream would be something like this on uxn (because I love the concept of uxn, I don't know that it would actually be feasible to do so - I suspect it wouldn't.)
Sorry, Unity was the first that came to mind, I forgot it was closed. Good call.
Though, I should clarify... the missed opportunity with Flash is that there was no good reason for the .swf format to be closed. IIRC, there were a few attempts made at making non-Adobe Flash players, but they were always terrible because of the necessary overhead of reversing the format.
Even if the initial version was built on Unity, as long as the creations were saved to an open and well-documented file format, alternative players could be written which would be a boon to the ecosystem.
Honestly, I think open formats and protocols are more important in general than open code -- which is of course why we see them less and less these days :( .
Uxn should be able to host something like Hypercard, the hypertalk language would probably look something like akin to Postscript.
Uxn's Noodle software is inching toward something like Macpaint. A software that ties it all together as a game making tool would in Uxn would be very nice indeed!
It's been a while since I checked in on Uxn, I should look again! Last time I checked there wasn't much in the way of docs, but it looks like there's more now - there goes a couple of evenings in the near future!
Edit: Looking at your username and then comment history, it looks as if you are possibly actually one or both of the 100 rabbits?
If so, thanks for being one of my personal inspirations to keep learning about both computing and sustainable lifestyle!
We've been trying to write some documentation as things are finally stabilizing. If you're interested in learning uxnasm to write something like hypercard, I'd love to help.
I'd definitely be interested in that, I actually started the tutorial about an hour or two before seeing this comment.
I'm thinking I'll run through this tutorial and then try to implement a couple basic ideas I've had bouncing around, is there way I should contact you when I get there? I'll try to check back here for any updates, an email address is in my profile as well if that works for you.
I'll probably need to work with Hypercard itself more first as well - at this point I only know how it works in theory plus a couple minutes of demo video.
GTK3 with Glade was a really great (albeit considerably more complicated) tool to do more or less the same thing with modern design paradigms and more complicated, capable widgets. Unfortunately, the GTK devs seem to be moving away from simple UI design with GTK4, making it pretty undesirable for building anything other than complex, hulking apps.
I still have a plethora of weekend projects made with GTK2/3 sitting around on my drives. Little MPRIS controllers, simple icon viewers, petname generators, hashing applications... I've got half a mind to fork GTK3 into a simpler UI design tool if I had the time for it.
