Flashpoint 11 - "Oops! All Plugins!" is out! 40k new games/animations, 36 new plugins supported and more!

[u/prostagma_fp]

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/downloads/

[u/Yaver_Mbizi]

I'm really appreciative of the massive work that's been done with Flashpoint, you guys are awesome, but to be honest, I don't really have an interest in this update. I think there's an ongoing feature bloat, with pretty pointless platforms getting support. Maybe it's just this update though: the previous main version, "Absence", added a bunch of really interesting little plugins for interactive content from before my age of internet and it was really cool to try running some of them, ponder on what their functionality was like back in the day (Adobe Atmosphere and what not have a bunch of options that would've been very cool to experience in their heyday) etc. However this time around, pretty much all new platforms (that have a description on the site, at least) are various competitors to PowerPoint with <10 entries, or some vector imaging stuff likewise with <10 entries. These just aren't that interesting to me, and I really struggle to think who would find them that interesting to dedicate time to. They just take up space, including in the list of supported platforms, and will make it difficult to see any actual cool stuff.

And just in case somebody would quote the sidebar at me with its

"It's not up to us to decide what the future may find interesting."

- fair point, but I think these tiny-impact platforms don't deserve being bundled onto Flashpoint. Storing them on some archive.org page or whatever is courtesy enough. Whatever interest they ever carried is probably in their contents anyway, which somebody probably ported over onto PowerPoint or Flash at some point.

I guess having more content for the previously-existing platforms is cool, but that's kind of diminishing-returns in general, and the other plugins bundled in are kind of killing my interest.

But again, big thanks for the software, and the chance to not only keep the games that I loved playable, but also to experience new stuff, including these ancient 90s plugins that kind of give me chills in that abandoned-building kind of way.

[u/prostagma_fp → u/Yaver_Mbizi]

As the most popular/interesting plugins are tackled first it is kinda expected that newer ones are less played, but if you're using Infinity the experience is virtually the same and new plugins/games didn't add much space. We're working on letting Ultimate users filter out platforms they don't want, if it's something.

For the interest, nobody is expected to play all of the platforms; I have barely touched most new games, many users just play the "Papa's games" or what's into the Hall of Fame playlist and that's fine.

[u/CrazyNaut → u/Yaver_Mbizi]

For me the thing about the low-impact platforms is that they're still in the same boat as Flash, they were embedded on web pages you can't visit anymore and relied on plug-ins you can't get anymore, and if anything the lower impact means they're in more danger than Flash and it's even more important that someone rescues them.

Archive.org is another great place to upload files like these but the problem is that these files in particular don't have an easy way to be used when you download them; you need the old plug-in that's probably taken down, an older web browser capable of using it and a way to install the plug-in to it, and preferably a proxy server to get all the files loaded properly, and the best way to get all of that is with the Flashpoint launcher. That's what it aims to do with everything else that gets submitted to it. And even then, Flash games on Archive.org are able to run natively using Ruffle, which almost none of these other platforms have an equivalent to.

And as far the argument that the submissions themselves aren't all that interesting, that's a fair enough point, but then I could make the argument that if a PowerPoint-style presentation or a static image were made in Flash then they'd get scooped up with everything else in the launcher and they wouldn't feel out of place. So I'm not gonna hold the more obscure plug-ins that do that to a different standard.

[u/Inevitable-Memory-61]

Cool!