[fxtentacle]

Nowadays with WASM and WebGL you can do basically everything in a web browser, but you'll take a 100x performance hit.

Every game using Unity/Unreal + WASM needs to download 10-20 MB of JavaScript before it even starts loading the actual assets. With Flash, that could have been a 10 KB SWF instead.

Similarly, Flash had really fluid animations that were drawn purely on the CPU. Why my 266 MHz P2 could have better vector animations than people nowadays can squeeze out of a 3070 with WebGL is beyond me.

In my opinion, we still DO NOT have any worthwhile replacement for the ease of cross-platform development combined with excellent performance that Flash had.

[exceptione]

I remember that loading a flash plugin would choke the browser for a while. I think we always had to to pay a startup penalty.

I have experienced flash for the last time a while ago though, so my memory might have been corrupted in the mean time. Also, I am talking about computing capacity of a decade ago, so the comparison is never going to be fair.

But I am definitely sure that the java applets were a disaster in terms of UX (slow to load, interaction feeling very foreign).

[singularity2001]

A Unity wasm empty scene is ≈1MB:

https://blog-api.unity.com/sites/default/files/styles/focal_...

couldn't find a live demo to confirm, which strongly speaks against Unity being anywhere as flashy.

[_jezell_]

Unity is not a good example, it's bloated as hell and takes like 15s minimum to load a square. It wasn't built for WASM and uses a toolchain that makes WASM hard.

Bevy loads pretty instantly in comparison. That's where I'd invest my time if I was doing web games.

https://bevyengine.org/examples/

[fxtentacle]

1 MB after compression. And only if you turn off physics and limit yourself to 2D

[seydor]

I consider that intentional