Desktop Flash gaming...

[Mikki1081#]

Afternoon, guys.

Now; I understand the situation vis-a-vis Flash Player completely, trust me.....and so far as browsers are concerned, I'm in complete agreement. Having been maintaining re-packed versions of PepperFlash for the Puppy Linux community (had to, because Puppy has a very odd package management system) for the last few years, I personally can't wait to see the back of it.

My question is to do with those of us who enjoy playing Flash games ON THE DESKTOP.....NOT "online". I use the Flash Player that was supplied as part of the DeBugger package, and it works nicely; drag & drop the game onto the player, and off she goes. Now; I would like confirmation of something, please....

I understand that player versions from 32.0.0.371 have been "time-bombed".....in other words, had code inserted to check the actual date, and if that shows as after Jan 1, 2021, they'll just refuse to work. Can you confirm if this will also affect a standalone player used on the desktop only, please?

TIA.

Mike Walsh.

[jeromiec83223024 · Accepted solution]

I'm pretty sure that we time bombed the projector (also, the projector is significantly faster than the debugger, because it doesn't have to do all the additional tracing and accounting that the debugger does), but I'd have to test it to be absolutely positive.  An OS-level API change will break the player at some point, so even if it works in the short term, without the sustaining engineering work that we currently put in, it will eventually fall into disrepair. 

You can confirm the time-bom behavior by setting your system clock ahead to something like Feb 1 2021.  

The ideal outcome would be that game developers port their games to other technology, and/or talk to HARMAN about licensing a maintained copy of the Flash runtime that they could distribute with their game as a packaged application.