This is missing a pretty big chunk of the end-game(s) of Flash: social network gaming. All of the top Facebook games were using Flash. We built the engine for FarmVille, CityVille, etc. using ActionScript3. Our artists would author the animations and sprites in the Flash editor and we'd be able to drop them in seamlessly into the game.
Additionally, PC/Console 2D & 3D games were using Flash to author and render their UIs for a very long time via ScaleForm. They only discontinued it in 2018.
Flash gaming became much bigger than Newgrounds and had massive influence on how to build future WYSIWIG tools to empower designers and artists.
Yeah that’s a huge oversight. AS3 was in fact the highest paid language in the industry for some time, and it was all of the social games. Then we all mostly jumped ship to mobile or PC or VR or whatever.
But it was a very significant industry, every major games company had divisions building FB games, we had games hitting 20+ million DAU overnight, it was big business.
I made Flash games (among other things) at Sony, Disney, PopCap, and Amazon. I’m not sure people understand how widely it was used.
Now... I also saw the writing on the wall and made a hasty exit in 2012 because it was clearly dying. But for a while it was a vibrant and well-paying niche.
The videogame industry is terrible at knowing about anything that isn’t in the ‘cool’ bubble. FB games were definitely deeply uncool and whilst people will have heard about and even played them they will never be part of games haiography. Same thing with games like Neopets and other predominately ‘girl’ games.
Even stuff like Roblox is only just getting noticed by game development influencers and it’s a huge platform pointing at the road towards the next big thing in games.
Glad this is no longer a thing, still remember playing Borderlands for the first time and thinking the UI was really janky and unresponsive feeling, then I googled ScaleForm because the logo was at the start and I hadn't heard of it and suddenly it all made sense because the UI had that jank that was really unique to poorly coded Flash content.
I'm pro Flash on the whole because of the explosion of creativity in the web game scene but ScaleForm was one case where the technology made a few engineers lives easier at the expense of making the end user experience way jankier.
AS3 added classes and static typing on top of ECMAScript, but lost out to regular ES3 in browsers.
In a surprising twist of history, AS3's ideas were rediscovered years later with a language called Typescript that among other things added classes and static typing...
Flash development's language and tools were surprisingly ahead of their time!
There is still no replacement tooling on the web, the way you can manage movie clips (as instances), attach animations, control the timeline.. (compose them)... That was really a joy..
Also was awesome the feedback loop within the ide (just hit ctrl+enter) to run it and try it.
On these times, flash was also the predominant option for embedding video on websites.. (there are lot's of stories that are coming back to now: preloading, lazy loading, easing... (I still follow Robert Penner for they ease equations). Thought people still uses tweenlite ;)
Ha hey, Greensock was and was and is the best, and it’s still going strong for Js. Frankly we could probably get half the experience of flash if we all just went and worked with that library!
> AS3 added classes and static typing on top of ECMAScript, but lost out to regular ES3 in browsers.
That's a bit jumbled. AS3 was an early implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition spec - Macromedia/Adobe implemented it expecting that the same changes would soon be coming to standard JS. ECMA later wound up abandoning that spec (for reasons unrelated to Flash), leaving AS3 sort of stranded as its own separate language.
They were! We had much better build and art pipelines than many of the PC games I’ve worked on. And the metrics data tracking and ugly anti user behavioral stuff was years ahead of itself.
I run a VR/AR-focused VC firm (Presence Capital). We've done 30+ investments in this space, so you can say that we believe in the long-term potential of VR. Even given that, we're bearish on how quickly there will be a profitable/sustainable VR consumer business and have advised most of our portfolio companies targeting consumers to keep burn low.
That being said, this article and most of the comments here are taking a singular worldview: consumer-focused VR for a western market. VR is a tool, not an industry. Context on use is required to assess traction.
VR for B2B or enterprises can make money today and doesn't require mass-consumer adoption. If you make someone 10x more effective at their job (tools for sales people: OssoVR) or onboard employees faster (training: STRIVR), you can overcome the cost and rough edges on the hardware and have an ROI to justify the cost of the system.
In Asia (and increasingly in the west), VR-arcades are going to be how most consumers first experience high-end PC VR. Culturally, people there are already used to going to internet cafe's to use computers by the hour and seek out 3rd spaces. VR-by-the-hour rooms fit this mold. Additionally, the short length of most VR experiences makes it easy to have a 15-20 minute session and not be disappointed by the lack of content. IMAX is starting to open multiple VR centers and the word within the industry is that the VR Zones opened by Namco in Tokyo are currently profitable.
> this article and most of the comments here are taking a singular worldview: consumer-focused VR for a western market
Even narrower than that: game VR; on HMDs without (usable) cameras; using particular software stacks.
The usual way I use my Vive, is on an old laptop with integrated graphics, doing ducktaped-on camera-passthrough AR, at 30 fps, in coffeehouses and conference rooms... Let's just say that many people are so focused on the gaming market, that they're unable to see anything else.
I've been through the mass adoption of PC's, the internet and web, cell phones, tablets and touch phones, and now here's consumer VR/AR. I've kind of given up hope of seeing intelligent analysis in the popular press during transitions.
Still, I was surprised by just how bad this article was. Isn't TC based in SV? I'd have thought the author could find people to do a sanity check. Misconceptions like drawing a hard VR vs AR distinction suggests that didn't happen. One can certainly make an argument for a slow takeoff. Even for a very slow and multi-phase one. But this article wasn't that. Perhaps I've just been unlucky to see this post before HN buries it.
> Let's just say that many people are so focused on the gaming market, that they're unable to see anything else.
This really annoys me. Actually I just want a good HMD that can replace any standard monitor. A lot of people complain about working in a plane or on a bus because other people can see their screen. People complain about working in open offices where they constantly have other peoples' faces moving in their field of view, distracting them from their screens. People try to build screen walls and wear isolating headphones to shield them from these distractions. People complain that they can't work outside in nice weather because of the glare..
I complain about my laptop because the screen is too small and it's impossible to have an ergonomic posture -- if it's at the right level for typing, the screen is too low and I get neck pain. If the screen is at a comfortable level, it's very difficult to type on. Even when the screen is at a comfortable level, it's annoyingly small for some things. I complain about big screens because they're heavy, take up a lot of desk space, are expensive, and aren't very portable.
There's so many issues that could potentially be solved with a HMD.. but everyone's just completely fixated on immersion in gaming and movies. sigh
A HMD could be a small, lightweight monitor I can keep in my backpack and use to get a desktop-like experience (plus some exclusive benefits) with a few minor disadvantages.
Varjo is working on a foveated display - a panel-plus-microdisplay combo. "Retina"-ish resolution. The development risk isn't small, and it would be expensive. But you could drive it with current hardware. Fingers crossed.
Maybe. But even that seems too much focused on VR and brings a host of issues with it (it looks like it needs special software; I don't think it can replace any standard display).
I think something like the Avegant Glyph is a lot more promising for my needs. But that thing works at 720p; I'd say bump it up to 1080p and I might buy it. It's also got a fatal design flaw that allows dust to get behind the lens and it's basically impossible to remove.. without sending the device back to the manufacturer. And the Glyph too is focused a little too much on multimedia; the inclusion of headphones is an obvious giveaway, as are all the comparisons to a big TV.. ten feet away.
Notice that the Glyph isn't fixated on immersing you; it doesn't try to fill your entire field of view. It's just a screen in a head-mount (plus headphones, which I don't want). There's some space around the eyepiece so you can see and find the coffee cup by your laptop. This means it doesn't run in to the same resolution issue that immersion-focused VR has to deal with. Thus piece in front of your eyes is also smaller than the usual VR box that tries to cover all the space around your face balls.
I borrowed a friend's Microsoft Hololens and it basically delivers this. I had a giant floating Microsoft Edge window, playing YouTube, in my dining room. It's able to map out the area you're in, so the Edge window remained in my dining room after I left. Combined with a keyboard I could see it completely replacing my laptop.
However, the field of view is incredibly small and you look like an idiot wearing one. Maybe 10 years from now we'll get there.
It's absolutely correct to draw an hard line between VR and AR.
The first one is just a limited technology that has seen some attention just because AR is still not ready today.
AR is the bright future, VR is just a gloomy present.
The 'singular worldview' is the multibillion dollar market that consumer represents and that makes people put large sums into VC funds. A $100M market that consists of niche applications is far less interesting. The hype was astronomical, so the resultant backlash is of course well-deserved.
Depends on the type of training. Walmart is using VR to simulate Black Friday scenarios in which a fully-immersive environment would be more useful than an overlay.
Several AR companies are working on just-in-time knowledge to allow people to do tasks without prior knowledge. We've invested in that area and I wrote on the topic here:
Maybe Google glasses make sense for training but I don't think Amitt's VC firm invested in Google recently. In my view, that long, informative comment (which I enjoyed) was an ad for his investments.
I think I've seen google glass style things in pictures of car manufacture workers. AR glass type option sounds like pretty awesome tech for manufacture or work that is outdoors.
> but I don't think Amitt's VC firm invested in Google recently.
We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets)
0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.
Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform.
BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg and return value types; type inference was non existant, Vector was invariant, etc. Let's face it, Adobe wasn't the best at language design.
Typescript is today so much better than AS3 ever was.
When Typescript came, I was like. Yay! Someone made JS become AS3 like. That's when I seriously got into javascript. Flash could do some amazing things back in the day, They had GPU accelerated graphics, microphone, image manipulation, video, and a whole host of other things that HTML didn't have. I think Flash inspired browsers to do better.
You should look at C# in .NET core as well. C# was designed by the same guy as Typescript and Delphi, the famous language designer Anders Hejlsberg.
His languages are the most logical and elegant I have used, all truly pleasant to work with. Building a decent language that compiles down so cleanly to Javascript is a minor miracle.
I tried TypeScript yesterday and while I really love the language, the tooling was wayyyy too complicated and confusing. All I wanted was to make a dead simple hello-world node app that let me write it in VS Code, and recompile the TS to JS every time I saved. Suddenly I had to learn about tsconfig.json, had to install nodemon and have a process running in the background that I'm sure to forget to kill later, and I have no idea how either tsc or ts-node plays into any of this... in the end I just decided to go with ES2016 and be done with it. Too bad, because I really like having type information available, especially for catching bugs. I enabled VS's "pretend JS is TS" setting so it catches some errors, but it's pretty hacky and not thorough, and I don't get to specify types in my program. Really wish I could get a dead simple TS app figured out.
Hey this is pretty great, thanks! Dunno why I didn't consider it to be that simple. But it really is working. Well, along with `npm install @types/node --save` which I found somewhere else, so it quits complaining about 'require' not being found.
Glad it worked! I think it's a failure by the TypeScript team to not make this flow more front and center.
You are right, I forgot about installing typings. Instead of require you should use ES6 "import" (which TS compiles to require anyway) to get more type checking. But when you do that you'll see more of my missed step, which is `npm install @types/XYZ` for each XYZ package you use.
As soon as you start introducing a separate build tool (like gulp or whatever) things get super messy super fast but not for any interesting reason. Using `tsc --watch` also means it does caching across builds so it's faster than using gulp unless you're careful to configure it.
This advice is gold, thanks. But what I'm finding is that it's too painful to create a TypeScript project that has both a front-end and a back-end by incrementally building it like this, unless the front-end is just a set of static files with no compilation steps.
On that note, I wonder if we'll ever see type="text/typescript" in the browser due to how much traction it's gaining so quickly, and considering it's basically always ESNext but with types.
To say nothing of their ridiculous security sandbox design... I remember trying to make banner ads with dynamic price data and between all the various detached hosting abstractions and ActionScript's security requirements (in a time before this kind of setup was common) it was a hell of a project.
I'm glad that someone else said that. I really hated AS3 as a language and was really happy that the ECMAScript spec didn't take their ideas. Typescript does everything that AS3 could do, but does it in a way that is much more friendly to the JavaScript way.
I just have to throw in my 2 cents here. Actionscript outclasses any other language I've used for building custom UI components or just plain experimentation (I'm looking at you in particular, C#). My favorite experience with the language - building a dynamic GIS mapping engine using item renderers. It pains me to no end to watch this designer-friendly* language fade away into oblivion. Thanks Adobe.
*at least for me
Loved AS3. We managed to make lots of great work with it that didn't hog the CPU and performed beautifully. But the Flash runtime was the big problem. I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming. Still, big ups to everyone who worked on Flash, past and present. Thanks, y'all.
You're welcome! (though I only worked on a small part of it - vector/SIMD instruction support, for gaming usecases)
I think a lot of the stuff that screwed the language was that it was initially supposed to be "an evolution of javascript" (ecmascript 4? I forget), so it took a on lot of the undesirable features of JavaScript, it was never a complete break from it.
Also, Adobe made a big-ish mistake in that it didn't keep the runtime separated from the VM - a lot of the VM abstractions (like pointer tagging) leaked into the runtime, and this is why a lot of things were harder to optimize in the VM than they should've been. Fortunately, the browser vendors didn't have this problem, that's why their GC could "run circles around Flash".
Hey, hello! I know there were features that AS3 couldn't access, but other languages like Haxe could. Would you be able to elaborate more on the VM/runtime issues?
Well, see e.g. https://blog.semantiscope.com/2009/10/29/getting-pointers-fr... ; the Flash runtime relied in various places on how pointers are represented for various "smart tricks"/optimizations. While this may have had the local effect of being faster, it also had the side effect of making global optimizations in the VM harder, since the VM was limited in the ways it could change. With the flash runtime codebase being pretty large, and the team being fairly paranoid about backwards compatibility ("you don't want to be the one who breaks the internet!"), this slowed down change quite a bit. Sure, it was easy to add new features - but it was pretty hard to improve how the old ones were working.
Hot damn, an actual Farmville developer. My big plan fresh out of college was to make a Farmville-esque game with some action elements. Got WAY further along than I rightly should have, and I have AS3 to thank for that.
It's a shame it's going away. Glad the pros from that time feel the same way I do about it.
I can no longer play Factorio. It is completely impossible for me to play without getting sucked in and wasting hours.
The worst part is that I feel productive while playing it. It's so close to the satisfaction I get from actually building something that it's just too dangerous for me to play these days :)
The peak satisfaction: eventually converting your base to 20+k logistic bot storms operating the entirety of your base and cranking out 10k+ blue circuits an hour.
Peaker satistfaction: Using mods to up the complexity and difficulty, and using all of AAI + all of Bob's + all of Angel's. New ores, vastly more complex refining, and you don't start with shit (literally makes like 2-3 hours to catch up to where you normally start tech wise on vanilla).
I used to working with AS3 and was always confused about the amount of hate that was thrown it's way. I found most things about the development flow very nice and it was a brilliant abstraction that HTML and JS just didn't provide.
I was involved in developing a really simple video editor in the browser that would have been impossible (or at least incredibly difficult) to accomplish without AS3 and the graphical abilities that it allowed.
But... it really did used to suck power from laptop batteries like nothing else.
I'll miss you flash. Thanks for shaping what we do and use now.
It was good for the time. So were java applets... but, as they say, to everything there is a season, and the sun is season is changing in the web media space..
It's really not comparable. Flash + AS was a RAD environment, many a game developer got their start (and even built full-fledged games[0]) through it. I'd argue that its biggest contributions were not web-bound[1], and I don't know of any other environment which is both as easy to get started with and as flexible.
[0] it's famously the primary expressive environment of Edmund McMillen: Gish, Aether and Binding of Isaac are all Flash though the later got rewritten natively in Rebirth, Super Meat Boy is the native successor to the Flash Meat Boy, The End is Nigh may well be his first game which did not start in Flash (and even that's unclear as it grew from a 2-weeks game jam)
[1] except insofar as they were being embedded/distributed through it e.g. newsgrounds or armorgames
I like Haxe but had my qualms with it too. To be honest, I would have to try again, but last I tried I remember at least having some issues with the type system, and the module system was OK but I definitely miss my ES modules.
TypeScript is typechecked only at translation time, as is reasonable for any language you would compile to JS. (I guess Elm breaks this mold, but at some great costs.) A side-effect is that you don't have any type information at runtime, for example.
This isn't as bad as it sounds in practice. I'm usually glad it eliminates reflection which I've rarely seen used honorably... I do miss it occasionally.
Some popular typed languages, notably Java, do type erasure on objects as well. Extending that to value types feels right in a strange way, more consistent at least.
One thing I'll mention to make The a better experience... The compiler, even on the strictest options, will still let you do a lot of hacky old school JS crap. I HIGHLY recommend integrating TSLint with almost all rules turned on and Microsoft's contrib extension. It makes Typescript code almost bulletproof.
Use the Typescript language service and experimental plugin for VSCode to show both Typescript errors and TsLint errors live with intellisense. It's a pain to set all this up at first but the experience is slick.
More or less yeah. But I worry it will take a pretty big change in direction before we can get something as crazy as types in the browser. To be fair, I would have never guessed browsers would be able to implement the current standards to the degree that they have.
It's probably worth remembering that AS3 was essentially based on the draft (later abandoned) ES4; there's still a vague agreement that most of those features should come back.
Yes back than even AS2 was good. But now you have a lot of great tools available for HTML5 and Unity. You can build anything you would have in Flash.
I wouldn't say AS3 is the best programming language, but that's just my point of view. I, for one, don't have a favorite language because i think that each language has it's pros and cons and each language excels in a certain area.
It may be ok for developers but the Flash scene was full of non-developers who used mostly the visual Flash editor and copy-pasted some scripts if necessary.
> 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.
Would that have been a major loss for humanity as a whole ?
Farmville improved the life of how many people ? how many hours wasted, people made miserable and money lifted from cash cows ?
AS3 was like learning Java, but with the lifecycle gotchas of JavaScript. Ten years ago it offered everything that JS did, except it required static compilation. The development speed of JS+CSS was vastly better than with pure AS.
I run a VR-focused VC firm (Presence Capital). We've done 25+ investments in this space, so you can say that we believe in the long-term potential of VR. Even given that, we're bearish on how quickly there will be a profitable/sustainable VR consumer business and have advised most of our portfolio companies targeting consumers to keep burn low.
That being said, almost all of the comments here are taking a singular worldview: consumer-focused VR for a western market.
VR for B2B or enterprises can make money today and doesn't require mass-consumer adoption. If you make someone 10x more effective at their job (tools for sales people: OssoVR) or onboard employees faster (training: STRIVR), you can overcome the cost and rough edges on the hardware.
In China, VR-arcades are going to be how most consumers first experience high-end PC VR. Culturally, people there are already used to going to internet cafe's to use computers by the hour and seek out 3rd spaces. VR-by-the-hour rooms fit this mold. Additionally, the short length of most VR experiences makes it easy to have a 15-20 minute session and not be disappointed by the lack of content. More info on this here: https://medium.com/@amitt/vr-will-be-huge-in-china-41de0c758...
Genuinely curious but what are your thoughts on VR porn being a thing? Recall that porn on the internet has really been one of the first to start accepting credit cards. The old adage "internet is for porn" rings true.
Well thought out and thanks for sharing. Having worked in quite a few sales / B2B / Fortune environments, I see VR in a lot of ways similar to video conferencing. Sure, it works and can save lots of money in time and travel, but I don't think it really has the value proposition to be a huge cultural change. I definitely see the use cases in training (heavy equipment, safety management) down the line.
Are you looking at anything or have been pitched anything in the AEC space?
The firm I work for has a small R&D department that is heavily testing out VR. As I've said in other posts, I can only really see it as a marketing tool currently but some of that team are hoping there might be ways to "move and build" items in terms of visualizations.
Sales people at medical device companies. They need to learn how to use the devices and then easily demo them to customers. It's also used by the end customers, after the sale is made.
FULL-TIME ENGINEERS and a FULL-TIME LEAD ACCOUNT MANAGER
We're on a mission to revolutionize how mobile developers acquire users for their apps. Our product, Toro, makes it super easy to split test and optimize mobile marketing campaigns. We’re solving one of the necessary, but tedious, parts of launching great mobile apps. We believe in creating delightful experiences that are easy to use, save people time, and, most importantly, save our customers money by improving campaign performance.
This isn't our first trip around the block. Our previous startup was acquired by Zynga and our core technology turned into FarmVille and the rest of Zynga’s most successful games. It was a wild ride and now we’re full steam ahead on a new adventure. We're well backed by folks such as A16Z, Greylock, SVAngel, Data Collective, and more.
We're looking for passionate, energetic, highly talented individuals to join our team. By becoming a foundational member of our team you will help shape the direction of our product, company and culture. We’re believe in constantly challenging ourselves to learn new things and would love to teach you what we know and learn from you as well.
==================================
ENGINEERS
We want all engineering members of the team to be full-stack engineers and well-rounded individuals. But, we're especially excited about the following engineering profiles:
- Senior Product Engineer: You've built products from concept all the way to
maturity. You're as opinionated and influential about product as you are about coding.
You're a master at JS/CSS/HTML and customer facing technologies.
Bonus points if you’re on-top of your front-end frameworks like Angular
(which we use!), Ember, or Meteor.
- Senior Systems Engineer: You've architected and scaled backend systems to
millions of users. You've put out every kind of fire and learned a lot in the
process. You understand the tradeoffs of different data stores, server
architectures, and low-level services.
OUR STACK:
- Redshift, Redis, MySQL, Rails for our backend API.
- AWS-suite: EC2, S3, RedShift, EBS, ElasticCache, RDS
- AngularJS, jQuery, Underscore, Node.JS with D3 for our dashboard and web apps.
- 3rd party services: Facebook, Mixpanel, Stripe, Mailgun
==================================
LEAD ACCOUNT MANAGER
We're hiring for our FIRST account manager position.
Our customer list is growing fast so we're looking for someone that is eager to work directly with our founders to build a process to ensure all of our customers are successful at using our product. Ideal candidates would have prior account management experience and a strong desire to define and implement account management best practices.
==================================
Do any of the above profiles sound like you? Send us an email at: jobs@redhotlabs.com or apply directly at http://www.redhotlabs.com/jobs
Hi! We’re Red Hot Labs from San Francisco and we're looking for a FULL-TIME DEV (authorized already to work in the US, no remote, no interns, thanks!)
We're on a mission to revolutionize how mobile developers harness their data. Our product, still in beta, functions as the central hub for all the services mobile developers already use. By weaving together the data from these disparate services, we gain a comprehensive view of the app and are uniquely positioned to deliver insights and value back to the developer.
This isn't our first trip around the block. Our previous startup was acquired by Zynga and our core technology turned into FarmVille and the rest of Zynga’s most successful games. It was a wild ride and now we’re full steam ahead on a new adventure. We're well backed by folks such as A16Z, Greylock, SVAngel, DCVC, and more.
We're looking for passionate, energetic, highly talented engineers to join our team. By becoming a foundational member of our team you will help shape the direction of our product, company and culture. We’re believe in constantly challenging ourselves to learn new things and would love to teach you what we know and learn from you as well.
We want all engineering members of the team to be full-stack engineers and well-rounded individuals. But, we're especially excited about the following engineering profile:
THE ROLE:
Senior Systems Engineer: You've architected and scaled backend systems to
millions of users. You've put out every kind of fire and learned a lot in the
process. You understand the tradeoffs of different data stores, server
architectures, and low-level services.
OUR STACK:
- Redis, MySQL, Rails for our backend API.
- Mostly AWS with a little bit of Heroku for our hosting.
- AngularJS, jQuery, Underscore, Node.JS with D3 for our dashboard and web apps.
- 3rd party services: Facebook, Mixpanel, Stripe, Mailgun
==================================
Do any of the above profiles sound like you? Send us an email at: jobs@redhotlabs.com
Hi! We’re Red Hot Labs from San Francisco and we're looking for a FULL-TIME DEV and a FULL-TIME ADMIN/GENERALIST.
We're on a mission to revolutionize how mobile developers harness their data. Our product, still in beta, functions as the central hub for all the services mobile developers already use. By weaving together the data from these disparate services, we gain a comprehensive view of the app and are uniquely positioned to deliver insights and value back to the developer.
This isn't our first trip around the block. Our previous startup was acquired by Zynga and our core technology turned into FarmVille and the rest of Zynga’s most successful games. It was a wild ride and now we’re full steam ahead on a new adventure. We're well backed by folks such as A16Z, Greylock, SVAngel, DCVC, and more.
We're looking for passionate, energetic, highly talented engineers to join our team. By becoming a foundational member of our team you will help shape the direction of our product, company and culture. We’re believe in constantly challenging ourselves to learn new things and would love to teach you what we know and learn from you as well.
We want all engineering members of the team to be full-stack engineers and well-rounded individuals. But, we're especially excited about the following engineering profiles:
==================================
- Senior Product Engineer: You've built products from concept all the way to
maturity. You're as opinionated and influential about product as you are about coding.
You're a master at JS/CSS/HTML and customer facing technologies.
Bonus points if you’re on-top of your front-end frameworks like Angular
(which we use!), Ember, or Meteor.
- Senior Systems Engineer: You've architected and scaled backend systems to
millions of users. You've put out every kind of fire and learned a lot in the
process. You understand the tradeoffs of different data stores, server
architectures, and low-level services.
- Senior Data Engineer: You've built models which extract insights or
predictions from large, living datasets. You can engage with a dataset in an
unfamiliar domain, grasp the dynamics of the system and impress subject area
experts with your result.
- Stupendous Junior Engineer: You don't have years of working experience, but
you have handful of mind-blowing personal or school projects. You were among
the best students at a top tier engineering university. Your TA's and
classmates gush about your code.
OUR STACK:
- Redis, MySQL, Rails for our backend API.
- Mostly AWS with a little bit of Heroku for our hosting.
- AngularJS, jQuery, Underscore, Node.JS with D3 for our dashboard and web apps.
- 3rd party services: Facebook, Mixpanel, Stripe, Mailgun
==================================
In addition, we're hiring for an admin/generalist position. We're looking for someone that doesn't necessarily know how to code (if you're interested in learning we can definitely help you there!), but is passionate about startups and is competent and considerate in any task thrown their way. This role would be to support the rest of the team to help with marketing, sales, general office admin stuff, scheduling interviews, QA, and so on. Basically, all of the "other stuff" in a startup.
Do any of the above profiles sound like you? Send us an email at: jobs@redhotlabs.com
We're on a mission to revolutionize how mobile developers harness their data. Our product, still in beta, functions as the central hub for all the services mobile developers already use. By weaving together the data from these disparate services, we gain a comprehensive view of the app and are uniquely positioned to deliver insights and value back to the developer.
This isn't our first trip around the block. Our previous startup was acquired by Zynga and our core technology turned into FarmVille and the rest of Zynga’s most successful games. It was a wild ride and now we’re full steam ahead on a new adventure.
We're looking for passionate, energetic, highly talented engineers to join our team. By becoming a foundational member of our team you will help shape the direction of our product, company and culture. We’re believe in constantly challenging ourselves to learn new things and would love to teach you what we know and learn from you as well.
We want all members of the team to be full-stack engineers and well-rounded individuals. But, we're especially excited about the following profiles:
Senior Product Engineer: You've built products from concept all the way to maturity. You're as opinionated and influential about product as you are about coding. You're a master at JS/CSS/HTML and customer facing technologies. Bonus points if you’re on-top of your front-end frameworks like Angular (which we use!), Ember, or Meteor.
Senior Systems Engineer: You've architected and scaled backend systems to millions of users. You've put out every kind of fire and learned a lot in the process. You understand the tradeoffs of different data stores, server architectures, and low-level services.
Senior Data Engineer: You've built models which extract insights or predictions from large, living datasets. You can engage with a dataset in an unfamiliar domain, grasp the dynamics of the system and impress subject area experts with your result.
Stupendous Junior Engineer: You don't have years of working experience, but you have handful of mind-blowing personal or school projects. You were among the best students at a top tier engineering university. Your TA's and classmates gush about your code.
Does this sound like you? Send us an email at: jobs@redhotlabs.com
For FarmVille we sent the actions back to the server and then validated against game state there. It's the only real way to protect against cheating. However, if I were building the game again today, I'd just do what King does and have the client manage the state. It turns out that the set of people that would do this and the set of users that would convert into paying users has very little overlap. The overhead of managing state on the server is that you'd have to write your game logic twice (once in your client-side language and once server-side, though with a scripting language you may be able to avoid this). Second, we benchmarked this approach and found that you can handle 10x the number of players with the same hardware by not doing any server-side logic/validation and just having the server be a dumb pipe to store player state.
Very, very informative, thank you. I too have been wondering about this exact thing - if it's worth the trouble in the end, to do server checks and whatnot. Seems it's not, in these cases :)
Additionally, PC/Console 2D & 3D games were using Flash to author and render their UIs for a very long time via ScaleForm. They only discontinued it in 2018.
Flash gaming became much bigger than Newgrounds and had massive influence on how to build future WYSIWIG tools to empower designers and artists.