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I am helping my teacher fix some links in her web quest, both of which involved Flash. However, there is this one link that is troubling me. The link - a BBC interactive - works partially in the Ruffle Flash Player but almost not at all in the official Flash Player. In Ruffle, only the Home and Organs sections work correctly, but the Muscles section is what needed, while in the official Flash Player (both through a link and the downloaded file), only the menu loads, and selecting a section loads a white screen. When run in the debug player, no errors show up. Why does the Ruffle Flash Player play it better than the official one? And, more importantly, how do I fix it entirely, or at least the Muscles section? I have Adobe Creative Cloud and have Adobe Animate downloaded, but the .swf file doesn't open in Animate.

Since there hasn't been an answer to the second part of the question yet after 10 days, I'm removing it from this post. I might make a new post for it sometime in the future if I have time and still need an answer.

Taf04k
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Although I don't have a precise and definite answer to your problem, as a Flash-ninja who's been with the technology for almost 20 years I will share some insights as will shed some light on the technical nuances, which is — alas — exceeds the comment limits by far.

  1. Why does the Ruffle Flash Player play it better than the official one?

A Flash application goes in a form of an SWF file, which also might have some external extras to download (text, binary, images and also additional SWF modules). There are multiple factors that might render an application unusable.

Why downloaded SWF might fail:

  • You download the main file, but not the additional files (personally I think this is the cause).
  • Application is URL-locked.
  • Application has a server back-end it cannot reach because it tries to access it via a relative URL.
  • Application has a server back-end it cannot reach because it is published with local-with-files security which doesn't matter via HTTP but matters if you run the application locally.

Why SWF by URL might fail:

  • Flash treats relative URLs in a very weird way: relatively to the current top-frame location on the current HTML page. If SWF is in different folder than the HTML it belongs to, then relative URLs could lead who knows where.
  • Application has a server back-end which rejects requests because SWF without HTML page does not have a valid session.
  • Application gets its settings (or checks the environment) from its HTML page which is not present in case of direct SWF link.

Well, then.

  1. More importantly, how do I fix it entirely, or at least the Muscles section?

Per suggestion above, try to figure (monitor the requests from the working application somehow) all the downloadable additions to the main file and download them as well — then the downloaded version just might work.

Otherwise, there's not much you can do, because of this. As you can see, Ruffle is still far from supporting Flash and ActionScript completely, one incompatible instruction — and the whole application just fails and will continue to fail until Ruffle covers the said instruction as well.

Organis
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  • Thank you. I'll wait a bit before selecting an answer in hopes that someone has a better idea on how to fix it, but thanks for an answer. Is there a way to take a look at the code of a .swf file? I've tried opening it in Adobe Animate, as an [Adobe tutorial](https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/convert-flash-ads-to-html5.html) said you could do, but Animate doesn't seem to support .swf files anymore. I think if I could look into the code, I might be able to see which other files I would need to get it to work. – Taf04k Nov 12 '21 at 12:06
  • @Taf04k It loads (as I expected) 4 different external modules, all of them (most probably) at the same folder as the main **SWF** file: muscles.swf organs.swf skeleton.swf nervous.swf – Organis Nov 13 '21 at 12:04
  • Putting all 5 swf files into the same folder made the main one work a bit better, but it's still not as good as Ruffle. Trying to run each individual module in Ruffle yielded the same results as selecting that module through the main swf in the folder though, so my guess is there may be something stopping the swf files from referencing each other properly. Is there a proper way to install these files? Also, how did you find the other swf files? If you got them from looking into the main swf's code, what program did you use? – Taf04k Nov 14 '21 at 00:21
  • @Taf04k If you have an installment of old good **Google Chrome**, one that still support **Flash Player**, you can open its **Web Console** and monitor all the outgoing **HTTP** requests and answers, just as easy as that, you don't even need any specific tool. – Organis Nov 14 '21 at 01:16
  • Just wondering since I've noticed for a while now... any reason you seem to be formatting most proper nouns (and some other keywords/phrases) in bold? Capitalization is usually enough in written English to denote a proper noun. Since bold is typically reserved for important words/phrases to draw reader attention it becomes a distraction when it's just used to highlight every single occurrence of a name of something. – BoltClock Nov 14 '21 at 15:23
  • @BoltClock Due to the nature of my job I produce texts that are to be easily digestible, because their readers are people with not that much free time on their hands. In order to make that happen I use markup tricks but also highlight certain words in bold, and/or color, or even put emoji like ⚠️ so they act as attention anchors in a solid mass of text. Since **StackOverflow** comments support very little formatting and mostly are monotonous blocks of text, I'm putting these anchors with no much thought to it. Think of it as of my professional habit. There's no harm in it, right? – Organis Nov 14 '21 at 19:50
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    @Organis Sorry for the delay. I've decided to stop pursuing how to fix this for now since I don't need to. I've marked your answer since it answers my first question. I have suggested to my teacher that the Chrome version on the laptops she has can be downgraded to a version that supports Flash. Thank you for answering my questions. – Taf04k Nov 23 '21 at 01:38