Archiving

[scornty]

With Flash supposed to be purged from all browsers in 2020, I'm archiving the Flash neopets plot comics. I'm not very good at it (as you will see in a moment) but I found a way to extract the comics as swf files.

AoTA page 1
(you need an account to see links)
AoTA page 2
(you need an account to see links)

The first page is fine but the second and some of them have all the text boxes overlaid and unreadable. It seems to be random which ones are functional and hoverable.

TFR page 10
(you need an account to see links)

Also interesting, some pages have translations that cycle between different languages, this one is in pink.


Questions:
1. Can someone try opening up AoTA page 2 in a Flash editor and see if the background image is still there and the comic is still readable? (disclaimer I have no experience with the platform and barely managed to get a Flash viewer working on my computer so if anyone could verify this I'd be in your debt.
2. What other flash is there to be archived? I've thought of grabbing the NeoQuest II cinematics and possibly advent calendar as well.

Also if anyone wants to see any other pages just ask!

[Bat]

What a fun idea, @(you need an account to see links)! I downloaded "AoTA page 1 and 2", but there's only one page inside that flash file. Here's what I'm seeing:



The "pages" are loaded one after the other by the presentation window on the comic chapter page. You can find their urls by using the "Network" tab in your browser's Dev(elopment) Tools.

[scornty]

@(you need an account to see links)

Oh darn, here's an upload of page 2:

(you need an account to see links)

And that's a pretty neat view! What do you have it opened in?

[j03]

Heads up, Adobe is ending support. Big difference than saying they will purge Flash.

Flash will still work, but only if you have it installed. And I highly doubt the web browsers will not let you install the plugin. I'm guessing it will just be like how it is now... "this plugin is outdated/unsafe to use"

This is the equivalent to the likes of Windows XP no longer receiving updates from Microsoft.

[Bat]

@(you need an account to see links)

Oh darn, here's an upload of page 2:

(you need an account to see links)

And that's a pretty neat view! What do you have it opened in?

Yikes! I see what you mean about the speech bubbles floating around everywhere. I suspect that's because the staging for those speech bubbles lives in the presentation window, so without having loaded page 2 into the same parent as page 1, it wigs out and display everything. I can decompile it and see if we can fix the ActionScript for it if you'd like!

I'm using (you need an account to see links) to look inside those flash files. It supports extracting all of the assets and code within the files as well as converting them into a semi-functional fla project file.

[scornty]

@(you need an account to see links)

That would be amazing if you could! And just knowing all the assets are there makes me feel better since everything's there, just not... formatted? correctly. Yay for fixable things! D

Also for everyone following along, here's the awesome The Faeries' Ruin banner page with Xandra!
(you need an account to see links)

[Bat]

Hey, @(you need an account to see links). I've spent some time revising the ActionScript, and here's what I've determined so far.

There are events that are normally fired in the "page" flash file's life cycle which aren't called unless that file is loaded into "comic_loader_v3". There is also a class called "SingletonEnforcer" that is present in the first "page" flash file, but not present in the other "page" flash files. If we attempt to load pages out of order, or out of context - we encounter errors because the SingletonEnforcer is missing and because the events that normally initialize a page aren't fired. Those are what is causing the speech bubbles to mess up. I've been gradually working my way through page 2 of chapter 1, and have patched up most of the dependency and event firing that is required to get the page to work. In short - it can be done, but it's arduous.

It's not perfect, and it's missing the proper font, but (you need an account to see links). If you hover over the comic cells, the speech bubbles will disappear and reappear as expected.

---------- Post added at 11:35 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:20 AM ----------

I won't be able to dedicate more time to this, but if you're interested in continuing the work, I made the following changes...

In com/neopets/projects/comicEngine/gui (StoryBookPage.as), add this after line 37:

root.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent({key:"FIREME"}, LANG_UPDATE_EVENT));
			
root.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent({key:"FIREME"}, RESET_PAGE_EVENT));

In virtualworlds/lang (TranslationManager.as), change line 21 to:

private static const _instance:TranslationManager = new TranslationManager();

remove this from line 35:

if (param1 != SingletonEnforcer)
{
    throw new Error("Invalid Singleton access.  Use TranslationManager.instance.");
}

and remove this from line 102:

loadTranslationData()

All of these changes will allow you to properly hover over comic cells with the speech bubbles popping in and out as expected.

[scornty]

@(you need an account to see links)

Thank you for the detailed response! The edited comic looks great, and thank you for adding how you did it, it will be very helpful when I edit the uncooperative pages.