Back in 2006 I worked with over 50 authors on Four Second Firestorm, a large collaboration of minigames and ideas that work in 4 seconds.  It was a fairly large project full of terrible problems, it was a doomed shipped that stayed together with a combination of no sleep, beta versions of Flash 9 and panic.  It launched successfully at the time, but the file broke when Flash Player 10 came out.

I’ve been working in my offtime to get the file  back up and running.  Alas, after several tweaks and working with a near-impossible file I have compiled a slightly problematic working version!  It has some issues with sound and fonts (20 font familes are missing) but it’s the closest to working I have gotten it.  I’ll be working to get those missing fonts and seeing if I can fix up some of the greater issues.

Long story short, people with Flash Player 8 on their computers could open the file even though it’s Flash Player 9 and the game wouldn’t run corerectly.  In order to get people to upgrade we put in a version checker.  Little did we know at the time that the version checker only checked one digit… the 8 or 9.  When Flash 10 came out it nuked the file and no one’s FSF copies worked anymore.

Meanwhile Flash Player 10 seems to have done some more harm to the source code and the SWF.  Some things just aren’t working anymore, even though it’s a Flash 8/9 file and Flash Player 10 should have no problem with legacy.

The struggle continues, but the file is getting closer to being a good build again… still working on this thing three years later…