When Forio launched Epicenter in 2014, we were able to help our customers move from old technologies like Adobe Flash into the world of HTML5, providing tools to create responsive web designs that work well on computers, tablets or smartphones.

Now we are truly at the end for Flash-based simulations. Recently, Adobe has announced they are discontinuing the Flash Player in the summer of 2020. Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft, and Apple have all announced transition plans which make Flash harder to use starting fall 2017. You may have already seen Chrome display a big puzzle piece when loading Flash, or prompt you to enable Flash when going to a site for the first time. Browsers will disable Flash by default sometime in mid-2019.

Although Forio Epicenter has been available for several years, many customers still have older legacy simulations running Flash. If you have one of these simulations, Forio wants to help you make the transition to modern web technology. Forio will continue to support Flash-based simulation through 2018. We will discontinue all Flash based simulations in spring 2019. We will provide at least 3 months warning of the specific date.

We’ve put together some documentation on “Getting Started with Epicenter” intended for simulation developers who built their simulations on older generations of our platform. Besides the HTML5 and responsive interfaces I mentioned earlier, other great features include the ability to:

• Upload a variety of model types, including Vensim, SimLang, Stella, Powersim (as you could in Simulate) and now also Microsoft Excel, Python, R or Julia.
• Quickly create turn-by-turn or run-comparison style simulations with the template-based interface builder.
• As an alternative to the templates, create a custom simulation in HTML using our Flow.Js library without the need for programming. You can even mix and match the templates with your own HTML!
• Include attractive, easy-to-configure graphs using our open source library Contour.
• Start with a few users running your simulation but scale “in the cloud” to many thousands.

Forio will continue to support Flash-based simulation through 2018. We will discontinue all Flash-based simulations in spring 2019. We will provide at least 3 months warning of the specific date.

Next Steps

If you’d like to learn more about the issues discussed above, we have some resources to help you.

• We have written an article, Migrate Your Simulation from Forio Simulate.
• We are offering a webinar December 20th @ 10am PST aimed at Simulate authors. In this session we will provide tips for migrating your simulation to Epicenter using HTML5 only.
• If you have any questions, please feel free to post on the Epicenter Support Forum or send us an email at support@forio.com. We’d be glad to discuss the Flash transition plan in more detail, and/or provide more information on new Forio technologies such as Forio Epicenter.