[Tutorial] Flash Game Ripping: the essentials

[shadowman44]

Awhile ago I had this problem where I couldn't access assets from a flash based game, after months of searching and asking around I've come up with the best possible solution for this issue.

Part 1: Obtaining and opening the swfs.

Download the latest nightly build version of JPEXS (free flash decompiler)
Go to Advanced settings, then paths. You will have a link to a page with the necessary tools in order to play the game in a separate window (I'll explain why you need flash player running shortly)
Download the necessary tools to play the games in a separate window (Flash projector, flash projector debugger, Playerglobal25) and make sure to set the paths so that they will run properly.
Download a program called "SWF Memory Dumper" from Force Project X
In JPEXS, hit "run" on the game you have open.
In the SWF Memory Dumper program, locate the Flash Player task (refresh the list if you open the dumper before the flash program)
Click on "scan process", there should be hidden SWFs. Download all of them just to be on the safe side.
Open them all in JPEXS and look through each one until you find the file with the sprites/sounds you want to rip.

Part 2: Ripping the assets.

After this tutorial was published I noticed a lot more flash games were being ripped from, and that's perfect and all that but I eventually learned that "vectorized" sprites have transparency artifacting.
You are going to need to look in the "shapes" folder and then select the vectorized sprites, then you'll have to "export" them to a new folder. Once that's done, you open Photoshop or whatever program you use that supports transparency.

Most flash games often have their character sprites separated in pieces, this is usually done to save time and effort making character animations.
If you want the assembled character frames for your sheet, you'll want to go down to the "sprites" folder. These are where the character animations are stored, and exporting them to .png will give you the frames assembled right there (unless they're special like character heads being separated from the bodies).

Examples:

Good sheet:

Spoiler

Bad sheet:

Spoiler

As you can see, the "bad" sheet has the transparency completely lost on it along with a colored background.

Now, as far as pixel based graphics go;

I strongly recommend using the same method as the "vectorized" sprites because there is a chance that a sprite can also have transparency applied to it and would be lost if it had a colored background.

One other thing to point out and I sadly used to do this; I don't recommend just printscreening the jpexs page if there's just sprites on there, that's because scaling is also a serious factor in pixel-based graphics.

Good sheet:

Spoiler

Bad sheet:

Spoiler

Bad sheet was a result of just hastly printscreening the thumbnail previews of the sprites in the program.

There you are, that's how to rip from nearly any flash game. Let me know in the thread or in a DM if you're having trouble.

[Cooper]

I've actually found a much easier way to obtain mini swfs, since you can actually get their original names. Open your browser's developer tools and go into the networking tool, you will see all the resources that will load onto the page and then you can open the resources you want in new tabs which will prompt the browser to let you save said resources.

[Superjustinbros]

Thanks for the tutorial, Bass.
This will surely be helpful sometime if I ever decide to delve into flash stuff.

[shadowman44]

About a year later and I've fixed it up a bit to include how to rip graphics properly.

[shadowman44]

Hey, it's been awhile. I just now discovered the technique of ripping the animations of sprites which have their pieces all separated, this will potentially make it possible to have game-accurate rips.

More recently, I did discover that flash games can in fact, have 3D models. I haven't tried ripping them correctly though, look out for it in the future!

[squidiskool]

Is there a way to extract the models from XForm’s Flash era games?

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By the way sorry for necro

[shuabv]

It seems that the dumper's page no longer works. Could you upload the program?