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Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

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Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#191

Post by redisman »

JohnBooty wrote: post #186

We're.... misattributing some things here, I think. Flash was a bundle of good things and bad things, as we all more or less agree. Good for creativity, bad for usability and accessibility and security, etc. You could, obviously, do so many things in Flash that were impossible with web standards. But, why was there such a gap between what you could do in Flash and what you could do with web standards? Why was Flash e…

Flash had a VM that truly was "write once, run on anything" and a great (software) pixel and vector renderer. Cross-browser compatibility with HTML standards was completely bonkers and HTML had none of the features Flash Games and Animations needed. Try to move or rotate a picture at 30 fps with old HTML.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#192

Post by zanny »

bsanr2 wrote: post #120
FooHentai wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Flash still viable for animation studios? I thought Flash Player is what's going away, effectively killing Flash playback on the Web, but Flash itself as an animation platform continues to be a supported, actively-developed and commercially available tool.

Adobe Animate is the successor to Flash's animation toolset. Animators use a number of different tools today, many that implement tweening, depending on studio needs. Also, low or no-cost applications that are accessible to newcomers include Blender and the upcoming Procreate 5.

Theres also OpenToonz and Synfig as other open source options

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#193

Post by zanny »

djsumdog wrote: post #38
l_t wrote: post #16

I had a formative experience with Flash as a middle schooler. I loved Albino Blacksheep, Newgrounds, etc. I thought the videos were hilarious and the stick-figure-style animation was approachable. So I acquired Flash, and I was blown away by how easy it was to create these silly animations. Automatic tweening was a miracle to me. Since then I've done a lot of video editing with different tools, but I still think back…

I know a lot of early Adult Swing shows were made with Flash (I think Aqua Teen?). What are studios using today? Is there anything equivalent today that matches the power of Flash for young animators?

The My Little Pony show just ended and it used Flash for 9 seasons. Most modern cartoons use ToonBoom though.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#194

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

Does anyone here remember an old DOS program called Cartooners [1]?

It let you do animated shorts with predefined characters, different backgrounds, music, speech bubbles, etc. I used to love playing around with that as a teenager.

I found the workflow ingenious: You placed a character on the screen, selected what action you wanted it to perform (like ‘Walk’), I think you selected how you wanted it to move, then you held down the REC button and watched the character act as the animation was being ‘recorded’. To do something new, you just stopped recording, set the character up for the next action, move, etc, then do the whole REC thing again. Repeat this as needed.

Adding another character? Scrub back to where you wanted that character to appear and repeat the above process.

New background? Scrub to where you wanted the new background to appear, set the background and then ‘record’ over the old one.

It was similar for everything. Put a speech bubble down where you wanted it, hold down ‘REC’ for as long as you wanted it on the screen, then just remove it and record further as needed.

It was so damn intuitive. Never seen anything quite like it since and I’d love to know if there’s a clone of it or something out there that I’ve missed!

[1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Cartooners_1989

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#195

Post by redisman »

fastball wrote: post #93
soup10 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for…

Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.

That's from bad programming practices. It was very easy to write a terrible inefficient program with it since it was so accessible. There was nothing inherent in Flash that used a lot of CPU. The VM was pretty light weight. It also had only a software renderer for most of its lifetime which would naturally struggle with lots of crazy overlapping effects.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#196

Post by kizer »

TomGullen wrote: post #9
pippy wrote: post #4

Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…

I wasn’t a big Flash user back in the day but I think our product Construct 3 ( https://www.construct.net ) can do just about everything Flash did, especially with the addition of the Timeline editor and scripting we’ve just added. I’m a little hesitant to overtly market Construct as the “next flash” as that I think would receive a mixed reception depending on your experiences with it! Tom Fulp from Newgrounds has ni…

It needs to be able to name a platform, media type, IDE, all at once. E.g., "I'm going to use Flash", "It's a Flash game", "Hold on, let me animate it in Flash". The name should be able to go in domain names; e.g., "superfunflashgames.com".

Basically, it has to have a name amiable to becoming an umbrella term. That gave Flash such a "universal" connotation.

I hope this makes sense - trying to convey the _peculiarities_ of "Flash" which made it (as I see it) successfull and distinct in character.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#197

Post by redisman »

ehsankia wrote: post #143
Mirioron wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also nowhere near as easy to distribute these games compared to Flash. All you needed with Flash was the swf and as long as you had a flash player then it would work.

What? Everyone these days has a browser. How is it more difficult to share a web game than sharing a flash game? IF anything, back then you often had to install macromedia and other plugins since they didn't always come by default on every computer.

Discovery. Discovery. Discovery. Sure you can host it on your personal site but who is gonna find it? It has to be on a 3rd party website and that 3rd party website wants some way to monetize it (by showing ads). It's harder to manage many files than one file that a VM can run as is. Also Flash had something like 98-99% installation base during like 2000-2010 so it was very much not a problem. Flash had a much larger market share than any one browser.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#198

Post by bigiain »

hunta2097 wrote: post #49
l_t wrote: post #16

I had a formative experience with Flash as a middle schooler. I loved Albino Blacksheep, Newgrounds, etc. I thought the videos were hilarious and the stick-figure-style animation was approachable. So I acquired Flash, and I was blown away by how easy it was to create these silly animations. Automatic tweening was a miracle to me. Since then I've done a lot of video editing with different tools, but I still think back…

Disclaimer: I'm an old git. I think you have deftly described a bigger problem, as the whole industry gets more and more sophisticated and complex. The barrier for entry is so high now that I think it stifles young people's interest too quickly. The great thing about Flash was the developer tool. Part animation studio, part simple programming IDE. It was a great balance. Maybe there is a place in the market for frame…

I feel this too.

As a kid, I could kinda understand how to go from programming in Basic to Pong or Space Invaders.

A kid these days has _so_ many more expectations if they're wondering how Fortnite works...

I had enough hubris as a 12/13 year old to write Space Invaders in ascii in Basic on an Osbourne2, and later to get a quite creditable imitation using sprites on an AppleII.

I wonder if kids these days look at computers and think "I could do that" about anything they care about?

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#199

Post by redisman »

buboard wrote: post #156
ehsankia wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, the issue isn't the lack of tools. It's the lack of interest. Making games is easier than ever with Unity, yet people don't spend all day playing random small Unity games. We have limited time, and as the types of entertainment increase, we have less and less to spend on small silly things like Flash games. Back then, a Flash game was the epitome of web entertainment. Now, we have thousands of amazing Youtube…

Unity is not a particularly lightweight thing, and flash wasn't just for games. Its main use was animations / banners and video . > If you were to give people the same flash games now, they'd find them ridiculously lame. Some of the most popular social games are like farmville, or some poker games. those are really equivalent of flash

Farmville and Candy Crush were literally flash games. Also many genres like physics games were born from flash.

On Unity I agree. It's never going to have 50kb games that download and start instantly. It's also not particularly easy or good for working with 2D games. I've used both professionally.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#200

Post by kizer »

wavefunction wrote: post #124
excessive wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As consumers, most people probably only care about what modern browsers can do. As a developer, the mechanisms become front and center. Modern web development is a Rube Goldberg kluge of things glued together with duct tape. Flash was much more coherent and imposed less cognitive burden of tying it altogether.

Are you intending to reply to me? I agree with you to a certain extent regarding NPM madness.

Not just NPM - the "web" is a diverse set of APIs with various peculiarities. It's not inviting to an artist with little to no programming experience (and even with the potential to learn). That was the advantage/disadvantage of flash - closed system, one (major) IDE, one language/standard library.
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