261–270 of 441 posts
And then there was utter genius like Homestar Runner, which made it almost worth it.
https://html5zombo.com/
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Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering. Old Flash can be upscaled to 4k. A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever.
I hear this a lot, but where was the Android or BlackBerry or Windows phone that ran Flash acceptably fast, and without weekly security holes? Mobile killed Flash. It was a poorly implemented technology which was acceptable only during the era where electric power was unlimited, and people were in the habit of frequent reboots to update their OS anyway.
For those of you half-considering building a Flash player replacement, I suspect the majority of Flash content (especially pre-AS3) can run performantly on modern mobile browsers with a canvas Context2D shim. Maybe even on 2010-era mobile devices.
Home Star Runner!!! Go to the old homestarrunner site, grab a flash file and play it (in the browser if you still have support, or using a rendering library) on a UHD screen. Yes, you can render that ancient 2000s era video .. in 4k. Flash is dead as a door nail though, and Homestar will now only be at the resolution of when they rendered it for YouTube.
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I think the essential thing about this era is a gradual cultural rediscovery of ownership. We've just been through a very lengthy race to the bottom for all sorts of information - pretty much anything ephemeral and disposable is free or extremely cheap, and then heavily locked down to protect property rights. And it's built a kind of event horizon to culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital univ…
> Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless? If you had a Pentium 1 PC, would you not still be able to run DOS and BASIC on it? Software "breaking" only happens if you let it - you can still use Windows 95, or XP, and run all those old programs that no longer work. If you have a copy of Flash 4 you can still run that on supported h…
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I'm not familiar with red5 but it seems that webRTC does a decent job on video and text chat with the browser doing the heavy lifting in terms of encryption and permissions. Am I missing something?
WebRTC seems to have less than consistent performance/experience. Red5 shouldn't be able to be on par or out-do it. Zoom has done some nice stuff in bypassing webrtc and instead using a webassembly connector to move video and audio.
I would spend entire holidays messing around in flash obsessively. Also then got into mxml and Flex.
Yeah I then learnt C, Java, JavaScript, Python etc but it wasn’t really as fun as Flash. Flash had progressive unwrapping of complexity. You could create impressive games in Flash quite easily. I learnt a ton by decompiling existing games from miniclip.com (love that site) and changing things to see what effect they had. Kirupa.com was a fantastic resource too.
Oh man. I could talk for hours about Flash and the self learning experiences.
In 2002 I created the original AdventureQuest. Because the game was created in Flash (Actionscript 1) it was instantly cross platform. It could dynamically load any number of animated monsters, weapons, cut-scenes, towns, and backgrounds. Most importantly, those loaded items could have their own code which let them do anything-- giving them new AI, features, or letting there be a game within the game. Also, it was easy to communicate with the database through posts to webpages. Because of this, your character was persistent and the game was able to update with new things every week. (In fact, the game has been updating for 17 years and is STILL updated with new things every single week.)
As Flash evolved, we built more games: DragonFable, MechQuest, and a slew of minigames. Actionscript 2 has a special place in my heart. It was my favorite language. Not being a "real programmer", it was really easy to use. Making things was ultra fast. Actionscript 3 was a challenge for me. our "real programmers" loved it. But, it was so hard for me to actually make anything happen with it. When it became the new standard and we started developing with it, I stopped programming and focused on the content assembly side.
We have built several Flash Massively Multiplayer Video games: AdventureQuest Worlds, EpicDuel, Oversoul, and HeroSmash. They all benefited from the same features that the very first game did, allowing for weekly (or more often) releases of new content. The games literally grew under your feet as you played them.
Creating art, animation, and interactivity in Flash was the best. Flash 3.0 was probably my favorite version. Flash CS6 being a close second.
We are currently in the process of converting our most popular game, AdventureQuest Worlds to Unity. Switching from vector to raster is a nightmare-- ask anyone who has gone through converting 10,000 items with no universal conformity.
Flash was just so fast and easy. We still use Adobe Animate (which is what they call the Flash tool now) for creating 2D vector art. But I really do miss Flash as a "one stop shop" tool to create... anything.
Battle on! Artix
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…
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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 com…
These days though- kids have access to much higher level languages and libraries and frameworks that can make some of these processes much easier. While it is much harder to understand the tech stack from the ground up- you can do a whole lot with the high level tools closer to the surface. Kids may not no how to go from BASIC to a video-game- but they don't have to write their games in BASIC. There are point and cli…
I've not tried to do anything like a game for decades, I'm kinda curious about that readily available tools kids could get their hands on these days... Closest I think I've come is launching Scratch from a RasPi's stock linux install...