IIRC many 2D animators considered the old Adobe Flash Professional to be one of the best 2D animation tools ever made.
I still use Flash
41–50 of 408 posts
Re: I still use Flash
#42This guy sees the matrix
Re: I still use Flash
#43Flash is fantastic and I wish it got the respect it deserves from tech circles. It got an entire generation into animation and software engineering, and had really robust and approachable tooling which is yet to be replicated. I think back to the gaming experiences made in Flash and Shockwave as far back as the mid 90s, and nothing today even comes close. Back then, you could load up a webpage on a Pentium II and pla…
Flash was conceptually fantastic, and today we can do everything Flash did, and more, with HTML, and WebGL. Unfortunately we don't have the authoring tool to do so. Flash IDE became Adobe Animate, but it has relatively restricted output and capabilities, compared to Flash before. Unfortunately also Flash was full of bugs, FULL. I mean the player, the IDE, everything. And Macromedia and consequently Adobe were increas…
I don't deny that it had lots of issues. In addition to what you mentioned, it was an accessibility nightmare, and had tons of security problems. All that said, it's difficult to argue with results.
Re: I still use Flash
#44I was expecting the graphics to be converted first to SVG.
That would be the easy part. From the post they are already stored as such, but the complexity would be to render the vector graphics in C++ at 60FPS. There is no simple solution to this, and rolling it yourself is quite the task too.
If you look at some of the modern approaches to animation in C++ (like Lottie or Rive) their C++ clients are pretty poorly supported in my opinion, mostly for anti-aliasing quality in native clients over their web equivalents.
Re: I still use Flash
#45It's nothing to be ashamed o..., wait, Flash you said? Well, then it is...
Re: I still use Flash
#46Hey HN, I haven't done a lot of technical postmortem blogpost-style writing so I'd welcome any feedback or tips on how to improve. Is it too long, too short, too technical, not technical enough? Boring? Interesting? Is it enlightening or does it just come off like content marketing? I literally have no idea how good I am at this.
I think you nailed it at every layer, it was a very entertaining, nostalgic and instructive read. Thank you!
Re: I still use Flash
#47Surprising there is no mention of the wasm/rust-implemented flash player https://ruffle.rs/ in the article.
They did mention it. They use it for some of their older games but it seems like Ruffle isn't yet feature-complete with Action Script 3 and thus cannot be used to run their newer games
It sounds like adding those features to ruffle would have been three order of magnitudes easier than writing a flash player from scratch
I understand contributing to OSS is a pain (I often end up with half implemented features in my own branch and never manage to merge them upstream) but he could have saved himself some trouble.
Re: I still use Flash
#48IIRC many 2D animators considered the old Adobe Flash Professional to be one of the best 2D animation tools ever made.
Fun fact: An animated TV series that ran from 2010 to 2019 developed by Lauren Faust, was animated in Adobe Flash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_...
Re: I still use Flash
#49[flagged]
Creatives: look at this beautiful chalice made of Roman dichroic glass. Security people: %drops it on the ground and it shatters% yes but glass is terribly insecure, why not redo it with PVC and LEF strip Christmas lights.
The problem wasn't creatives.
Bank UI authors: Management wanted a pretty UI, so we made a semi-attractive chalice out of Roman dichroic glass. If it breaks, bad guys take your money.
Re: I still use Flash
#50> The way forward was obvious; I'd have to make my own Flash player.
Uhhhhhhh, hold on a second, wait a second... this is not readily apparent nor obvious as a course of action at all!!
I would rather have gathered the raw assets and tried recoding the game using the same game logic on a better platform...