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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#61

Post by echelon »

TillE wrote: post #30
CSMastermind wrote: post #16

I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate…

Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just fine on YouTube. It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.

Flash made it easy for any kid or creative to do amazing things.

Homestar, Weebl, Salad Fingers, Charlie the Unicorn, Ultimate Showdown, Xiao Xiao, Albino Black Sheep, Newgrounds, YTMND...

It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#64

Post by johannes1234321 »

jonplackett wrote: post #59

The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool. It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites. I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t. I wish Adobe had do…

Yes, I still haven't found a good alternative to easily build simple interactive animations for the web. Flash was fun, even with my limited artistic skills.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#65

Post by LadyMartel »

jonplackett wrote: post #59

The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool. It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites. I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t. I wish Adobe had do…

I fondly remember when I first discovered how to attach a goto action to a button and I went nuts with it making choose your own adventure type animations. Drawing was also really easy to make thing look decent even with a mouse. I haven't found (or admittedly looked for) a similar vector drawing tool like that ever since.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#66

Post by j4ah4n »

They certainly were fun days back with Macromedia at the helm. Full suite of tools that worked extremely well together.

I remember when Tim Burton put out various cartoons via Director (the same used for countless DVDs) that opened up more dramatic storytelling than the business “intros” offered at the time (I built these too mind you).

I was even Flash AS3 certified at one point, something I was very proud of in my early career.

Good times.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#67

Post by kmeisthax »

Bakingpotato wrote: post #43
themagician wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby

The problem was that Flash Player needed significant rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at least, not without finding a way to get more money out of game developers for the privilege.

The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is specifically to keep Unity off the Flash platform. This, predictably, causes huge backlash from Flash developers - even those who don't care about cross-compilation. So they kill the revshare... as well as any plans to fix Flash Player's problems.

This all happened a year after Steve Jobs posted "Thoughts on Flash" and tried to ban Adobe AIR apps - and all other third-party development tools in the process[0]. We'd learn way later on that preceding this, Apple had begged Adobe to ship them a Flash Player build that would actually work on iPhones, and their attempts were... anemic[1].

[0] This was only stopped because the Obama administration threatened an antitrust lawsuit.

[1] While the iOS ports of Flash Player haven't been publicly released, they did ship NPAPI Flash plugins on Android, which were just as bad as Jobs had claimed. Actually they probably were the same codebase given that jailbreakers were able to get them to work on Safari.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#68

Post by nolok »

themagician wrote: post #40
CSMastermind wrote: post #16

I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate…

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

> I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow.

Same way pdf does, because the money was in the authoring tools and they had the best ones around.

But adobe mostly inherited flash because they wanted the death of macromedia, so they didn't really care about it.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#69

Post by kmeisthax »

mynameishere wrote: post #13
haunter wrote: post #4

Highly recommend "Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby". It's the Dark Souls of flash games https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en The japanese version is here (no difference) https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126 They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)

Well now I've got that crappy music stuck in my head. That brings up a real mystery from 15 years ago that I never did solve. Back in the day you could go on kongregate or whatever and play these awful flash games that clearly took 30 minutes or less to make. Just junky, copy-paste stuff. (Much worse than the "home run derby" game above.) And yet... And yet they all seemed to have original sound tracks of more-or-les…

Newgrounds had the Audio Portal, a repository of free-to-use music specifically intended for use by people creating movies and games for their Flash Portal.

That being said, this sort of licensed tie-in webgame probably would have just bought a royalty-free stock music track from Audiojungle[0] or whatever.

There was also a huge market for licensing custom-branded versions of whole Flash games, too. That's why every mid-2000s official site for any sort of media property had Flash games on it.

[0] Audiojungle.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#70

Post by [deleted] »

jonplackett wrote: post #59

The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool. It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites. I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t. I wish Adobe had do…

[deleted]
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