When stick figures fought

The vast majority of games I played, for years, were flash games. I have a lot of fond memories of that time.

However, Flash sucked. It ran terribly, it was insecure, and a mess to maintain. It needed to go.

Way back, before the year 2000, I desperately wanted to make my own stick figure death animations, but I was too lazy, and being in South Africa, we couldn't get any useful software.

I did however manage to get Delphi Personal Edition off a cover CD from a magazine grey-imported from up-north.

I proceeded to create "TISFAT" (This is Stick Figure Animation Theatre) in Delphi, inventing my own "inverse kinematics" algorithm, quotation marks not only because I had no idea what that was at the time, but I also had no way to look it up, and it was ghastly (the day I found out what atan2 did unlocked everything!).

Being a cocky teenager, I thought, "this is great!" and sent it to the local version of "PC Format" magazine and got it on the local coverdisc.

That's when I first learnt several very important things about having users! Always -always- version your file formats!

Anyway, it somehow made its way onto "the world wide web", and someone set up a forum about it, and a small community built around my bug-ridden app. Then the religious wars of "Pivot vs. TISFAT" started, so I reached out to the author of Pivot just to say I wasn't any part of it, and I'd be keen to add support for the Pivot file format.

Later on I learnt about verlet particle physics, made better "IK", made a Pascal wrapper for the Chipmunk physics library, allowing me to add physically-driven animation creation.

I look back with awe at younger me, because I wouldn't have the energy to power on like I did, and I'd think more-than-twice about showing anyone my work nowadays (I have the physical Winamp part 2 video basically done, but the fear of showing it in public is holding me back).

You can still find videos created with TISFAT on YouTube, and I've still got a complete rewrite sitting on a HDD somewhere, where I planned a "no UI" way of animating, targeting all the "new" multi-touchscreens back then...

Ah, good times.

> None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind.

Some of that did, at least for how that creative work was almost exclusively delivered to the world. Those bugs were not just excessive resource usage and instability, they were incredibly often exploitable security flaws that were regularly weaponized against a huge swath of internet users. The ubiquity of the Flash browser plugin was simultaneously one of the greatest strengths of Flash as a creative platform and one of the greatest risks to the average person browsing the web in the 2000s.

The plugin needed to die. Unfortunately the Flash community was so firmly built around the web plugin as their distribution method of choice (presumably because many of us were browsing animations and playing games at work/school where we couldn't necessarily download and run arbitrary .exes) that the plugin was more or less a diseased conjoined twin, and when it died the community didn't have long left.

Compare this to Java where the death of the browser plugin caused a number of badly designed banking sites to have to be redesigned in a less stupid (but quite often still very stupid) way but the community as a whole continued on without huge disruption. The browser plugin was just one of many places Java existed, it wasn't the dominant focus of the community.

Yeah, it's kinda crazy people are brushing over the security issues. The nostalgia is huge, I get it, but Flash was terrible for browsing the internet at the time.

And OpenFL https://openfl.org/ which is an implementation of the Flash API written in Haxe. It can cross-compile to HTML5 or native C++ mobile and desktop. Disclosure: I'm a contributor.