Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023

[rickdicker]

Spent the past few days making this - something halfway between a demoscene program and an experimental film. I wanted to celebrate the unique computer-y aesthetics of flash, while showing off some weird and obscure tricks I've picked up over the years since it's been deprecated. (Also, some maybe-not-subtle commentary about AI-art and the tools of the future)

[mclightning]

I was a huge Flash nerd, all the way since Macromedia Flash 5. I learnt programming with Flash 5 and action script. I have been at it until Flash 8. Then I stopped putting effort to keep-up and eventually Flash died.

Something was lost in the internet culture. Flash was the language of web art. I don't know what is the new language for that anymore.

If anyone knows, please do tell me. WebGL? Any WebGL-powered framework? What is it?

[BoppreH]

My feeling is that we won't see another Flash because the artists went to video platforms[1], and the developers are trying to make money on the app stores[2].

Flash was the most attention grabbing medium at the time (because of bandwidth constraints), and making money was not the expectation, so the two groups flocked together and created all those wonderful animations and games for free. I don't see Flash, or anything like it, winning against TikTok and app store cash grabs anytime soon.

[1] Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN92RC0Lmd4 . Distinct visual style? Check. Absurdist? Check. High effort? Check. Niche? Currently 3k views, check. Available for free? Check. 15 years ago this would be on Newgrounds.

[2] Exhibit B: https://play.google.com/store/games . Hundreds of thousands of simple games. 15 years ago, the less greedy version of this would be on Kongregate.

[rchaud]

Regarding the Play store, I just see waves and waves of the exact same game with different character textures applied.

The difference with Flash was that it was usually the work of a solo developer of a very small team, so they could be unique in what they made (not dismissing that Flash game had clones too). The mobile app landscape is different in that conformity = $$$. These apps are soulless, they have no incentive to build something that's not a Clash of Clans / Temple Run / Candy Crush type game that's inundated with microtransactions.

[grishka]

Nothing. The ease with which Flash allowed one to create all these web experiences, with little to no programming, is still unmatched to this day.

[LeifCarrotson]

I feel like the same is true of Visual Basic 6. (Excuse me, I'll wait....)

OK, now that we've all calmed back down, VB6 has been unmatched in the way that it allowed someone with zero experience to drag-and-drop and write in what looks like pseudocode to get some little business widget built. Yes, you can engineer something with better architecture that's less likely to paint you into a `DoEvents()` corner. Yes, the mere existence of settings like `On Error Resume Next`, `Option Strict Off`, and `Option Explicit Off` are anathema to correctness, security (lol), and robustness. No, if you expect support for Unicode or 64-bit operations, it wasn't built for that.

Many people loathe Flash for its security vulnerabilities, or VB6 because of experiences with poorly-written code at businesses that should have had a 'real programmer.' And today, a tool that made the same design decisions that Flash and VB6 did - pandering to novices who weren't willing to go to the effort to do things right - would be derided as a toy, as unusable for real work outside of sandboxed demos. But both were instrumental as stepping stones in the early 2000s to transform non-computer-literate individuals and businesses into creators and users.

[grishka]

The vulnerabilities in Flash were not in the SWF format or the AS APIs or their intended behavior. That was all rock-solid. They were in one particular proprietary implementation of Flash player. Ruffle won't have any memory-related vulnerabilities to begin with by virtue of being written in a memory-safe language.

[camhenlin]

My first job was writing VBA programs on top of extremely complicated Excel 97 spreadsheets to prevent input errors and provide a cleaner UI. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ve ever been as productive as I was at that job. It was just so straightforward to crank out decent looking forms and so intuitive for a fresh new dev

[pixelrevision]

Unity is a really good alternative. Flash kinda went sideways and started really trying to lean into the Java crowd with flex. Unity is more like what would have happened if Flash heavily leaned into what it did well.

[grishka]

Unity is a bad alternative because it requires programming. It's also much more complex since it's a game engine, not a scriptable vector animation thing.

With Flash, you could just follow some tutorials and make something nice in no time, fully understanding what you're doing.

Flash didn't "lean into" Flex. Flex was an Eclipse-based IDE and a set of libraries that some people used for some projects. It was specifically aimed at building apps. There were layouts, controls and all that. There was a list view with cell reuse, in 2008! It was much more like Android layout system then what the web had and still has. Flex was a tool that's very good for some jobs and completely unfit for others — like any other tool, really.

[rchaud]

> Flash was the language of web art. I don't know what is the new language for that anymore.

Nothing. Flash left a gaping void in Internet creativity that has gone unfilled. We don't call it 'art' anymore, we call it 'content', aka grist for walled-garden mills of Youtube and Instagram and Tiktok.

[AshleysBrain]

We make Construct Animate which can do Flash-style animation right in the browser: https://www.construct.net/en/animation-software

[dwild]

At first glance it seems to only support bitmap? I means it does seems great, but I believe a big part of Flash is the vectorial format, it's not baked into the image, and it does look "good" in many resolutions. You can iterate quickly that way.

[whywhywhywhy]

> Flash was the language of web art. I don't know what is the new language for that anymore

P5, which while excellent and better than flash for many reasons it’s not the same thing.

The true beauty of flash was seeing the cool games and animations online a kid could pirate a copy of flash and then the way the tech worked it lulled you in with simple animation tools but you were forced to interact with code to control the play state.

This meant a percentage dug deeper and could eventually make games and more advanced things.

[rchaud]

p5.js is to Flash....what D3.js is to making a bar chart in Excel. Here is the code required to just render a circle in p5:

>function draw() {

> stroke(50);

> fill(100);

> ellipse(x, y, 24, 24); }

In Flash you would just click the Oval icon and draw one.

[whywhywhywhy]

True true, now draw a ellipse programmatically or line that follows the mouse in Flash and you'll see this flip round and P5 is easier.

Both have their benefits, P5 is far superior for creating interactive digital art or creative tooling. Flash is far better at creating intricate animations.

[woogley]

There is nothing like Flash IMO. Closest we have in the modern day is Unity and Godot

[hutzlibu]

Closer would be Adobe Animate, the official successor, but it is really not the same experience.

Wick editor is nice, but developement is on hold. It is open source, so maybe something will still come out if it.

[woogley]

Yeah I mean more from a mindshare / value to your personal portfolio pov. But still, what we have today is just an approximation of Flash in 2000s

[rchaud]

Tumult Hype on Mac as well. Point-and-click, drag 'n drop animation and website design. Also supports custom HTML/CSS/JS.

[mattl]

I wish Macromedia had been able to get Flash to work without a plug-in. Flash was missing on Unix outside of Mac OS X and only i386 Linux.

[throwaway5947]

Adobe Animate.

[grishka]

Flash literally changed my life. I wouldn't be who I am without it. I owe everything to it.

Without Flash, I wouldn't have most of my friends who I met via the VKontakte app developer community. My career would have been vastly different because I was later hired to that same VKontakte thanks to my previous participation in Flash app developer contests. I got quite a bit of my programming skills from ActionScript as well. Flash decompilers taught me reverse engineering.

I sincerely hope that at some point in the future Flash will see a resurgence. Ruffle in particular brings that moment closer. There is still no good open-source Flash authoring software though. I may try to fix that myself when I'm done with the rest of my project ideas.

[chaoz_]

Damn I saw too many fun VK apps, which ones have you authored? :D

[grishka]

The reasonably popular ones:

- A "durak" card game. Was real-time with the server in Java. Also full of bugs because I had no clue what I was doing wrt multi-threading and I also didn't know what defensive programming even is.

- A demotivator-style meme generator.

- A gambling thing that resembled those once-popular "pillar" machines found in grocery stores and malls around Russia. IRL ones took 5-rouble coins, mine took VK votes. VK killed it by deprecating the API for apps to give votes to users.

- A music player with playback speed control. Mostly for shits and giggles :D

There were more smaller ones, all kinds of experiments, but they didn't catch on.

[thewebcount]

The visuals were a lot of fun, but I don’t understand why I, as a viewer/consumer/whatever of this sort of thing, would ever want these things:

> Unknown runtime

I like to know whether I’m going to have time to view all of something or not. I might want to set aside some time to watch something if it’s too long for the break I’m taking right now.

> No rewinding, no skipping ahead

Ugh. Just … no. If I saw something cool or missed something, I want to see it again without having to watch the preceding 20 minutes again. Also seems like the kind of thing that would eventually be used to try and force you to watch ads, which I don’t need in my life.

> Extremely dense patterns that would get destroyed by video compression

This I can understand! See also SVG.

> Moiré effects that change if you mess with the zoom setting on your browser

OK, if that’s your thing, go with it.

> Effects that change depending on if you're using flash player or Ruffle

So a friend might suggest I watch something, but then when I watch it, I might see something different if I just use a different player? That seems less than ideal.

Anyway, love the visuals, and we could use more stuff like that, but really dislike the above points.

[rickdicker]

I wouldn't say any of those bullet points are inherently better - just differences for you to contemplate. For all the downsides of these things, there are artistic uses of each that sadly are not an option on modern video platforms.

Example - mystery runtime, while inconvenient to someone in a hurry, is useful in keeping suspense or surprise. It's kind of hard to convince a reader that the hero is at risk of dying when there's obviously 2/3rds of a book left.

Do the pros outweigh the cons? Probably not. Should it at least be an option on modern video platforms? Maybe. But the important thing to me, is that we remember how such a thing changes the viewing experience before every film for the rest of time comes with a progress meter attached.

[chrisan]

Would you consider putting this on youtube or something? I grew up with flash (my first paid job was an as3 project for a medical teaching team) and was always interested in the artistic side of flash

I got to the point where you are talking with the older guy but wanted to get back to work and reference something. I noticed whenever I tabbed to something else the video/audio would stop, so I dragged the tab out of firefox create its own window and it continued playing for about 30 seconds then for some reason it stopped and when I looked it was back at the prompt from the start

[rickdicker]

That was the end!

[thaumasiotes]

> It's kind of hard to convince a reader that the hero is at risk of dying when there's obviously 2/3rds of a book left.

This is what George R. R. Martin wanted to do. He will kill the fake-out protagonist at any time.

This is supposed to mean that he is a great writer. But really it just means he's bad at storytelling - you'd tell a better story by just focusing on the actual protagonists instead of random redshirts. Focusing the correct characters has no effect on the plot.

[bccdee]

This is only true if you accept an extremely myopic view of storytelling.

A Song of Ice and Fire is about the illegitimacy of the Lannisters' reign, the choice to execute Ned Stark for discovering it, and the ensuing civil wars. Ned Stark isn't a "fake protagonist" because he dies. He's a protagonist and he dies, and then the story continues. Not every story needs to be a Save The Cat Hollywood screenplay to be "correct," and not every character arc needs to be satisfyingly resolved.

You not getting Boss Baby vibes from Martin's writing doesn't mean he's done anything wrong.

[onion2k]

I'm with you on this. Running Flash as a plugin in a browser is not something I want at all. Flash Player was awful.

But...

The Flash editor/IDE was brilliant, and that's something that the web sorely needs. There's a few libraries that can do similar things (eg theatre.js) but they don't do enough. Flash's editor was genuinely easy to use once you'd mastered a few things, and if you remembered to save regularly, and it enabled people to make fantastic games, sites, experiences, etc.

I suspect the lack of a really good animation and interaction design tool is one thing that's lead to the homogenization of the internet.

[boudin]

I still wonder what browsers would be today if adobe had open sourced flash player and worked on making SWF and action scripts standards to be natively integrated in browsers rather than letting the player die as an annoying badly maintained plugin.

[Closi]

Agree - the success of flash was that it was designer-first rather than developer-first (and I miss that!).

Things like theatre.js look great, but very quickly their documentation make it clear that you are expected to use javascript.

Flash expected you to just draw stuff, animate stuff, and if you like there is an optional scripting environment. The first few iterations of flash didn't really even have much of a scripting environment at all (AS1 was incredibly limited!).

I think that is part of the nostalgia of that period - things were so easy to make that you got some really creative and crazy stuff.

[fphhotchips]

I'm with you. I stopped watching not because of the visuals (which I hated - I immediately got eyestrain - but I can appreciate others might like them), but because I reached the point in the video where I wanted to know how much longer there was. I was interested enough for a couple more minutes, but for all I know, this doesn't get to the point until 10 minutes in. I just don't want that in my life.

Everything on the 'different' list is unambiguously bad to me except maybe the compression thing. I don't want effects that change with zoom settings - that just excludes people who need to be zoomed in to see stuff.

I'm not happy that Flash died. I spent a lot of time playing really fun games in Flash. I'm happy this can exist, but please let's keep doing video essays in videos. That said, now I know Newgrounds still exists I wonder if I can find the impossible quiz...

[smolder]

I don't think the author was implying all of those characteristics they enumerated were positives.

[dusted]

Keep in mind that flash is not simply a linear media to be played back like a movie or song, it's interactive.. What's the run-time in a strategy game ? What does rewind and fast-forward even mean in a story-driven one ?

[chris_armstrong]

You could take the perspective that this is art, and sometimes art sets constraints on how the viewer can experience it that be a limitation of the medium or something deliberate on the part of the artist.

I was happy enough to go with it, even though the flashing at first made me feel a bit uneasy. I'm glad people still find joy in this stuff - I remember building Flash animations in the early 2000s and quite enjoying learning about all this cool animation stuff and laying background music I'd ripped off a disc.

[nextaccountic]

> Unknown runtime

> No rewinding, no skipping ahead

Could this be manually inserted by a specific flash applet? Just like, you know, Youtube started as a flash applet and it had a (custom made) seekable progress bar

This should make animation only slightly harder (it would receive a parameter t instead of mutating things as the time goes forward, but that's best practice for animations anyway I think, at least in gamedev it is)

[nextaccountic]

> > Effects that change depending on if you're using flash player or Ruffle

> So a friend might suggest I watch something, but then when I watch it, I might see something different if I just use a different player? That seems less than ideal.

Sounds like a bug/limitation of Ruffle that might or might not be addressed by future versions, not an inherent thing with Flash

[CSSer]

This is very cool. It sent me down a rabbit hole of NG’s Flash Forward submissions that ultimately triggered a strong sense of nostalgia for the late ‘00s and ‘10s. There was a lot of kid culture here at the time. I’m not familiar enough to know (probably since I don’t have kids), but I get the impression that in some ways New Grounds was for my generation what Roblox is for kids today. Can anyone attest to this?

It makes me wonder what a resurgence of flash via Ruffle.rs could mean for the web today. That being said, there are also a lot of exciting ways to make this kind of content today now too.

[whywhywhywhy]

> New Grounds was for my generation what Roblox is for kids today. Can anyone attest to this?

Essentially yes, you can jump from completely different experiences in seconds. Main difference is it’s multiplayer by default.

[michaelbrooks]

I owe my career to Flash. I got started because my school would block game sites, and we weren't allowed to play games at lunch time. I used Flash to learn how to make games and then play them in School. If anyone said I couldn't play games, I would respond with "I'm learning to make the game", and they would give me a pass.

It's the reason I got into scripting/programming, and I'm now a web developer.

[VapidLinus]

When I was a kid my mum would only let me use my PC every other weekday because she wanted me to spend less time playing games. I convinced her that on the non-game days she would let me use Game Maker on my PC instead :)

So I ended up using my PC every day of course. But I did spend a lot of time making games!

[thih9]

Impressive! I think that’s a fair rule for any school, i.e. you’re allowed to play a computer game if you’ve made it yourself.

[dandare]

My professional career was:

ActionScript 1 -> I am making silly games!

ActionScript 2 -> I am making cool games!

ActionScript 3 -> OO, classes, IDEs, SDKs, oh my got, I think I can write code now!

JS -> What is this crap??

TypeScript -> Thanks Flash, I am a software developer thanks to AS3.

[hutzlibu]

Yeah, I can relate, only that I had to stay with js longer than planned.

And my old workflow with Flash, Flash Builder, Flex builder I am still missing.

[libraryatnight]

I enjoyed that - thanks for sharing and making it. Thoughtful and kind of beautiful.

Flash was such a huge part of why the internet was awesome for me growing up. My favorite part of the internet is still people making and sharing things - like this.

[bryceneal]

It's fascinating to observe the dramatic shift in perceptions around Flash on Hacker News over the past 5-10 years. As I recall, discussions mentioning Flash were once dominated by near-unanimous complaints about its flaws, and there was an overwhelming sense of relief when it was announced that it would be deprecated.

Now, the narrative has evolved to appreciate the unique creative value Flash provided and the distinct niche it occupied at the intersection of art and code. Maybe it took us some time to recognize this, or maybe it's possible for both sentiments to hold true simultaneously.

[npteljes]

I think it's because Flash means more than one thing to people. As a plugin, it was horrible for multiple reasons: insecure, undiscoverable, pain to view at different resolutions, etc. As a creative outlet, it was awesome, it enabled a lot of people to express themselves, and others to take part in a culture.

[rchaud]

I think it comes down to those that categorize Flash's use cases as either white-hat or black-hat.

Some will remember Flash-based banner ads and video sites, that often had malware; that's black-hat Flash.

Many others will remember Flash for the games, cartoons and experiences that were non-commercial in nature and thus were malware-free.

[Groxx]

tbh I think the dividing line is pretty clear:

Many are glad the performance and security nightmare of a runtime is gone, and we have modern replacements for most of what it did. They're not all superior, but I think it's fair to say we're roughly equivalent now, and possibly better, in aggregate.

Most are sad that the excellent, ubiquitous, amateur-friendly authoring environment is gone, and no replacement currently exists. There are many more-specialized ones, but few general ones (and they're far less widely used, though that could change eventually).

[jpgvm]

Flash was ironically ahead of it's time.

I don't think Flash is shit canned if it wasn't acquired by Adobe. While it was Macromedia it was no threat to established players, neutral ground if you will. Adobe was much more relevant during that era and as such the acquisition painted a target on it's back.

There exists an alternate universe where Macromedia stayed independent or was acquired by a party like Mozilla interested in openning up the Flash standard. We would be writing frontend "web" code in AS4 or AS5 by now in a fully tricked out IDE that would support code, design and animations in a single interface.

Instead we have the steaming pile of garbage that is Javascript, the one surviving attempt to make that better (Typescript), CSS that is now tortured beyond recognition, no good tooling for building animations or highly interactive interfaces etc.

Flash was a scapegoat to kill the old web but also to ensure that the burgeoning App Store/Play Store would rule mobile instead of something more accessible and cross platform.

[saurik]

Is the concept of authoring with Flash actually dead/deprecated? I've been trying to understand--and maybe you're willing to help answer this--whether Adobe Animate is just a newer version of Adobe Flash that can target things other than the deprecated Flash web player/plugin.

[rickdicker]

That's pretty much it - though it's been able to target other platforms since long before the "Animate" name change. I believe it still has a small-but-significant market share in the animation industry (mostly TV stuff) (hence the name!), but there's waning support for anything else.

That said, Ruffle ( https://ruffle.rs/ ) is keeping flash alive on the web, preserving the legacy of flash and enabling people to make new things like this! Newgrounds hosts a contest every year since the "death of flash" to see who can make the best new thing, (that's what this was made for, actually): https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1523958

[egypturnash]

Last I heard, my buddy Pringle was still using it to do Teen Titans. He picked it up along with me when we were at Spumco doing web stuff and ended up at Cartoon Network, doing stuff like Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends.

I think the last I heard from him was like a decade ago, so who knows, maybe he and his crew finally moved on to some other tool. But it definitely persisted in the animation industry long after the browser plugin got killed off. Adobe's still cranking out new versions every year, too, so it's not like you're stuck using ancient operating systems to run it.

[Dracophoenix]

Since you worked at Spumco, weren't the animators using a combo of hand-drawn work and PowerAnimator or did things move on quite quickly to digital art by the time you were there?

While Adobe is still making animate Teen Titans Go! (a Spongebob-esque spinoff of the original show), as well as many other US animated shows past 2012, moved on to Toon Boom.

[egypturnash]

I was there during the WPH era, when there was a hybrid digital/physical process. The workflow was boards>layout>inks>painstaking hand-optimization of scanned inks in some autotrace program that's long gone>Flash>color>animation. The parts that John interfered with the most were layout and animation. The Flash side wasn't allowed to draw a damn thing, we just chopped up approved drawings and moved them around.

[Dracophoenix]

So I just watched WPH as I haven't seen that one before and noticed the cat was similar to the one in the Weird Al Yaknovic music video for No Cigar. I don't know if personally you had a hand in that one, but all in all, the show looks pretty good for 1999 and probably looked less stiff on a CRT than it does on my phone.

[rickdicker]

Wow no kidding! The Spumco web stuff was before my time, but Foster's started airing right around the time I picked up flash, when I was like nine (it was a favorite show of mine!) There were a lot more flash shows on TV back then, and most look pretty crappy by today's standards, but at least that one holds up pretty well.

[rchaud]

Adobe Animate is not the same as Flash. Flash could do things that the HTML/CSS spec simply did not support before 2010, like <video>. Even now, Adobe Animate cannot do a 3D shooter because it is limited by what the browser supports.

[riwsky]

Bravo, dude.

The analogy I go to is that of a living versus a dead language, which I got from my dad. He was a professional cellist for years before he said screw it, got an MBA, and went into finance, and I always thought this was some tragic compromise on his part—but when I finally asked him about it (well into my twenties and figuring out my own career) he said it was nothing of the sort: finance back then (~late eighties, trading latin american sovereign debt) had much more innovation, competition, and energy around it then classical music had (or will ever have again: it was dead). We should treasure the art movements we have while we have them.

(proceeds to rewatch several Xiao Xiaos)

(proceeds to generate dog photos with Stable Diffusion)

(proceeds to futz with midis, slouching towards counterpoint)

[soperj]

How do you even start writing counterpoint? What's the actual theory there?

[riwsky]

I mean: if you're looking to go straight to theory, the classic textbook is Johann Joseph Fux's, from 300 years ago. But if you're familiar with writing melodies (with some voice leading) over chord blocks, try eliminating the chords and composing a second melodic line. This line should imply the original harmonies, while maintaining a unique rhythm and contour—and you can then add more melodies as needed. Many theory rules, such as avoiding parallel 5ths or 4ths, are essentially design patterns ensuring melody distinctiveness.

Of course, it also helps to listen to a shit-ton of counterpoint (the right suggestion here is "Bach", but personally it was Brad Mehldau's music that got me interested in this).

[Uhhrrr]

Gradus ad Parnassum of Johann Joseph Fux http://www.opus28.co.uk/Fux_Gradus.pdf

[vnorilo]

Everyone reads Fux (see sibling) but nobody, including my counterpoint professor, thought it was super useful.

Piston has this book that's more approachable: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/445366.Counterpoint

But ultimately, learning counterpoint is 10% reading and 90% writing.

[eurasiantiger]

The short version: have your harmony or bassline go down when your lead melody goes up, or vice versa.

(It’s not that easy in theory but that is the gist of it.)

[TranquilMarmot]

Loved this, it's something I think about a lot. I "grew up on the internet" and spent a lot of time in my youth making flash games/videos for me and my friends and we always had such a great time. Even today, 20-some years later, a lot of our vernacular from flash videos still finds its way into our speech- "fire ze missles", "badger badger badger SNAKE", that kind of thing.

The bit at the end about "the old ways" still being needed sometimes... it reminds me of a story I saw recently about how we're still researching ancient Roman concrete and finding secrets about why it's so durable (https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas...) Makes you wonder how many artistries have been lost over the years, and what kind of stuff we work on today that will be lost in the future. I spend a good 50 hours a week toiling over code, and already I see that changing a lot over the next 10 years. I can't imagine what it will be like in 50.

[lakomen]

I love the star wars rap and wee. "When you're a kid an you wanna go wee but you ain't got drugs yet, you hold on to your life, you hold on to your gonads and strife, gonads and strife x3 , gonads in the lightning in the the lightning in the the rain weee."

"It's not the east or the west side - no it's not, it's not the north or the south side - no its not, it's the dark side - you are correct. So for all you Vader haters we'll blow your planet up. What is thy bidding my master, it's a disaster, Skywalker we're after, but if he could be turned to the dark side, yes, we'd have a powerful ally..."

That was the internet I loved, pre Facebook, pre cookie banners, pre everything bad nowadays. Better times too, everyone knew the Dubyas were full of shit and most people didn't go haywire yet with the gender crap and the 15 years of Islam hate terrorism brainwashing etc. Work was fun because "SOLID" and OO fetish wasn't there yet, no k8s, no cloud, no microservices. Living was less difficult. And you could actually find things to buy in local stores vs Amazon swallowing everything. You could also say anything without bullshit censorship. Steam was new and didn't have much power. MMORPGs were big and the social networks of that time, besides ICQ which was a falling star but the main platform to send messages, also MSN messenger. I don't want to know the amount of spying that was going on there. Summers were warm but not the burning hell of today. See you in 20 years and 45-50°C in Northern Europe. There were forums everywhere, not just that abomination reddit. Google still had the don't be evil slogan and getting into adsense wasn't impossible like it's nowadays. Layers ads were a thing. No bootstrap meant colorful and diverse websites. And then came Facebook and turned everything into shit.

[adamredwoods]

Years ago, when I used Adobe Animate to make HTML5 animation (ahem, banner ads), it wasn't quite the same as Flash. I think it would compress and uncompress the SVG, which was cool and something I haven't seen too often post-Flash. Adobe Animate would even make sprite sheets, which are still rare (some sites use it for their icons libraries), but again, very useful in Flash-like HTML5 compression. I think the SVG compression was an internal Adobe function, though, I didn't see it in EaselJS.

Then there was vector keyframe animation, which was very clunky in HTML5.

https://createjs.com/docs/easeljs/modules/EaselJS.html

Very cool to see new content being made as in the OP's demo. I would say they're creating for Ruffle now, as Flash is old and deprecated.

Ultimately, someone needs to make a Ruffle editor. Adobe Flash succeeded because the authoring tool was great. Something like Synfig exporting to Ruffle:

https://www.synfig.org/

[CoolestBeans]

A thought I’ve had for a few years now is that the loss of the Flash runtime (and the rise of mobile) might have been the proximate cause for the end of fun small web based videos and games but what is really missing is an authoring tool as good as Flash was for HTML5. Virtually everything the flash plugin could do, a browser can do with canvas and whatnot. But the magic was really that the Flash authoring tool opened up to a canvas you could draw on with tools most kids knew from Paint. With a little experimenting you could figure out the timeline and start animating things. If you wanted to go even further and add interactivity, you could edit ActionScript again right in the interface. It wasn’t easy but the visuals-first, almost but not quite WYSISYG aspect made it pickuppable instead of like learning to wrangle a text editor or whatever. The closest thing now is Unity but to me it misses that immediacy and simplicity.

[Wowfunhappy]

Here's the actual SWF, in case anyone else wants to watch it in actual Flash instead of emulated flash, for the symbolism of it.

https://uploads.ungrounded.net/881000/881533_bc81682038934.s...

[DonHopkins]

I love all the amazing inspirational open source examples of generative procedural art and artificial life that Jared Tarbell published on his web site https://levitated.net .

It opened my eyes to using Flash for procedural graphics and simulations, instead of just using timelines like a glorified graphical player piano, or like a BASIC program full of GOTO spaghetti rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise (which is how Macromedia founder Marc Canter described Director's Lingo, which also used frame numbers like BASIC line numbers).

Jared went on to do a lot more amazing stuff in Processing, co-founded Etsy, and built a toy factory!

https://www.artnome.com/news/2020/8/24/interview-with-genera...

https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/8/8/why-love-generative-ar...

https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/dusseldorf-2018/speakers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-9UWkgDf8

[dandare]

Side note: The Flash vector editor was the most efficient vector editor I had the experience working with. I wish Illustrator had the same capability.

Apparently I am not the only one who misses it: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/1769/is-th...

[CharlesW]

The Flash vector editor lives (it became Adobe Animate), and you might really like Figma's vector editing as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x2uHUB_pzw

[brucethemoose2]

Amazing! I hope vector stuff makes a comeback, especially since its useful in tandem with AI (like with diffusion video nets + controlnet).

You are right about it being incompressible, among other things. I am going to restart it and see how much NVENC butchers it.

EDIT: Usual CQP settings are going absolutely bonkers.

EDIT2: https://youtu.be/6x3WUw12kKE

[duskwuff]

The 2016 demoscene production "Through the Cracks" has some similarly catastrophic effects on Youtube's encoder, particularly around 2:30:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N5CLcSkkWs

[brucethemoose2]

Even 80000k CQP HEVC at 2160x2160 looks pretty janky.

Yeah, catastrophic is a good descriptor.

[grupthink]

I would like to thank OP for creating this. I watched this yesterday and thought the visuals were fun, playful, and rare in this day and age. More than that, it felt like I was on the phone with an old friend revisiting old memories that we both shared. I love hearing people like this tell their story because their passion and enthusiasm is contagious. And, well, I didn't realize the effect this would have on me at the time, but your message has stayed with me, and helped me feel inspired enough to get some creative work done this afternoon. I just kept thinking about how ephemeral and fleeting everything is. And that I really needed to seize the day! Thank you OP. I hope you will share more of your stories with us again soon. Cheers.

[charlieyu1]

We may never see a creativity boom like the Flash era again.

[hrayn3]

Strong 'How To With John Wilson' energy - it works well for this type of presentation, nice one

[ohxh]

You've made something really cool here. Watching transfixed me in a way similar to a video exhibition I saw at the Tate Modern when I was younger. It was a loop with footage of a JAXA rocket launch, an anti-nuclear protest after the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster, and the eruption of a volcano, with narration from a shaman in Japanese (subtitled) contemplating our relationship with nature. "Transit" by Susan Norrie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TS3d4URcB4&t=173s

[anjc]

Brilliant and lovely, well done.

I think the applicability of techniques go both ways. Similar to what Sarah's dad said, I see research in ML now which rehashes expertise from many decades ago. Conversely, I see the demoscene implementing ideas on old hardware that, as you said, it would have been amazing if the technique was known at the time, but it simply wasn't conceivable then. It's only with advances in tech and lowering of technical barriers that new ideas are explored.

In any case, it's compelling to see people's expertise applied wherever.

[jtbayly]

It's 2023, what are my thoughts on Flash?

It still doesn't work on mobile. That's my only thought. My phone is more powerful than my computer was when Flash died. Makes no sense.

[rchaud]

Only if "mobile" equates to "iPhone". And even then, it ran; it was the rendering engine for the old iPhone Youtube app. Lord Jobs simply didn't let it into the App Store for fear it would displace all the native games like iBeer.

Flash ran on Android natively; even ran on Windows Mobile 6.5, for those who remember it. It was Adobe that ended support for it, as Google also didn't want them competing against the Play Store.

[jtbayly]

But… it doesn’t work on my phone. The author even warned me at the top of the page. I didn’t believe him. I tried it on my phone. It didn’t work.

[nicetryguy]

MovieClips? i 'member...

[Asooka]

You weren't kidding about it chugging on mobile. I'm on a Google Pixel 6 and it crashed my browser :'D. Perhaps it can be used as a nice stres test for Ruffle. Also, I would appreciate some screenshots showing where and how Ruffle differs from Flash, it's not like I can install Flash plugin on a current browser and check for myself.

[grishka]

Ruffle is an open-source reimplementation of Flash player. The only differences there are stem from the fact that Ruffle is still very much a work in progress.

While you can't install a plugin any more, you can still install a standalone Flash player. I even have it on my M1 Mac. Works surprisingly well.

[scarface74]

Ob: I thought this was going to be about Steve Jobs “open letter” that was on the front page of Apple in 2010.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Technology/apples-steve-jobs-post...

[Toutouxc]

Surprisingly enjoyable. Make sure to stay for the phone conversation about mining.

I usually don't take messages about mobile performance seriously, but this does bring even A15 Bionic devices to their knees. I wonder whether it's a RAM or GPU issue, it plays nicely for a few seconds and then dies.

[yellowapple]

Meanwhile, my Unihertz Titan (with a Mediatek Helio P60) handles it pretty well in Firefox Nightly (a couple stutters at the beginning and in the middle, but otherwise smooth) - so the operating system and/or browser could be factors as well.

[darepublic]

A beautiful piece of art, and very relevant. A piece of gold from the mine. Thank you

[jmkd]

After 23 years, a worthy conceptual sequel to Nosepilot [0] [0] https://alexsacui.com/launch/nosepilot.html

[uptownfunk]

Has anyone considered porting the flash language to JS. Wondering if there is some way to emulate it in the browser despite it not being officially supported

[herbst]

I've learned flash after the language died. Haxe, OpenFL and all the amazing tooling built around the Haxe language make it an interesting choice for developing games. Still

[tmountain]

Aren’t you missing the key ingredient though? The integrated editing experience?

[herbst]

I never used that before, I am a Linux user staying far away from Adobe. It's really just the language design that got me (to my own surprise)

[eslaught]

Wasn't expecting the audio commentary at all, and I have to say (beyond the visuals, which are also cool) that it's very well-done. Thanks for sharing!

[nextlevelwizard]

Most comments seem to be just praising this, but in my opinions the visuals are just headache inducing non-sense. I remember watching flash animations and briefly dabbling in making some, but I don't remember this kind of flashing hyper stuff.

All in all this was confusing thing to try to suffer through since I couldn't decide if this was suppose to be just a podcast where I dont look at the visuals or if there was going to be something actually worth looking at. So I just kept looking away and back at the flashing lights while retaining absolutely nothing from the audio portion.

[exodust]

It's aiming for a "demoscene; psychedelic; trippy" aesthetic, as hinted at by the tags listed on page.

> "flashing hyper stuff"

You're getting it! That kind of vector animation isn't easy in HTML5.

Flash did have big arcs flying around the screen, at least in subtler background style. Even today there's not much "TV broadcast graphics" around on web, maybe for good reason, or because poor little mobile screens would choke, and need simple elements. Big screens can't have nice things.

[qz_kb]

Just leaving a comment to say this is amazing.

[benrbray]

Howdy Elfman, fancy meeting you here all these years after the Game Trailer Collab! Thanks for the nostalgia trip :)

[rickdicker]

Where's windows doors 2, man

[pmarreck]

Since Ruffle is running the Flash for this, couldn't one just keep using Flash via Ruffle?

[cyber_kinetist]

From what I know, Ruffle cannot emulate AS3 properly yet, so you’re pretty much stuck with old AS2 for the time being (though it seems some devs prefer it).

[pmarreck]

I realized this after I posted. I assume they're making semi-steady progress on it. IMHO, something that can't run every .swf file is not yet a proper Flash runner.

[parasti]

They're really not exaggerating, terrible performance makes this unusable on mobile.

[est]

chokes my old macbookpro.

1/10 animation based on DOM is bad. wont watch again.

I really like .swf in the past, but I have to say that it feels really weird that I can't fast-forward. Am I been trained to be too impatient in this video-everywhere age?

[SCdF]

This is great, it's the 'My Dinner With Andre' of the flash era

[k2xl]

A puzzle game I made in Flash in highschool in 2005 (Psychopath) was rebuilt last year by someone who played it in highschool. I have been working with him on it too (shameless plug: https://pathology.gg). Many of the original people that played it back in the day have actually come back which is crazy to me.

Without downloading Macromedia Flash MX in highschool I would never have built Psychopath, Obechi, Boomshine... flash games that changed my life and made me want to be a game developer & programmer.

The creativityand ability to built a Flash game or animation in many different ways was why it was so great.

Many people do not realize that Flash used to be MORE ubiquitous than almost ANY softwar in the world (If I recall Macromedia released some stat around 96% of computers had Flash installed). Meaning you could depend on flash being installed on a device more than Javascript, Java, or any particular browser or operating system.

Miss those days dearly

[i_c_b]

I've long been fascinated by the intense role of path dependency in what technologies and art styles get really explored and mapped out in connection with computers, and I think Flash is a magnificent example of that in action.

Until Flash got really big, 2D vector art styles in games were really pretty underexplored. Not totally - there were games like Out of This World, say - but in general 2D games historically leaned very heavily on bitmapped art work. And that made sense, given the nature of the sprite hardware of arcades, home consoles, and some 8 and 16 bit home pcs (like the C64) in the 1980s and early 90s.

But that meant at the time that there never really developed a culture of 2D vector game art that was a magnet for super talented, competitive artists who really tried to push the space to its limits, see what was possible, drive a tool ecosystem, share techniques, etc. And of course you _did_ see all of those things happen around bitmaps and pixel art - the very best of 16 bit pixel art still does look really impressive.

Instead, most of the effort that went into 2d vector art at the time (at least this is my understanding) was more over in the land of business, where real time frame rates on cheap consumer hardware weren't a concern, and having crisp and clean graphic design and fonts that could scale up (especially when printed) were much more important.

And then GLQuake and 3dFX Tomb Raider and the Playstation 1 hit, and and something like vector art (in the form of polygon meshes) suddenly became ubiquitous in games - but all in the context of 3D rendering, 3D cameras, 3D worlds, and so on. And that did indeed become (and remains) a magnet for super talented artists to try to drive the state of the art forward, shared techniques, build tools, etc.

Along the way, the rise in graphics capabilities became more than enough to enable really interesting real time 2d vector art work in games, but there just wasn't a critical mass of interest in it (probably because the massive leaps in 3D rendering in the late 90s through the 2000s were sucking up all the attention, and 2D gameplay was at the time viewed as the past).

And all that remained true until the circumstances where Flash rose, which 1) ran on reasonably powerful PCs but 2) largely didn't use 3D hardware, and all this in 3) highly file size constrained environments (because of internet deployment), while 4) shipping a small runtime plug-in that evolved into a pretty good stripped down real-time combination of Illustrator and Photoshop, along with 5) an integrated authoring tool that was good for making 2d vector art - and all of this in the context of 6) really massive potential audience size because of web browser deployment.

All of those constraints and capabilities together were a really fertile space for 2d vector art in games to become a magnet for attention and talent and evolution, making it one of the major art styles in games today. Maybe that would have happened anyway, but Flash certainly played a major role in the world we actually live in.

**

Flash really left its mark as a stripped down, real time Adobe Illustrator, but its runtime (less so its authoring tools) was actually equally powerful as a stripped down real time Photoshop - something like what the Super Nintendo or Amiga could have conceivably evolved into had 3D acceleration never shown up, and if massive amounts of RAM and level-loading-time rendering and caching became a central rendering paradigm.

I was doing, I think, pretty striking indie work from that angle between 2010 and 2013, but I never quite found a way to turn it into anything and wasn't as good at shipping and networking as I needed to be (be honest with yourself when you need a business person or a producer, folks) ... so I'll dump some videos here instead, because why not.

So, the first approach I did was something like a Flash evolution of the parallax techniques used in Shadow of the Beast (and other 16 bit games):

Sideview Rendering Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybHJx-S3LWk

Incomplete Platformer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRUDYdfwvCI

And second approach was something like a Flash evolution of the techniques used in Sega's After Burner 2, Sega's arcade Rail Chase, Sega's Power Drift, or Sega's Galaxy Force 2:

Incomplete Racing Game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrL33EF-v0I

Cartoony Minecraft Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h1zzLOCAaQ

Unfinished FPS Wolf Horror Game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2WgC7OL8Aw

81k First Person Grass Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRsc0salnEs

All in file sizes < 2 Megs. All were using, essentially, lots of clever caching and image-based rendering techniques.

I've updated some of these techniques to work with Canvas more recently. The parallax scrolling techniques in particular work quite well on phones and tablets with javascript and Canvas.

[rickdicker]

That is some seriously cool stuff! It's a shame nothing came of it - but I suppose shipping something good with cool new tech is bound to be harder than shipping something good that's been done a million times. Not because the tech is difficult, but because there's less of a roadmap to go off of, design-wise. Thanks for sharing!

[bobmaxup]

For me, this crashed at about a minute in with a sad error screen.

[wizofaus]

That's a minute longer than I had to wait - I can't even resolve the domain name!

[totetsu]

My whole browser closed suddenly after the sprites came on screen.

[adultSwim]

What a beautiful love letter

[fotad]

ChatGPT will save the Flash, feed it with SWF spec, and it will create Flash player for you, maybe in year 2048...

[EZ-Cheeze]

Dat moire looks sick as fuck yo

[shove]

Still miss it

[INTPenis]

TIL I have Ruffle installed, a Flash player emulator made in Rust of course.

[nextaccountic]

My understanding is that ruffle is compiled to wasm and loaded in the page. So, the page has just regular web technologies

[ihatepython]

I can't get it to work, it keeps crashing on me.

[rman666]

I heard you like Flash in 2023, so you wrote about Flash in 2023 so you could Flash in, well, 2023!