alt text
A drawing of a person laying on the ground, seen from the side. There is text on the image, “We still talk about you”. Deep in the ground, there is the Adobe Flash logo.
Flash games were a huge part of my childhood. They’re one of the reasons i love gaming in general now. I will forever fondly look back on those memories of me and my cousins playing flash games.
today adobe announced they are killing adobe animate, which was one of the last remnants of flash. instead of making it open-source, or just leaving it alone, they are stopping updates in march this year, and making the program completely unuseable next year.
i’m not gonna dwell on the usual platitudes about how evil adobe is. you’ve heard them before and you’ll hear them again. but, yea 🙃
Hbomberguy sighs as he adds another 30 minutes of runtime to his next video.
Based on his production time vs video lent length, next one will release in around a bazillion years.
I wish he would plagiarize and get 3 videos every week
And 5 more years until it gets released I reckon
I hope people put in the effort to patch out whatever time bombs Adobe puts into it like people did with Flash player.
Although unlike with Flash player, there’s probably not going to be a China version that continues to produce updates for it.
There’s also an open source runtime for flash now, to. Ruffle is super neat
It’s great and for most stuff out there works very well, though it does have a few undocumented functions left that still trip some software up, which is why its good to have the originals in a working state.
But Ruffle is improving greatly so hopefully those issues will be solved soon.
i’m not gonna dwell on the usual platitudes about how evil adobe is.
I never talk about Flash. I do, however, talk about how evil adobe is.
In it’s heyday nerds like us fucking hated it because it was a proprietary plugin that broke sites on an otherwise open web. We remember it fondly because it made animation accessible for young creatives. In Winter 08/09 I was interning on the first season of Ugly Americans and they were still animating in an old version of Flash MX, even though like CS6 was out by that point. Today though there are creative apps where you can still do Flash-style vector animation, and the modern internet has no problem serving up rendered videos of the final output without the need for a plugin.
Love that show any other intern stories about it?
Nothing too crazy, was only there for a few months between paid gigs and it’s my only animation credit ever. Augenblick Studios is a surprisingly small operation, Aaron himself was in the room most days reviewing scripts and boards. You could tell that he and the senior staff were burned out from Superjail and were looking for a more chill production vibe on the start of UA. We were in a big industrial building on the DUMBO (Brooklyn) waterfront but the studio itself was a smallish carpeted room where they kept the lights dim, but blinds open so you could watch the snow fall in front of the Brooklyn Bridge. Every animator got a big shelved wooden desk to themselves where they could adjust their own lighting, put on whatever music they wanted in their headphones, and just draw for hours. It was an incredibly stress-free vibe but I learned that I’d go stir crazy if I did it as a career, after 4 hours in front of the Cintiq I was usually ready to jump out of my skin. Oh, I remember that when Obama won the presidency Aaron called off work for the rest of the day and took the whole studio out for lunch. Nice dude, ran into him a few years later at a Bill Plimpton screening and he remembered me, also wrote me a recommendation for a later job.
Almost all of my work was on the pilot. In the opening scene where Mark is left tied to the bed and Randall breaks down his door you’re seeing like a week’s worth of my brush strokes. The shot of Randall’s hand coming through the door of course had key frames but they gave me lots of leeway so a bunch of the flesh and veins and chunks are infinitesunrise originals :P
Thanks for sharing, the original pilot is on YouTube here linked below if anyone wants a feel for the show. I gotta say that adding Grimes into the show was a good call to help balance out Mark’s optimistic tone. And I love Twayne’s voice in the show, really sells the whole momma’s boy dynamic he has, plus when I played Cyberpunk and heard him it was a blast imagining him as Twayne Boneraper.
We remember it fondly because it made animation accessible for young creatives
And simple games, too. But yes, I agree with you; what people remember fondly isn’t Flash itself, it’s what it enabled.
i think you’re right. the technology itself was arguably garbage, i’ve heard from many people i have no reason to distruss that it was a security nightmare, and i don’t especially miss going on any random website and seeing “you need to install the adobe flash player extension!”
still, the modern web feels different. even if HTML5 and WASM can do everything flash could and then some, it’s not the same… you don’t really see websites filled with amateur web games anymore.
you can filter for web games
still, the modern web feels different. even if HTML5 and WASM can do everything flash could and then some, it’s not the same… you don’t really see websites filled with amateur web games anymore.
I guess the tools are better but the passion is gone. The whole web was amateur back then; now it’s all… you know.
There’s still plenty of amateur web stuff around. It’s just not nearly as big a percentage. Lemmy is kind of amateur web stuff. (Not calling Lemmy devs amateur, it’s just not a big corporate bullshit platform.)
Yes, there is. But it’s more like a bunch of tiny nature reserves in the middle of a sprawling metropolis, full of “BUY IT!” flashy signs. When the old web was more like an expansion of wilderness, you didn’t need to look for amateur stuff to find it.
(I agree Lemmy has that same vibe.)
I don’t think that’s accurate. There’s orders of magnitude more amateur stuff online now than back in the Wild West days of the web. The sprawling metropolis didn’t shrink any of the expansive wilderness, they both grew, at different rates. It is harder to find the amateur stuff, but that’s not cause there’s any less of it.
And simple games
…and a major Slovakian bank Tatra Banka used it for internet banking until 2019.
Nowadays this would be seen as insanity. (Back then, too.) Like, Flash wasn’t exactly the safest platform out there, specially not to handle money.
My problem with it’s death was everything lost because of it.
Hestekor!!
Throwback to shockwave
Macromedia Flash Player
ShockWave was a similar software platform for interactive media that was initially a competitor with Flash until it was acquired by Macromedia.
Who hackers? Zero day exploiters? You still have PDF for that
Hbomb did a video on flash once, I think…
Don’t let the dream die, install Flashpoint today!
I discovered flashpoint a couple months ago. It works great even in Linux. I love to play some old Flash games.
Related question: Does the game “Mike Shadow: I paid for it” work for you on Linux? It doesn’t for me, except for the Infinite Cash Hack version.
Just curious because I discovered this game not working a couple days ago, will maybe report it as a bug.
It seems to work, I got a white screen for a little while, I thought it would not work and as I was about to close the window it started. I played the first stage and it works. Mabe just wait for it to load ?
Turns out my game was somehow not installed correctly. Because it’s a legacy game there is no uninstall option (which is what I would’ve tried) but you can right click the game in the grid -> Show Game in Explorer and delete the file to force a reinstallation. After reinstalling, the size of its .swf tripled.
I guess the game was downloading during the white screen and I must have closed and interrupted it.
But thanks for checking, I wouldn’t have discovered the solution otherwise!
Happy to have helped.
Here is an open source multiplatform flash engine/player written in Rust;
https://flashpointarchive.org/
https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/search/
This is what I’ved used to play: https://github.com/WumboSpasm/flashpoint-nano
Has Madness, but still no Gangsta War.
Sometimes copyrighted stuff gets dmca’d?
You have to be a special kind of asshole and copyright troll to DMCA claim a flash game that can’t run anywhere officially.
Oh, but the world is full of those. It even seems like they are the ones who succeed in life unfortunately.
I take it the technology was shit, but damn, people made awesome things with it
Badger badger badger
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM!!!
Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake! Snaaaaaaaaake!
Flash was very influential to my life surprisingly
I’m so glad it’s dead and buried. The pain that shit piece of software caused me trying to get it set up on Linux to watch YouTube back in the day. I broke multiple installs over this shit. Also anything from Adobe I consider malware.
It was from Macromedia before :(
Rip Bloons TD
Do we? I’m a web dev and I haven’t talked about Flash in years.
You are talking about it now .
Correct. And I haven’t talked about it in years.
You can say it today, but not tomorrow.
I mean, since we’re talking about it, I am so happy that Flash is dead. It was an absolute nightmare for support, accessibility, security, and open source code. It wasn’t quite as bad as ActiveX, but it was pretty close. Let’s all collectively agree to never implement any technology like Flash into the browser again.
Let me explain the open source code part. Before GCC, C compilers were closed source and expensive. This meant that if you wanted to work on an open source project that was written in C, you had to buy a compiler. That’s the same as Flash. There were open source Flash players, but as far as I know, there were no open source Flash compilers. Just Macromedia/Adobe. So anything open source written in Flash/ActionScript was only accessible to people who could afford the software license. That sucks.
Speaking of accessible, Flash was not. If you were browsing the web with a screen reader, the vast majority of Flash content was completely walled off from you. The accessibility implementation in Flash had to be specifically coded for, unlike HTML, which is relatively accessible by default.
For a while, Flash was the way people embedded video into web pages. This was neat, but again, a nightmare to work on. Flash players required very specific video encodings, so you’d likely have to transcode the video to embed it or at least remux it, and for a while, that wasn’t free. It also meant that a different piece of software was requesting the video as that which requested the page. This could cause some very difficult to track bugs.
Not all systems supported Flash, because why the fuck would Adobe give a shit about Unix? At least there was Linux support for the player, but if you wanted to make Flash content, your choices were Windows or Mac.
Last, but not least, Flash refused to die for a long time, which ultimately held back the industry. For almost a decade, it was very common to have to mux two copies of the exact same streams, just for people who were still clinging to Internet Explorer and Flash. People were really pissed off when websites stopped working when browsers abandoned Flash, but that was the fault of naive web devs who built their sites in a faulty, insecure technology. They didn’t get the blame. The browsers got the blame. And a lot of them kept Flash around well after its development had been discontinued, just for that reason.
Good riddance, Flash.
All true but the stick figure animations were funny.
