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

267 points| rickdicker | 2 years ago |newgrounds.com

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)

124 comments

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mclightning|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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.

grishka|2 years ago

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.

rchaud|2 years ago

> 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.

whywhywhywhy|2 years ago

> 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.

woogley|2 years ago

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

mattl|2 years ago

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.

grishka|2 years ago

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_|2 years ago

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

thewebcount|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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.

onion2k|2 years ago

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.

fphhotchips|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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

dusted|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

> 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|2 years ago

> > 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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

> 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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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.

saurik|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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

rchaud|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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

TranquilMarmot|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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.

DonHopkins|2 years ago

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

brucethemoose2|2 years ago

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

grupthink|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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

hrayn3|2 years ago

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

ohxh|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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.

Asooka|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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.

Toutouxc|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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

uptownfunk|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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

eslaught|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

Just leaving a comment to say this is amazing.

benrbray|2 years ago

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

rickdicker|2 years ago

Where's windows doors 2, man

pmarreck|2 years ago

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

cyber_kinetist|2 years ago

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).

parasti|2 years ago

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

est|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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

k2xl|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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|2 years ago

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

wizofaus|2 years ago

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

totetsu|2 years ago

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

adultSwim|2 years ago

What a beautiful love letter

fotad|2 years ago

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

EZ-Cheeze|2 years ago

Dat moire looks sick as fuck yo

shove|2 years ago

Still miss it

INTPenis|2 years ago

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

nextaccountic|2 years ago

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

ihatepython|2 years ago

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

rman666|2 years ago

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