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)
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>function draw() {
> stroke(50);
> fill(100);
> ellipse(x, y, 24, 24); }
In Flash you would just click the Oval icon and draw one.
Wick editor is nice, but developement is on hold. It is open source, so maybe something will still come out if 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.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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)
> 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
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.
Essentially yes, you can jump from completely different experiences in seconds. Main difference is it’s multiplayer by default.
It's the reason I got into scripting/programming, and I'm now a web developer.
So I ended up using my PC every day of course. But I did spend a lot of time making games!
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.
And my old workflow with Flash, Flash Builder, Flex builder I am still missing.
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.
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.
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.
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).