Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023 (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)
125 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadThat 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
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.
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.
The WPH crew was pushing really hard on what could be done in the medium of a Flash cartoon delivered via a dialup modem, but it sure is hard to look at most of that animation now.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N5CLcSkkWs
Yeah, catastrophic is a good descriptor.
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.
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/
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)
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).
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.
(It’s not that easy in theory but that is the gist of it.)
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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)
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.
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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> "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.