The Real story of Flash

[WonderGirl]

Fun fact: when a lot of 2D animations were on a video file they called them ''MPEG animation'' when everyone else used Flash.
also they had 2D animations on different formats such MOV and AVI, for download besides of MPEG.
2D animated videos nowadays don't call them ''MPEG animation'' anymore since flash is dead.

 

[murdered meat bag]

HE WAS THE SAVIOUR OF THE UNIVERSE. AH HAAAAAAA
KING OF THE IMPOSSIBLE.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I disagree with the notion that Flash player was killed by its vulnerabilities. It was more like a perfect storm of changes and new possibilities opening for creators.
Even if Adobe patched and optimized it, nobody would use it anyway. And why would they?
Video? There's HTML5 for that.
Games? Just use Unity and release on Steam.
Web apps? HTML5 again.

ActionScript, I think it was called that, made things easy and accesible. Flash/Shockwave was something special at the time, RealMedia was a turd, it was the worst, Vivo was better.

 

[Whatevermancer]

ActionScript, I think it was called that, made things easy and accesible. Flash/Shockwave was something special at the time, RealMedia was a turd, it was the worst, Vivo was better.

It's not that ActionScript was that good(it didn't even have fucking generics), but there was nothing that could compete with Flash. Sure you could use Game Maker or RPG Maker, but how were you gonna release your game? Whereas with Flash you just upload the swf to a flash portal and get tons of plays.

 

[stares at error messages]

<https://ruffle.rs/>
Flash emulator. A lot of web games were also written in flash.

 

[Maurice Caine]

And this cements the autism diagnosis for me.

Webm is exactly like Flash. Please tell us how you found Kiwi Farms.

isn't Webm just the modern version of 3gp? It really helps that it's a format with a small filesize but how do you compare it to flash animations of yesteryear?

 

[HumanHive]

isn't Webm just the modern version of 3gp? It really helps that it's a format with a small filesize but how do you compare it to flash animations of yesteryear?

It was bait.

 

[Maggots on a Train v2]

I can't fathom how anyone seriously defend the abominable webpages made with flash. What part of it is so fun? Was it waiting 2 minutes on a slow connection until the "intro" finally downloads and puts the fan into frantic spin as the CPU struggles to cope with busylooping? Or was it the text content being unable to be selected, copied and indexed by google?

I mean, the games and animations are fun and all, but seriously, flash browser plugins were always the worst of the worst. And don't give me the hurr flash good durr webdesigners bad herp derp. I may give a pass for the "lowly" (which had more than a thousand employees!) Macromedia for not getting their shit together, but Adobe didn't make it any better so I kinda don't buy the idea that the technology itself is any good.

It was absolute cancer for non-recreational websites. There was a webshop I wanted to use around 2007, it combined flash with frames, each frame contained flash files that were dozens of megabytes large. I can remember the year, because it couldn't load on my home connection. I went to my workplace and still could never get the whole goddamn site to load properly.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

Flash wasn't shit or anything, it didn't led into security problems, It had great quality into animations, but not all animations made on the flash format, Especially if it's hand-drawn or CGI.

Search up Operation Torpedo, the FBI used Flash's security flaws to embed them in pedo websites to reveal the IP addresses of people connecting to it.

I agree 100%. Flash was the biggest thing back in the day because it made animation, game development, and web design more simple. Say what you want about how flash websites looked, it was a more direct link between art and interactivity than html, JavaScript, and css even to this day, and that made for websites which are 100 times more visually interesting and fun than the bland minimalist chickenshit that any normie with a subscription to square space can slap together from a template. I fear that nothing will ever capture the same magic as homestar runner, where each menu page had a unique visual theme, and the cartoons themselves were full of interactive Easter eggs, which is something that is robbed from us in video format, especially since, for no reason at all, annotations and the wide functionality they provided were removed from YouTube. This "progress" tech giants use to justify shit like this has taken nice things away and given nothing back that could replace them.

Everything is so bland, minimalist and perfectly structured now that they almost all look soulless. There's only a handful of websites that I frequent that still retain any level of identity about them. I believe it's due to companies like Wix and SquareSpace that had pre-defined web formats and so custom web designing really isn't that necessary anymore (still used, but these sites are so powerful for web creation that it's almost impossible for any company to not use them).

 

[Enig]

Holy shit I didn't even know legitimate video export apologists existed. Enjoy needing complex network algos to do upscaling on your videos in the future, I guess, I mean it's not like all you had to do with Flash was resize the browser window or anything.

 

[Pissmaster]

It was absolute cancer for non-recreational websites. There was a webshop I wanted to use around 2007, it combined flash with frames, each frame contained flash files that were dozens of megabytes large. I can remember the year, because it couldn't load on my home connection. I went to my workplace and still could never get the whole goddamn site to load properly.

Yeah, those kind of sites were very common and would make any home computer buckle, if not outright crash. You'd think they'd test those sites on home computers and tweak them as necessary.

Just about everything in Flash content was a vector, so my guess as to why those existed is that they were designed on workstations with professional-class CPUs that could easily deal with a ton of vectored objects at once, even at high resolutions. Like, I even remember building out my very first computer and being happy that Flash sites didn't bring my computer to such a crawl that even my mouse was running at < 1 FPS.

Though it really is crazy that there's just no real modern alternative. HTML5 ain't it, either.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Though it really is crazy that there's just no real modern alternative. HTML5 ain't it, either.

Unreal Engine can run in a browser so cobble together a website in a high-end game engine and relive the bloated Flash experience.

Everyone can agree that WMV is the worst. I went through my movie folders and found 10+ year old movies in WMV then played them on my computer. The seeking is super-slow and at the same time the CPU does nothing, the SSD is not utilized, it is a format supported by nothing but backwards Hong Kong pirates pining for the days of shitty VCDs in plastic sleeves. Who the fuck rips Versus to WMV? Aah, here's 13 Beloved in 1080p, it doesn't look great and it's 11GB despite being barely 2 hours. You want the Japan release of [western band] for that extra song? It's in WMA. I wish anti-asian hate crimes were a real thing.

 

[I Love Beef]

Fun fact: when a lot of 2D animations were on a video file they called them ''MPEG animation'' when everyone else used Flash.
also they had 2D animations on different formats such MOV and AVI, for download besides of MPEG.
2D animated videos nowadays don't call them ''MPEG animation'' anymore since flash is dead.

Fuck off, poser. Where the fuck were you when the net was on the rise and was the forefront of the future? Did you ever go to Newgrounds, or Albino Black Sheep? Stickdeath? Homestar Runner?

Dare me risk sounding like a copypasta, but fuck, listen to Hall and Oates, because you're out of touch. Flash was fucking freedom at the creative fingertips, and so many people used it to create games and host their animations on it for free and without bullshit milking for the cash money/bread grabs as we're seeing today. It wasn't perfect but if this is trolling, try harder.

 

[chris driver]

flash might have been a giant hole in terms of online security for websites, but it was also a great source for making hilarious/epic/cool flash movies...
newgrounds, armorgames, kongregate, albinoblacksheep and miniclip were all testaments to that.
newgrounds still does cool shit to this day.

i mean, flash creations had a great start during the early 00's, and they kept going on until the death of flash (now, on late 2020/early 2021).
thats not a small thing.

 

[Whatevermancer]

<https://ruffle.rs/>
Flash emulator. A lot of web games were also written in flash.

AFAIK, it doesn't support AS3 at all, and only supports a part of AS2(e.g.: drawing API and BimapData are still not completely supported, I think). It will take them ages until it's able to emulate any kind of flash content, granted that it doesn't die like other similar projects(Gnash, Shumway, etc.)
On the other hand, Adobe broke a lot of flash games themselves with their updates. Several months before Flash shutdown I tried playing Edmund McMillen's Spewer, and it didn't fucking work.

 

[AmpleApricots]

You can download a standalone flash player executable from adobe that can pretty much run any flash file. Even runs well via WINE under linux. Might want to sandbox it somehow maybe.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

A thing about Flash is that it didn't always suck. The releases pre CS were great and had a minimal amount of scriptability to facilitate buttons and such. I was into flash programming big time as a teen and remember Pico's School being absolutely amazing at the time from a technical standpoint because flash was never intended to do something that complex.

The problem started with Shockwave. For people who don't remember it it was Macromedia's earlier heavyweight programming-oriented version of Flash intended for the kind of content you expect when you hear the term 'flash game' (hence the name 'flash' referring to how minimal, fast and simple it was by comparison) It never took off for web content but Flash did and as a result Macromedia decided to rework Flash's scripting backend (named ActionScript) to be a lot more versatile to support the sort of things Shockwave was supposed to do. This got released as ActionScript2 and was the start of the bloat that became more and more all-consuming as more and more features were piled on, and then the vulnerabilities came due to AS2 having direct hardware and filesystem access.

I seriously think old flash would be popular in the modern era if it were to reemerge, and I miss it a lot. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

 

[Pissmaster]

Fuck off, poser. Where the fuck were you when the net was on the rise and was the forefront of the future? Did you ever go to Newgrounds, or Albino Black Sheep? Stickdeath? Homestar Runner?

Dare me risk sounding like a copypasta, but fuck, listen to Hall and Oates, because you're out of touch. Flash was fucking freedom at the creative fingertips, and so many people used it to create games and host their animations on it for free and without bullshit milking for the cash money/bread grabs as we're seeing today. It wasn't perfect but if this is trolling, try harder.

I figured @WonderGirl is either a child or an autist based on how she posts. I've never heard of anything being called an "MPEG animation" in my life. It sounds to me like she was trying to piece together in her head how anime and cartoons were shared online back in the day, and why they weren't also distributed as Flash animations.

When comes to new media animation, They come in all different forms, For a lot of years, people had their animations on Floppy disks, CD-ROM, Video file formats, etc. but, in 1996 there was format that changed new media animation in a different way, When new media animators used Video file formats and Java, Flash was the new thing to have animations, and started a phase which was called ''The Flash Craze'' where everyone used flash player when everyone else had their animations on Video files and Java. Flash animations were mostly made by Independent and amateur animators, But most Independent and amateur animators weren't used into the .swf format and still had their animations on video files. Other animators were still had their animations on Java.
Flash has been used in many websites and people weren't used into the format,
People like it and people don't like the format. When YouTube was launched in 2005, People had their animations flooding on the site.
Flash was still seen on many websites, but people still were not used to the format
when Adobe announced that flash player going to be end of life soon.
Flash died last year, so, The truth is not all animations are in the .swf format and they are other software besides of Flash.

This reads like a research paper from a 6th grader, and by those standards, I give this a C+.

 

[Whatevermancer]

I seriously think old flash would be popular in the modern era if it were to reemerge, and I miss it a lot. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

I completely disagree. Flash gets BTFO'd by more specialized tools like Unity, Godot or Gamemaker. Also, it's not like there's a market for web games nowadays, Friday Night Funkin is an exception, not the rule.

You can download a standalone flash player executable from adobe that can pretty much run any flash file. Even runs well via WINE under linux. Might want to sandbox it somehow maybe.

Yeah, I tried it with Flash Player 28, it doesn't work.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

I wasn't talking about for games (complete agreement there, flash blows compared to unity et al) I was talking about everything else. The flash I want back is the simple timeline-based animation software it was intended to be in the first place. Web ads with simple reactive elements, noninteractive animations, rich media menus, etc. Early SWFS were a lot less cpu-intensive than modern Javascript and easy to turn off if they were obnoxious.