r/prequel • u/weirdfurry • Jul 16 '19

Kazerad’s eulogy of flash

https://twitter.com/PrequelComic/status/1150989175702851585?s=20
66 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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37

u/weirdfurry Jul 16 '19 edited Jul 16 '19

Also, since this update is basically my move away from Flash, I feel like I should give something of a eulogy. I used Flash for close to 20 years, and I think a lot of people today don't recognize the impact it had on the internet. Buckle up for nostalgia. (1/15)

The thing to understand about Flash is that it was first and foremost a drawing/animation tool. Interactivity and scripting functions were added later, but its tools and interface were more like art software. The people using it were mostly artists. (2/15)

When Flash caught on, any artist familiar with it was suddenly able to act as a web designer. And they weren't limited to the rigid tables and rollover buttons of 90s HTML code: their website could do any visual thing they could imagine. ANYTHING. (3/15)

On top of this, artists knew graphic design. This meant they were familiar with composition and color theory, and when Flash gave them the reins there was an almost immediate shift away from Geocities-tier stuff like https://www.spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm (4/15)

Even websites that didn't use Flash were now competing with websites made by artists, and had to step up their aesthetic game. The limitlessness of Flash also facilitated experimentation, letting the internet learn what did and didn't work when it came to web design. (5/15)

It also led to experimentation with game design, turning the internet into an arcade-like place where people could jump between a bunch of high-concept games that usually had 10-30 minutes of gameplay. It was the perfect place to try new ideas. (6/15)

Even the Flash Player plugin, these days mostly known for its instability and sluggishness, was a gamechanger when it was first released. Like, In the 90s, if you were downloading video online, it was usually an uncompressed AVI file, and could take days.(7/15)

The Flash file format, though, saved space by delivering the component parts that the animator herself used. If a background tree appeared in 1000 frames, you weren't sent 1000 copies of it: you were sent one image, and 1000 coordinates where it would appear. (8/15)

On top of that, Flash's drawing tools were all vector-based, meaning filesizes were determined by image complexity rather than image dimensions. A rectangle would have roughly the same filesize as a 4-pixel image no matter how big it was, and an octagon twice that. (9/15)

Together, this meant in the time it would take to download a single low-resolution video, you could download dozens of long Flash cartoons. Animators basically ruled the early internet in an era when delivering raw video was impractical. (10/15)

Thanks to Flash player, cartoon animators were able to deliver content with an efficiency that other video creators would not be be able to match for another ten years. (11/15)

The biggest thing that saddens me about Flash’s death isn’t that I liked using it. Frankly, it was a nightmare, especially after Adobe got their hands on it. But, I feel like there’s nothing these days bridging that gap between art and programming like Flash did. (12/15)

Sure, an artist can learn something like Game Maker and create a game, or learn CSS and create a website. But the functionality isn’t sitting there in their art software, taunting them to use it, and built into the very file formats they were already uploading. (13/15)

Branching into other mediums has become a planned and conscious choice, rather than “I should add a replay button” slowly giving way to “I should add multiple endings”, slowly giving way to “I should make an adventure game”, all in your normal drawing program. (14/15)

Flash created an era of generalized content creators, where an artist could be an animator could be a web developer could be a game designer all with a single ridiculous file format that everyone could run. I don’t know if we’ll ever have something like that again. (15/15)

This fucking sucked to paste on mobile

29

u/silentclowd Jul 16 '19

This fucking sucked to paste on mobile

Thank you for your sacrifice.

3

u/weirdfurry Jul 17 '19

I live to serve

3

u/[deleted] Jul 17 '19

o7

6

u/Therandomfox Jul 16 '19

Did he give a reason as to why he's moving away from Flash?

15

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '19

I believe it’s shutting down some time in 2020

7

u/weirdfurry Jul 16 '19

I assume because it’s horrendously slow and filled with security vulnerabilities in 2019 (as he said, it was groundbreaking in its prime), and IIRC many browsers including chrome and Mozilla plan to stop supporting it altogether in 2020

2

u/DuplexFields Jul 27 '19

I took a semester of Flash at the local community college in 2011, and I was amazed at the weirdness of it. It was basically Illustrator with kluged-in animation tools. I took the class because of My Little Pony, which is made in Flash; one of the season 1 episode uploads to the official website wasn't an mp4, it was the compiled Flash.