Some of you might remember when a 3mb flash animation could pack in some 5 minutes of animation, with the more advanced ones even having chapter/scene selectors, which could also include clickable easter eggs and other kinds of interactions during the scenes.
You mean in 2021 HTML5 was barely supported by browsers? Adobe ended support for Flash Player on 31th December 2020.
For comparison, the original HTML5 W3C recommendation was retired in 2018 and even Version 5.3 was retired less than a month after Flash Player was retired.
Functionally. Functionally. I said functionally for a reason. I didn’t just add that word in because I liked how it looked.
When was the last time you actually saw flash content?
Browser extension support deteriorated. It never worked on iOS. People stopped making flash content because folks couldn’t view it long before it officially became unsupported.
Again: HTML5 was supported way, way before flash disappeared.
https://caniuse.com/?search=canvas
That’s way before flash was discontinued. Except of on iOS, but smartphones were never the main platform for flash games/animation.
Flash-style skeletal animation was a result of technical limitations, not a deliberate art choice. The thing that killed flash-style animation was (a) the availability of better things like full-motion rasterized video and (b) the internet moving away from personal websites and towards big platforms, and almost all big platforms restricted the kind of content you can post to text, images and video.
Idk how old you are but it feels like you’re just looking up dates without really understanding what it was like.
I did flash animation.
I am a developer (I prefer backend but we all have to do some web).
I was an adult during that time.
The textbook dates don’t tell the story. I’m telling you that flash died long before support ended. I’m telling you that replacement tools didn’t exist yet. I’m telling you that getting flash artists to try to animation using JavaScript was not feasible. It’s crazy to me that you think that the existence of a basic canvas support means that artists had an realistic path to making their art.
Smartphones weren’t the main platform for flash, and that’s why it died early.
You’ve got a skewed view of what flash was used to animate. People made absolutely beautiful flash. Just like all art, there is good and bad. Flash made it accessible enough that bad amateurs could produce reasonable animations.
Rasterized video was not better. What a crazy thing to say.
Personal websites? You think that people mostly consumed flash animation and games from personal websites??? Where did you get this from?
It feels like you’re reading this from a timeline of major events instead of having lived it.
You keep saying ‘better’ like if heavier solutions have no downsides, like saying raytracing or gaussian splatting make all older rendering tech obsolete.
For individual animations sure data doesn’t seem to matter, but if you want to binge/download something like Homestar Runner at 1080p+ that data adds up when pre-rastered. The internet in the US isn’t always great (esp. rural, cost), even worse with upload speed.
Flash also had frame animation, with bezier curves and vector blob drawing… both of which are the big thing missing from modern solutions. Alternatives in modern engines aren’t quite the same and must be intentionally sought out, and also I don’t think that’d even be well supported by platforms (itch doesn’t even have an animation section) unless you’re fine with it being in a games section.
Newgrounds also still does Flash Forward jams. I wouldn’t say “better” things killed Flash, just that support was ripped away. There isn’t much of a choice. If you want Flash-style animation (and I don’t mean skeletal-only), it’s just Ruffle or maybe Wick Editor.
I see this as an implementation failure.
WebGL doesn’t have a container format, and a vector video format could exist (on Youtube, or played with an HTML5 video player) but doesn’t. The internet “moved away” because the key players who killed Flash didn’t implement things that would bring HTML5 to closer parity with what Flash did.
I could also see parallels made to other parts of life where the choice has been made for you many years ago.
A vector video format does exist: animated SVG. It has all the features you claim are missing.
But nobody uses it because it is much more complicated to do than rasterized video and has no relevant advantages.
You keep claiming that features don’t exist even though every single one of these features do exist but are just not used a lot because they are more complicated and have no relevant benefits.
Spoken like someone who has never animated something in flash.
Go ahead and try to make an animated music video in SVG. Tell me how easy it was. It’s it something a middle schooler could pick up easily after a couple hours?
A video has sound, can be exported from the animation software to a single file, and it can be played in a standard video player.
Animated SVG does not sound like it does that, and needing new paid* software isn’t great for adoption either. And honestly, I’ve never even heard of animated SVG (I’m well aware of SVG and that it probably could be animated with CSS or JS but that alone does not make it a thing).
The fact that vector works at resolutions (even if they don’t exist yet!) without the author even needing to think about it (let alone re-export) is an advantage. It can be great for many 2D aesthetics (many cartoons even used it!), the biggest complication is Adobe (and whoever is selling a subscription to what you mentioned).
Also that people are still developing things with Flash (even if it has to be ran via Ruffle) tells me again that the issue isn’t vector, it’s that replacing a format with ingredients is not an effective strategy if you actually want people to use it.
* yeah I know Flash was expensive as well (except y’know… other ways), but communities were already using it