7 ms·

Further Thoughts on Flash at the Internet Archive

66 points by ykat7 6y ago

jpcooper 6y ago
Does anyone remember the skiing game with terrible graphics whose only control was the space bar? Where is it these days?
- sp332 6y ago
  Was it one of the Yetisports games? Snowboard Freeride?
  - codethief 6y ago
    Oh wow, Yetisports! I haven't heard that name in at least 10 years! Speaking of very popular and very well-made flash games with winter/Christmas setting, this reminds me of Orisinal Winterbells[0]. I still can't believe how many hours I spent playing that game. [0]: https://ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bells.htm https://ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bells.htm
  - jpcooper 6y ago
    That wasn’t the one I was thinking of, sadly. The graphics were even worse.
- mikequinlan 6y ago
  SkiFree https://ski.ihoc.net/ https://ski.ihoc.net/ Also https://archive.org/details/win3_SKIFREE https://archive.org/details/win3_SKIFREE
  - jpcooper 6y ago
    Interesting, but it was native Flash and second-person perspective.
    - interestica 6y ago
      What is "second person perspective"?
      - jpcooper 6y ago
        It’s when the camera closely follows the back of the protagonist.
  - kilroy123 6y ago
    Oh man, this takes me back.
- codethief 6y ago
  Ahh, that reminds me of another one where one was (more or less) steering a stick man on a sled. More precisely, one would create custom slopes for him, which he would then follow automatically after hitting "Play". The goal was to prevent him from falling or crashing. There was even a YouTube video of a guy who must have spent hours creating slopes, which the stick man would then follow to the precise melody of some classical piece of music. Truly epic. Does anyone remember the name? UPDATE: Line rider! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcBn04IyELc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcBn04IyELc
commandlinefan 6y ago
I never had access to the Flash "developer environment". There was a free Flash-like environment that came out around 2005 or so (I think it was called Adobe Air) that you could use to compile a .swf, but it didn't have the animation capabilities of proper Flash. I've always been curious if the Flash animation studio really had anything to offer in terms of usability over, say, modern HTML5 in WebStorm or Visual Studio. I remember being amazed by the sophistication of the animations some Flash developers could put together using it and I always wondered if the tooling made it easier, or if somebody painstakingly drew cells one by one and then spliced them together with an otherwise relatively dumb video creator. I remember people going on about (then non-free) ColdFusion back in the 90's - when I actually got a chance to use it years later I was shocked at how awful it really was and how little the development environment actually offered over a simple text editor like Sublime.
- larrik 6y ago
  Yes, animations in Flash were much different than WebStorm or Visual Studio. It was very powerful, and had a javascript-like language to power it as well.
- bntyhntr 6y ago
  I don't think I touched most of it, but as a dumbass kid who didn't know how to code yet, I remember taking advantage of: - layers - keyframes: you could mark frames as keyframes (per layer, I think?) and then "tween" the contents which would handle animating the movement (and maybe other transforms?) from one key frame to another - action script for interactivity
- bshimmin 6y ago
  If you look on YouTube for something like "Flash CS4", you can find numerous videos showing what the Flash authoring tool was like. I never found it all that much of a pleasure to use, but for people who were good at animation, it was a fairly powerful tool. (I did Flash for a few years and spent most of my time writing ActionScript 3 in FDT, which was built on top of Eclipse; I left the animation stuff to people more capable in that department!)
- 6y ago

66 points by ykat7 6y ago

Does anyone remember the skiing game with terrible graphics whose only control was the space bar? Where is it these days?

sp332 6y ago
Was it one of the Yetisports games? Snowboard Freeride?
- codethief 6y ago
  Oh wow, Yetisports! I haven't heard that name in at least 10 years! Speaking of very popular and very well-made flash games with winter/Christmas setting, this reminds me of Orisinal Winterbells[0]. I still can't believe how many hours I spent playing that game. [0]: https://ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bells.htm https://ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bells.htm
- jpcooper 6y ago
  That wasn’t the one I was thinking of, sadly. The graphics were even worse.
mikequinlan 6y ago
SkiFree https://ski.ihoc.net/ https://ski.ihoc.net/ Also https://archive.org/details/win3_SKIFREE https://archive.org/details/win3_SKIFREE
- jpcooper 6y ago
  Interesting, but it was native Flash and second-person perspective.
  - interestica 6y ago
    What is "second person perspective"?
    - jpcooper 6y ago
      It’s when the camera closely follows the back of the protagonist.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  Oh man, this takes me back.
codethief 6y ago
Ahh, that reminds me of another one where one was (more or less) steering a stick man on a sled. More precisely, one would create custom slopes for him, which he would then follow automatically after hitting "Play". The goal was to prevent him from falling or crashing. There was even a YouTube video of a guy who must have spent hours creating slopes, which the stick man would then follow to the precise melody of some classical piece of music. Truly epic. Does anyone remember the name? UPDATE: Line rider! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcBn04IyELc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcBn04IyELc

commandlinefan 6y ago

I never had access to the Flash "developer environment". There was a free Flash-like environment that came out around 2005 or so (I think it was called Adobe Air) that you could use to compile a .swf, but it didn't have the animation capabilities of proper Flash. I've always been curious if the Flash animation studio really had anything to offer in terms of usability over, say, modern HTML5 in WebStorm or Visual Studio. I remember being amazed by the sophistication of the animations some Flash developers could put together using it and I always wondered if the tooling made it easier, or if somebody painstakingly drew cells one by one and then spliced them together with an otherwise relatively dumb video creator. I remember people going on about (then non-free) ColdFusion back in the 90's - when I actually got a chance to use it years later I was shocked at how awful it really was and how little the development environment actually offered over a simple text editor like Sublime.

larrik 6y ago
Yes, animations in Flash were much different than WebStorm or Visual Studio. It was very powerful, and had a javascript-like language to power it as well.
bntyhntr 6y ago
I don't think I touched most of it, but as a dumbass kid who didn't know how to code yet, I remember taking advantage of: - layers - keyframes: you could mark frames as keyframes (per layer, I think?) and then "tween" the contents which would handle animating the movement (and maybe other transforms?) from one key frame to another - action script for interactivity
bshimmin 6y ago
If you look on YouTube for something like "Flash CS4", you can find numerous videos showing what the Flash authoring tool was like. I never found it all that much of a pleasure to use, but for people who were good at animation, it was a fairly powerful tool. (I did Flash for a few years and spent most of my time writing ActionScript 3 in FDT, which was built on top of Eclipse; I left the animation stuff to people more capable in that department!)
6y ago