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I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I

I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure stories. He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story. But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience choose a character's hair color and have that effect the animation for the rest of the story. The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are making that possible.

Bakingpotato 3y ago
yeah, lots of Flash games were actually innovative. plenty of developers got their start on NG with flash before moving on to make console or steam games. flash had plenty of shovelware, but you can still make incredible stuff with it.
- klenwell 3y ago
  Good example here: https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash It works! It had been effectively defunct for years: https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/ https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/
  - Bakingpotato 3y ago
    good pick.
TillE 3y ago
Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just fine on YouTube. It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.
- derefr 3y ago
  Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime. (You could still download them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1/RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire. It was not a "click to play" experience.) This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started until 2005 — that was about when at least some people were starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video over their Internet connections, without needing to make a big production of it. Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos — a Flash animation wasn't a video, it was an ActionScript program that rendered a video when executed. So a Flash animation could be arbitrarily lightweight on the wire — as long as the author was clever about composing things out of vector bits and small reusable textures. Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway. Flash as a distribution format for games stuck around a few more years, because HTML5 wasn't fully there to replace it yet. And the authoring tool (now Adobe Animate) is around to this day, because it's still an excellent tool for creating vector-based cartoons... that you render out to bitmapped video.
  - Bakingpotato 3y ago
derefr 3y ago
> He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story. I mean, that's not a distinction of Flash as a format; that's a distinction between animation and film. Netflix could certainly do a CYOA for a cartoon series.
- Cerium 3y ago
  It is not a distinction between animation and film, it is around when the content is generated. A CYOA series needs the content generated in realtime. Each binary decision that impacts basic facts about the series (hair color in this example, or which character has something happen to them, etc) in the entire series doubles the number of possible versions.
  - derefr 3y ago
    My point is that animation can be procedurally generated "at runtime", while film [motion-photography of actors] cannot.
themagician 3y ago
Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping for touch input. Apparently they showed this garbage to Steve Jobs several times and he shot it down, and I can't blame him. Tragic, really. Even still, today, if Adobe open sourced Flash and Flash CS4 I think it be a huge hit. Homestar Runner and Newgrounds. Such an interesting space for creators. I can't even imagine the things people might create if it was still around today.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby
  - chongli 3y ago
    Adobe is the Autodesk of the creative side of things. They've swallowed up almost everything in the space and exist only to collect rent. When something requires finesse, such as Flash, they fail miserably.
    - Bakingpotato 3y ago
      oh god, autodesk. don't remind me. exactly correct.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        Yeah fusion 360 doesn't even support HiDPI scaling to this day.. wtf
goosedragons 3y ago
You can already experience them on homestarrunner.com thanks to ruffles. It emulates the flash player and the old toons seem to work fine. The site even has it built in so no need for an extension.
irrational 3y ago
Flash really was something special. We created all kinds of training content in it (all of which was completely replaced with static text and images after all of our customers adopted iPads for doing associate training - Which where it still is today, extremely boring). We all these animated characters, with their own backstories and personalities, that each had their own professional voice talent. Associates in Asia especially loved them. Another project was for people who repaired printers. All the printers this company produced were 3d models inside of flash that could be rotated on any access and disassembled to the smallest screw. A tech could choose something to repair and it would show them step by step how to do the repair. They could rotate/zoom the printer however they wanted to see the current step playing out. Neither video nor static text/images are a good replacement. The best thing was, everything was vector graphics, so the file sizes were minuscule.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  Personally I’d rather read text and/or watch a human present slides/demo than watch an animated thing for training.
  - j45 3y ago
    It's good to offer both, not one over the other. I think the point that gets missed with the power of today's devices is how much could be delivered on device, and going to text was a step backwards in some ways, when flash might have delivered text in a more interactive or engaging way.
- mwcampbell 3y ago
  > We created all kinds of training content in it How accessible was that training content for disabled people, particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better in some ways.
  - genewitch 3y ago
    were blind people with screen readers repairing printers?
dylan604 3y ago
>He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story. Oh, how little credit you give to the magic of editing. If they needed the same footage to be reusable with minor differences in things like hair color, they could do it all in post. With the magic of m3u8 play lists, they could see where they even have the variations of videos to as minimum duplication of video as possible. It becomes much more of an asset management nightmare than content creation issue. As an aside, theatrical releases of movies were sometimes given "fingerprints" where small details in a scene would be changed like the adding/removing of a prop in the background, the color scheme of the books/towels/whatever in the background, etc. They didn't film all of those variations. They were modified in post.

Bakingpotato 3y ago

yeah, lots of Flash games were actually innovative. plenty of developers got their start on NG with flash before moving on to make console or steam games. flash had plenty of shovelware, but you can still make incredible stuff with it.

klenwell 3y ago
Good example here: https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash It works! It had been effectively defunct for years: https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/ https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  good pick.

TillE 3y ago

Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just fine on YouTube. It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.

derefr 3y ago
Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime. (You could still download them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1/RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire. It was not a "click to play" experience.) This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started until 2005 — that was about when at least some people were starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video over their Internet connections, without needing to make a big production of it. Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos — a Flash animation wasn't a video, it was an ActionScript program that rendered a video when executed. So a Flash animation could be arbitrarily lightweight on the wire — as long as the author was clever about composing things out of vector bits and small reusable textures. Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway. Flash as a distribution format for games stuck around a few more years, because HTML5 wasn't fully there to replace it yet. And the authoring tool (now Adobe Animate) is around to this day, because it's still an excellent tool for creating vector-based cartoons... that you render out to bitmapped video.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago

derefr 3y ago

Cerium 3y ago
It is not a distinction between animation and film, it is around when the content is generated. A CYOA series needs the content generated in realtime. Each binary decision that impacts basic facts about the series (hair color in this example, or which character has something happen to them, etc) in the entire series doubles the number of possible versions.
- derefr 3y ago
  My point is that animation can be procedurally generated "at runtime", while film [motion-photography of actors] cannot.

themagician 3y ago

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping for touch input. Apparently they showed this garbage to Steve Jobs several times and he shot it down, and I can't blame him. Tragic, really. Even still, today, if Adobe open sourced Flash and Flash CS4 I think it be a huge hit. Homestar Runner and Newgrounds. Such an interesting space for creators. I can't even imagine the things people might create if it was still around today.

Bakingpotato 3y ago
adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby
- chongli 3y ago
  Adobe is the Autodesk of the creative side of things. They've swallowed up almost everything in the space and exist only to collect rent. When something requires finesse, such as Flash, they fail miserably.
  - Bakingpotato 3y ago
    oh god, autodesk. don't remind me. exactly correct.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Yeah fusion 360 doesn't even support HiDPI scaling to this day.. wtf

goosedragons 3y ago

You can already experience them on homestarrunner.com thanks to ruffles. It emulates the flash player and the old toons seem to work fine. The site even has it built in so no need for an extension.

irrational 3y ago

Flash really was something special. We created all kinds of training content in it (all of which was completely replaced with static text and images after all of our customers adopted iPads for doing associate training - Which where it still is today, extremely boring). We all these animated characters, with their own backstories and personalities, that each had their own professional voice talent. Associates in Asia especially loved them. Another project was for people who repaired printers. All the printers this company produced were 3d models inside of flash that could be rotated on any access and disassembled to the smallest screw. A tech could choose something to repair and it would show them step by step how to do the repair. They could rotate/zoom the printer however they wanted to see the current step playing out. Neither video nor static text/images are a good replacement. The best thing was, everything was vector graphics, so the file sizes were minuscule.

nemo44x 3y ago
Personally I’d rather read text and/or watch a human present slides/demo than watch an animated thing for training.
- j45 3y ago
  It's good to offer both, not one over the other. I think the point that gets missed with the power of today's devices is how much could be delivered on device, and going to text was a step backwards in some ways, when flash might have delivered text in a more interactive or engaging way.
mwcampbell 3y ago
> We created all kinds of training content in it How accessible was that training content for disabled people, particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better in some ways.
- genewitch 3y ago
  were blind people with screen readers repairing printers?

dylan604 3y ago

>He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story. Oh, how little credit you give to the magic of editing. If they needed the same footage to be reusable with minor differences in things like hair color, they could do it all in post. With the magic of m3u8 play lists, they could see where they even have the variations of videos to as minimum duplication of video as possible. It becomes much more of an asset management nightmare than content creation issue. As an aside, theatrical releases of movies were sometimes given "fingerprints" where small details in a scene would be changed like the adding/removing of a prop in the background, the color scheme of the books/towels/whatever in the background, etc. They didn't film all of those variations. They were modified in post.