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Didn't we already do this experiment with Flash? Macromedia/Adobe made the player free, and charged for tools. In the same way, it seems that Rive wants to open

Didn't we already do this experiment with Flash? Macromedia/Adobe made the player free, and charged for tools. In the same way, it seems that Rive wants to open source the player and then charge for the editor. Maybe its a bit different since Rive seems targeted at game devs using other platforms like Unity and Unreal - presumably to embed things like cinematics? But then of course you have this (OSS) player, which implies Rive also wants to own the whole experience. Hence the reference to Flash. It's not really my area, but best of luck to you!

hoherd 3y ago
That's a really great comparison, and great point that this is just the renderer. I'm happy to see it released under an MIT license, but I wonder how many OSS tools there are to build compatible content, and how easy it would be to build exporters from other formats in existing tools.
- neurowave 3y ago
  Our entire runtime and format are open-source. https://rive.app/runtimes https://rive.app/runtimes We charge for the editor, but everything else is open.
gfodor 3y ago
Flash was great, someone creating a better Flash has been long overdue. I think Rive looks like a great attempt at a new Flash.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  The Flash tooling is still around, actually. It's now called Adobe Animate and targets existing web standards.
  - bsimpson 3y ago
    Did that pivot ever really work? I know Adobe renamed Flash, and I haven't talked to anyone in the cartoons space since then, but it seems like innovation/attention to the Flash toolchain died with the player.
    - SimianLogic 3y ago
      We used to use a tool called flump to rasterize flash animations for iOS games (I ended up writing our runtime and renderer in Unity and later SpriteKit to consume that data). I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to build an exporter from Flash (the program, now Animate) to this runtime if the features are fairly compatible.
      - JoeyJoJoJr 3y ago
        Flump was a fantastic tool in the early mobile days when there wasn’t really anything else to create quality 2D animations. I also wrote a few Flump runtimes and have since written a few more runtimes utilizing the Export as Texture Atlas feature in Adobe Animate. If the goal is to just render the rasterized output from the exported texture atlas animations it should be pretty simple to create a converter. If the goal is to render vectors I imagine it is more complicated due to quirks in how Macromedia triangulated their vectors, but someone has done it before http://blog.bwhiting.co.uk/index.php/2014/03/17/introducing-b2dlite/ http://blog.bwhiting.co.uk/index.php/2014/03/17/introducing-...
zem 3y ago
and think of how much better flash could have been if the player and file format were open, and third party tools didn't have to reverse engineer them!
qiller 3y ago
There was Scaleform, and it looks like it's been discontinued along with Flash - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx

hoherd 3y ago

That's a really great comparison, and great point that this is just the renderer. I'm happy to see it released under an MIT license, but I wonder how many OSS tools there are to build compatible content, and how easy it would be to build exporters from other formats in existing tools.

neurowave 3y ago
Our entire runtime and format are open-source. https://rive.app/runtimes https://rive.app/runtimes We charge for the editor, but everything else is open.

gfodor 3y ago

Flash was great, someone creating a better Flash has been long overdue. I think Rive looks like a great attempt at a new Flash.

zozbot234 3y ago
The Flash tooling is still around, actually. It's now called Adobe Animate and targets existing web standards.
- bsimpson 3y ago
  Did that pivot ever really work? I know Adobe renamed Flash, and I haven't talked to anyone in the cartoons space since then, but it seems like innovation/attention to the Flash toolchain died with the player.
  - SimianLogic 3y ago
    We used to use a tool called flump to rasterize flash animations for iOS games (I ended up writing our runtime and renderer in Unity and later SpriteKit to consume that data). I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to build an exporter from Flash (the program, now Animate) to this runtime if the features are fairly compatible.
    - JoeyJoJoJr 3y ago
      Flump was a fantastic tool in the early mobile days when there wasn’t really anything else to create quality 2D animations. I also wrote a few Flump runtimes and have since written a few more runtimes utilizing the Export as Texture Atlas feature in Adobe Animate. If the goal is to just render the rasterized output from the exported texture atlas animations it should be pretty simple to create a converter. If the goal is to render vectors I imagine it is more complicated due to quirks in how Macromedia triangulated their vectors, but someone has done it before http://blog.bwhiting.co.uk/index.php/2014/03/17/introducing-b2dlite/ http://blog.bwhiting.co.uk/index.php/2014/03/17/introducing-...

zem 3y ago

and think of how much better flash could have been if the player and file format were open, and third party tools didn't have to reverse engineer them!

qiller 3y ago

There was Scaleform, and it looks like it's been discontinued along with Flash - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx