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.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Dude, I’be been developing HTML apps from 2008 on. Early HTML5 browser support was literally my job at that time.
You seem to have totally ignored the next gen tech at that time and now you can’t remember what happened back then.
And now you are basing your whole argumentation on “you must be a kid”.
Kiddo, I’m likely pretty much the same age as you.
You were the one who brought up canvas support. By 2015 you could export full 3D games made in Unity to HTML5. And that was certainly not the first, there were literally dozens of other engines that allowed export to HTML5/WebGL at that time.
If you are too young to remember, that’s not my problem, little child.
Flash died because people moved to a better, more future-proof stack. And you claiming that little 2D animations in Flash were technically much, much better than full 3D rendering with GPU support is honestly wild.
(If you want to get offensive because you don’t have arguments, fine, I can get offensive too, little child.)
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Flash. Animators. Weren’t. Devs.
I don’t know how many times I need to beat this into your skull. I’ve never said it was impossible. I said it was setting the bar unfeasibly high for the vast vast majority of content creators. It was easy. The bar for entry was low. tons of literal children were making flash videos.
And you’re saying that “all they needed to do was become a software developer”. Oh they just needed to learn unity and 3d modeling! Should be no problem for a 14yo, that’s why we see so many 14yo indie devs making unity games.
Be so for real.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You were the one harping on how you were a great flash “developer”.
That was your argument. Now you are claiming that you weren’t a developer. Make up your mind.
Now you don’t even know that Unity totally does 2D as well and that it’s easier to use than Flash ever was. So your argument boils down to the fact that you don’t know anything about the topic at hand.
People who are making videos nowadays don’t need to program either, they just animate a video and upload it to youtube. No programming needed.
But it was you who claimed that “being a flash developer” is somehow superior to that.
In fact, we do see a ton of kids making games e.g. using Unity or other tools. Have you ever heard of Roblox? That whole ecosystem is run by kids making games.
You are just wildly out of touch and stuck in the past.
Flash sucked. There’s better alternatives today. You are out of touch.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
learn to read. where did I say I was a flash developer, let alone a great one?
I’ll tell you what I did say: I said I was an (amateur) flash animator starting in middleschool, and I was a developer (not flash) by the time flash was dying (which IMO is the early to mid 10s).
fucking figure out what your argument even is.
I keep saying “it was difficult for people back then to find alternatives that let them express their art as easily, and thats why it died”
You keep talking about how easy it is now which is completely irrelevant. like your whole aside about roblox.
then you keep dragging on textbook dates and stats, which tell you what happened, but not why.
easier to use for what?
For shits and giggles I decided to check out a tutorial on making 2D cutscenes in unity. and one on how to use unity Animator. and another for how to make cutscenes.
and you’re laughably wrong. And I didn’t even use a modern version of flash, I used Macromedia FlashMX from 2002.
you seem to have a gross misunderstanding about what animation outside of video games involves, especially as an amateur. if you want to argue that its easier now to make animation than it is back in 2015, I’ll agree.
if you want to argue that unity is now easier to make games than flash was back in 2015, I’ll agree. If you want to argue that unity in 2015 was easier to make games than flash was in 2015, IDK what unity was like in 2015 but it wouldn’t surprise me.
but for you to say that prior to ~2015 it was easier to make 2D animation using unity or javascript+canvas/SVG than it was to make 2D animation in flash, then that is just crazy. its just ignorant.
If you disagree, show me a unity/canvas animation tutorial that involves more than simple translation of a few pre-made sprites. Ideally one at least 10 years old, but I’d even accept a modern one.