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- Hacker News
- SFDT was the first online community I was a part of. It was a special time on the early internet. I feel so lucky to have been a very small part of it.by robmerki
- Can't believe this is the only mention of sfdt so far on this thread. I have similar nostalgia about it being the first online community I joined. Collaborating with others, getting a glimpse into their personal lives, chatting off-platform on MSN/AIM. I wonder if that experience exists for kids in the modern day internet...by fortydegrees
- Stick figures live on! Hyun's Dojo is the new place where stick animations are. Recently the winners of a stick figure tournament have been announced https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO5hiRV5MTk
There is even a timeline if you want to know the full history; https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index....
by HydroKai - Is there anywhere you can watch these old flash creations like Xiao Xiao and Homestar Runner with the original vector graphics? The reproductions I’ve seen on YouTube are terrible, in part because of the obvious video artifacts that don’t preserve the edges, but also because it loses all interactivity.by coryfklein
- H*R is up again.
https://homestarrunner.com/main
Using Ruffle. Like the others, it's somewhat recent.
by p2edwards - The versions linked to in the article use the original vector graphics. In fact I think they're the original post location (NewGrounds). From there you can follow the link to the author's page, which has them all:
- If you can grab a copy of the SWF somewhere, Ruffle[0] is a decent Flash replacement and compatibility is pretty good[1].
[0]: https://ruffle.rs/
by DoctorOW - I was knee-deep in the flash animation scene through the late 90s early 00s, and I don't remember anyone calling anyone 'Flashers'. China-only I suppose.
I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?
by King-Aaron - >I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?
Definitely remember Stick Death in highschool around '99-'01, 2+ years before this flashers group supposedly started.
by samplatt - Yeh stick death definitely was before Xiao Xiao. I remember all the lads at school sat around a computer in school binge watching them all.by FugeDaws
- There was a group on deviantArt called flashers. I wasn’t a member myself, but some of their members made some neat stuff I remember.
The group hasn’t been active for many years now it looks like, but the group page still exists.
https://www.deviantart.com/flashers
Group founded 2004.
There’s not much in the group gallery now, so probably I was looking in the individual galleries of some of the members and I think some of the time some member would make something and post it to Albino Blacksheep and sites like that and maybe post a journal entry about it to their own individual journal on their own profile.
deviantArt also had IRC-like group chats. Flashers had a chat room. There’s a link to it still in the about section of the group, but that link doesn’t work any more. Even if a group didn’t have much posted into its gallery they could have a lot of member activity in those chat rooms. And from what I remember, I think I visited the flashers chat room a few times and that it was pretty active.
I think some chat rooms were private, and some were open even to people who were not in any particular group.
- I remembered Alan Becker (https://youtube.com/@alanbecker) who creates stories with an array of his stick figure characters.
Sometimes, they interact with real world too!
- Yes when I saw stick figures mentioned on HN I immediately thought of his "Animator vs Animation" [1] (to which I've just rediscovered the title!)
- I assumed this was going to be about Stick Death but I was mistaken! I had never heard of XiaoXiao before this article...
Stick Death was online when I first starting used the WWW, I was obsessed with it! It was just incredibly to me that someone could easily make these animations and get them online for everyone to see! I believe this around the same time as 2advanced and the "Flash intro" craze...
by m4tthumphrey - I immediately thought of Animator vs Animation!by andrepd
- Ah, XiaoXiao. Under the amazingly named `E:\Storage\Old\Fun\old\XiaoXiao` I have fight (xiaoxiao1).avi, XiaoXiao_City_Plaza.swf, and xiaoxiao2.swf - xiaoxiao9.swfby Semaphor
- It wasn't until the mention of "City_Plaza.swf" that memories finally came flooding back.by samplatt
- Send us a file listing for `fun' :)by swah
- I'm jealous. My files from those days did not survive; too many hard drive failures and lost or destroyed CDs.
This is particularly sad to me because I dabbled in Flash animation too back then, since I was in art school at the time. None of my creations survived. Some were even acceptable work.
by bovermyer - This unlocked memories I forgot I had. Not only playing these games, but Flash introduced me to gamedev. I can clearly remember struggling in Actionscript, trying to get collision detection and resolution working. I never got it to work properly lol.
By the way, if anyone wants to relive some old flash games/movies, there is https://ruffle.rs/, an open source Flash implementation. It's great!
by danhau - Honestly happy memories of Actionscript 3 are a big factor in how easily I cozied up to TypeScript.by mock-possum
- Man the Flash era, and the overall vibe of creativity on the internet back then (hey it was only 20 years ago), was the kind where you could feel a limitless potential for the future, where everyone would be awesome.
Then it all congealed into the tentacles of 4-5 corporations and now we're forever stuck in their "How do you do fellow kids" cringefest..
AI also ha[s/d] potential, but it's already getting crippled at birth by corporate idiocy and lawsuit fever.
by Razengan - I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval.
Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".
by enricozb - This unlocked some good memories that have been sitting latent for probably 15 years or so.by josh-sematic
- I still have a bunch of .piv files on a CD backup I burned on my PC right before I switched to an iMac G5 in the summer of 2007. I should fire Pivot again and reminisce. If I recall correctly, they were absolutely crude and incredibly poorly done.by wpm
- I was just about to make the same comment! I never remembered the name of this software. Thank you so much for posting it!by cyrialize
- I remember spending hours and hours on pivot and forums like droidz.org which used to host animations, models, and forums. I even remember learning about "easing" and different "levels" of animation and collabs as showcased on darkdemon.org[1]by avandekleut
- Yep, had Pivot on a disk. Countless hours lost making my own sprites, and I remember the joy of downloading other peoples sprites that were actually goodby alansaber
- Toribash is awesome! I last checked it a year ago but it was still alive then [1]. Worth checking out still. People who were great at it back in the day were legitimately doing dark arts with the tools the game came with. I wonder if we'll have an era of appreciation and rediscovery for pre-AI software.by nidnogg
- >A sort of related thing is ToriBash ...
If memory serves, the sound effects were a fantastic touch on top of the multiplayer hilarity of that game.
Looks like there's still an active community around it today, based on a cursory YouTube search.
by rl3