[HN Gopher] When stick figures fought
___________________________________________________________________
When stick figures fought
Author : ani_obsessive
Score : 338 points
Date : 2025-11-04 00:48 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (animationobsessive.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (animationobsessive.substack.com)
| King-Aaron wrote:
| 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?
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| 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.
| King-Aaron wrote:
| Yeah, I miss DeviantArt.
| samplatt wrote:
| >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.
| FugeDaws wrote:
| 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.
| taneq wrote:
| That's spooky, we were literally just talking about stickdeath in
| the office and then this shows up.
| nkrisc wrote:
| And most people weren't talking about it, but it's inevitable
| that some were, and I guess that's you. Surely you're not
| surprised about all the times when you're not talking about
| something that then shows up on HN?
|
| You talk about stuff everyday, and stuff shows up on HN
| everyday, eventually they'll coincide.
| taneq wrote:
| Oh my god do you think it was selection bias? No way, I'm
| certain it was spooky action at a distance! /s
| soulofmischief wrote:
| The fallacy in question would be sharpshooter's fallacy.
| Selection bias is when a sample misrepresents the
| population.
| taneq wrote:
| I kinda feel like these are two different views on the
| same basic 'mismatch-between-sampling-and-distribution'
| fallacy, what am I missing here?
| robmerki wrote:
| 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.
| fortydegrees wrote:
| 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...
| soulofmischief wrote:
| You can intentionally seek out such places today, but the
| average internet denizen sticks to a few known mass
| communities. If someone is lucky, they get involved in a
| small subreddit or group chat.
|
| Group chats are the closest thing we have to that experience
| today, but they're probably more socially-oriented on
| average, unlike the groups I rolled with back in the aughts
| which were all heavily creative- and fandom-oriented.
| andrewrn wrote:
| Woah, this brought back memories. Like that one flash game where
| you played a stickman hitman.
| gtramont wrote:
| Xiao Xiao and Ninjai *chef's kiss*
| charcircuit wrote:
| Youtube used Flash.
| dlhavema wrote:
| I loved the xiao xiao series. They were amazing.
| me_vinayakakv wrote:
| 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!
| JohnHammersley wrote:
| 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!)
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npTC6b5-yvM
| me_vinayakakv wrote:
| Yeah, I discovered the channel through this series as well.
|
| "Animation vs Physics"[1] was video which got started me with
| the channel. The presentation is beautiful there!
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/ErMSHiQRnc8
| uvaursi wrote:
| Yep. StickDeath was the shit.
| swyx wrote:
| i was OBSSESSSED with this growing up. i had no idea about the
| origin or real name or that it was chinese origin. incredible.
| thanks to whoever found and submitted this
| vpribish wrote:
| I added ELIZA to shittalk for a statistical ML model to play
| bouts on 'stickfight' PVP game around 2000. :)
| amarant wrote:
| Ah man, these are some awesome memories! Hot damn I liked these
| when I was a kid! I was first introduced to them on a LAN party.
| We would pass these kinds of things to eachother between CS 1.5
| matches (VLC can play any file format!)
|
| I remember towards the end of my lan party going days, these sick
| fights were finally outdone by the much more advanced Killer
| Bean.
|
| Just a bean, trying to get some sleep.
|
| Those were the days
| PyWoody wrote:
| Killer Bean! That's exactly where my mind went as well.
|
| I'm so happy people still remember it. We used to watch 2.1 at
| every LAN, too.
| kevinfiol wrote:
| Was not expecting to read about Xiao Xiao today! I loved Xiao
| Xiao as a preteen, and spent many hours playing Xiao Xiao 4 [1],
| or re-watching the other Xiao Xiaos over and over again.
|
| [1] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/25718
| pixelmelt wrote:
| Stick figures still fight to this day! Go check out hyunsdojo
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Hyun's dojo was awesome
| Semaphor wrote:
| 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.swf
| samplatt wrote:
| It wasn't until the mention of "City_Plaza.swf" that memories
| finally came flooding back.
| swah wrote:
| Send us a file listing for `fun' :)
| Semaphor wrote:
| That has a *lot* of random images I downloaded. From street
| art, over those "priceless" memes people used to make. All in
|
| The videos directly there are a bunch of internet famous
| things, some of them in German:
|
| Basshunter_Boten_Anna_German.avi,
| PatchMeUpMusicVideoByRootKit-GeekVideo.avi, trafo-
| entkopplung.avi, wow_forporn.avi, fainting goats.flv,
| gangbang.flv, Gruftis1989.flv, hape kerkeling.flv,
| HumanCamera.flv, Wii.vs.PS3.flv, der_stack.m4v,
| hacker_packen_aus.m4v, 3dshot.mov, ACUVUE_Hearts_on_Fire.mov,
| AtheistenOnly - JesusVideo.mov, fsm-spotting.mpg,
| Stroh.flv.MPG, tetris.mpg, test.swf, theresheis.swf,
| blowdarts.wmv, einsteinthebird.wmv, FLURL-dot-
| com-30292-Mafia.wmv, FLURL-dot-com-50776-korn_mosh.wmv,
| FLURL-dot-com-51227-pop.wmv, getalife.wmv,
| hamburgertrick.wmv, insane.wmv, mariopiano.wmv,
| nintendochoir.wmv, SOAD_gremlins.wmv,
| supersoakerflamethrower.wmv, theglasstrick.wmv,
| TRANIX.NET-11-String-Bass.wmv
|
| "gangbang.flv" is some French movie student project "Revenge
| of the Gangbang Zombies", not actual porn ;)
|
| The Fun\old folder has these:
|
| Folders: CS ft. Southpark, Dela&Ort, HTF, Knight Rider,
| Lenore, XiaoXiao
|
| Files: AYB.swf, AYS.swf, beer.swf, c_d_mmorpg.swf, cow.swf,
| crab.swf, cruise.swf, dengdeng.swf, fuckher.swf, hhonda-
| ad-300k.swf, humor_pong.swf, knowjackschitt.swf,
| metaluohigh.swf, optical.exe, rgb.swf, starwarz.swf,
| trafikskolen.swf, urbanlegends.swf, winrg.swf
| riffraff wrote:
| Is the first one the "Anna is a bot" song?
|
| I had actually built a bot named Anna to trick friends on
| IRC (with AIML) so when I came upon the song it felt
| hilarious.
| bovermyer wrote:
| 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.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Archive.org has a _lot_ of the old flash stuff, including
| Xiao Xiao.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Sure, but the files I'm talking about were never online.
| enricozb wrote:
| 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".
| rl3 wrote:
| > _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.
| alansaber wrote:
| 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 good
| Hunpeter wrote:
| Oooh, I really liked ToriBash! I didn't play for very long for
| whatever reason, but I did think it was a creative and fun
| game.
| cyrialize wrote:
| I was just about to make the same comment! I never remembered
| the name of this software. Thank you so much for posting it!
| mcpar-land wrote:
| if you liked toribash, also check out Your Only Move Is Hustle
| (or YOMI hustle) which is similarly 'turn based' but in 2d.
| Closest thing I've found to playable Xiao Xiao.
| kipchak wrote:
| You might also like 'Stick It To The Stickman' and 'One
| Finger Death Punch' 1 & 2.
| wpm wrote:
| 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.
| nidnogg wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://www.toribash.com/
| avandekleut wrote:
| 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]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkqDoAYKG4A
| josh-sematic wrote:
| This unlocked some good memories that have been sitting latent
| for probably 15 years or so.
| deepsun wrote:
| Macromedia Flash had probably the best UX of all the programs
| ever created. It all goes downhill from there.
| silisili wrote:
| I feel that way about a lot of things. Maybe it's just
| nostalgia...but heck we had Flash, Frontpage, VB,...we were
| spoiled.
|
| I sometimes wonder why such concepts went away, and everything
| became far more complicated.
| muzani wrote:
| Some tools were certainly better, like Flash. Mobile made a
| lot of things complicated. Half the game dev tools still
| don't run properly for mobile. HTML5 was supposed to make
| things easier, and for a while it did, but it got rapidly
| more complicated afterwards.
|
| Some things are much better today, like Procreate.
| watwut wrote:
| I dont think HTML5 was supposed to make things easier. It
| is just that major players wanted to get rid of flash for
| own reason (some of them valid) and HTML5 was something
| they were able to point at. It was never easier or even
| half replacement, it was significantly more complicated and
| crappier experience for an average normal creator.
|
| It never even got some convincing demo. All those I have
| seen at the time were the "spend a lot more time to produce
| something much less impressive" kind of anti demos.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| There _still_ aren 't any convincing demos.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Is there any reason why they couldn't be emulated with
| WASM+canvas?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| No, and a lot of Flash projects have already been converted;
| notably, Google was one of the first to release a flash-to-
| html5 converter, because a lot of ads were Flash at the time.
|
| But Adobe's missed opportunity was keeping Flash alive,
| "just" adding a html5 / canvas / JS version instead of the
| browser plug-ins that were killed when smartphones/tablets
| refused to support them.
| Pxtl wrote:
| It's the flash animation/design tools that are missing from
| modern young people, not the ability to render it into the
| browser.
| AmbroseBierce wrote:
| These animations got me into Flash and soon after into
| programming thanks to ActionScript, one copycat music video that
| maybe made even stronger impression in teenage me was a sad
| adult-themed music video from 2004, I just found ii after looking
| online for a bit: I love death - Lodger (Finnish band)
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BoFQV4jXun4
| rubee64 wrote:
| I remember that video well
| AmbroseBierce wrote:
| I think it made teenage me empathize a bit more with my
| parents, about how bleak can existence feel.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Same, I had been making stickman animations in powerpoint of
| all things, before a friend mentioned I should try FlashMX.
|
| I even made this terrible thing as my first foray into AS2:
|
| https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408469
| AmbroseBierce wrote:
| I made a few Flash animations and a couple made it to and MTV
| show here in Latin America called "Flash MTV" that featured
| some of the animations people sent them, unfortunately I no
| longer have a copy of any of them and they don't seem to be
| online, although you can find some made by other people on
| YouTube.
|
| My initial career idea was to become an animator but I found
| forums of senior animators complaining about low wages and
| long hours and it made me second guess myself about all that
| and I slowly picked up programming instead, I did get a copy
| of a great book called "The Animator's Survival Kit" by
| Richard Williams, best known for directing "Who Framed Roger
| Rabbit?", the book still lives in my library and I hold it in
| great steem.
| wengo314 wrote:
| what a trip down memory lane.
|
| for some extra nostalgia, check out "one finger death punch 2"
| game (and its prequel). i bet it's sort of an homage to those
| animations.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember a "choose your own story" stick figure Flash app,
| called _Time to Die_ (I believe), where the "protagonist" was a
| condemned convict, used as target practice by scientists.
|
| You could pick weapons used by the scientists. In most, he'd just
| get blown away, but in one scenario, he grabs the gun, and kills
| everyone in the facility.
|
| Not sure if it was this guy, or was just inspired by him.
| danhau wrote:
| 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!
| Razengan wrote:
| 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.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Honestly happy memories of Actionscript 3 are a big factor in
| how easily I cozied up to TypeScript.
| rasso wrote:
| Absolutely, me too!! AS3 was a beautiful language.
| nunodonato wrote:
| the Xiao Xiao Flash series were amazing. I always wondered when
| someone would come up with a beat'em-up game with that style.
| Simple, fast-paced, lots of free movement and use of
| tools/weapons.
| icemelt8 wrote:
| I grew up learning Flash and started my love for programming due
| to ActionScript 2 then 3, is there anything like this today I am
| looking for something for my 10 year old daughter.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| For games or animation?
|
| Godot might be today's analogue for games.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It was the era when a major company could brush off the bad PR
| that comes with copying a major online artist. Is it believable
| that _no one_ involved in the Nike ads had seen _Xiao Xiao_? Not
| really -- it was popular with young people worldwide. Yet Zhu was
| new media at a time when _old_ media ruled. What could he do?
|
| This doesn't make any sense. From earlier in the same article:
|
| > Zhu didn't invent violent stickman animations. In the '90s, the
| Western site Stick Figure Death Theatre hosted exactly what its
| name implied. But _Xiao Xiao_ , and its mix of Jackie Chan with
| Jet Li with _The Matrix_ , perfected the idea.
|
| > Either way, it was _Xiao Xiao_ that made "stick fights" massive
| online. Clones were rampant -- even Stick Figure Death Theatre
| had them. As one paper reported in 2002:
|
| >> The Web's legions of part-time Flash animators have begun
| producing their own copies of _Xiao Xiao_ -- so many, in fact,
| that there's a whole portal dedicated to them. Stick Figure Death
| Theatre ... has so many stick man knockoffs, you have to wonder
| why Zhu doesn't just give up.
|
| If we assume that people at Nike were familiar with Xiao Xiao...
| _and_ that they were also familiar with the mountains of similar
| material, what are we saying they did wrong?
| Luker88 wrote:
| The first animation that made me love these was the old 'stickman
| vs door' gif,
|
| Thanks for reminding me of that one
| reactordev wrote:
| Dude completely forgets StickDeath.com which came before all of
| this...
| farseer wrote:
| The woke crowd of today would have gotten stickdeath.com banned
| from the internet were it made today :)
| reactordev wrote:
| Nonsense. Senseless violence in animation has been around as
| long as studio ghibli.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I was going to mention MTV's Liquid Television animation showcase
| as a potential inspiration for this.
|
| That link seems partly confirmed since they mention an online
| predecessor called Stick Figure Death Theatre and the Liquid
| Television segment (which re-enacted famous movie scenes with
| stick figure animations) was called Stick Figure Theatre.
|
| Pretty much each individual segment of that show was mind blowing
| (it launched Beavid and Butthead) but the stick figure
| interpretation of Night of he Living Dead stuck with me for
| years.
|
| YouTube has a compilation: https://youtu.be/-M7-Sew5aU8
| AlexAplin wrote:
| Stick figures run through a lot of amateur digital animation, for
| probably obvious reasons. Pivot reigned on a lot of early YouTube
| and the stubby stick figure style ran through a lot of Flipnote
| Hatena. I'm not sure if it's simply that standards for amateur
| digital content have evolved, or if we have lost the character of
| small platforms like SFDT and Flipnote, but I do find stick
| figures absent today on the large platforms we've all herded
| towards. A lot of what I see is definitely buoyed by Flipnote
| diehards.
| Archit3ch wrote:
| Wow, Flipnote on the DS brings back memories.
|
| For the uninitiated, behold peak animation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI-IbwOveII
| blacklion wrote:
| I remember series of stick man fighting cartoons which starts
| from simple kung-fu/gun porno in big office tower of (presumably)
| evil corporation, but progressed to some infernal fights, with
| Jesus, ghosts, hell, etc.
|
| I'm not sure it was XiaoXiao, I (don't) remember some other
| letter combination in the names of files.
| aj_hackman wrote:
| Madness Combat
| blacklion wrote:
| Yep, thank you!
| anymouse123456 wrote:
| I owe my technology career to Flash.
|
| Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able
| to destroy it together.
|
| This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical
| people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could
| navigate.
|
| Nothing has come close since.
| nntwozz wrote:
| I remember the white MacBook Core 2 Duo with 100% CPU, fans
| maxed out while watching YouTube 720p.
|
| This was months before the iPhone announcement.
|
| I can see why they killed it.
| croes wrote:
| Because it was a security nightmare
| IshKebab wrote:
| No it was a usability nightmare. Watching Flash Youtube on
| Android technically worked but it was a horrible
| experience.
|
| Google were ok with "works but janky af", but Apple
| weren't.
| kakacik wrote:
| We could have kept that creative environment (that seem
| to just disappear without any alternative to this day)
| while leaving videos to evolve as they did.
|
| People here complain like they have issues with long term
| memory, but reality was - there was no real web video
| before. That apple had more issues than others was
| problem that should have been contained to apple walled
| garden alone. World was, is and will be much larger than
| that.
| empath75 wrote:
| That 'creative environment' was mostly used for obnoxious
| advertising by the time flash died.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Maybe, but playing videos was 99% of the use case for
| Flash by the time it was killed by Apple. Adobe _could_
| have kept maintaining it for the 1% Flash games, ads and
| terrible websites, but you can see why they gave up...
| jb1991 wrote:
| The product itself still exists as Adobe Animate, I think (or
| one of the Adobe CC tools). It's just as good or better than it
| ever was, with the same workflow. But instead of exporting to
| SWF now people just export to video and share it on video
| platforms. Lots of great stuff still being done with it on
| Youtube.
| riffraff wrote:
| But flash was interactive, videos are not. I miss the days
| kongregate had a bunch of new fun games regularly.
|
| I suppose itch.io fills that niche now.
| empath75 wrote:
| The problem with flash is that it was a security, performance
| and usability nightmare for web browsers.
|
| Yes the games and videos were cool, but 99% of the usage of
| Flash was awful ads and UI/UX elements.
| hollerith wrote:
| For most of Flash's existence on the web, I had my computers
| configured to block flash. (The block was achieved by
| removing files IIRC).
| jonbiggums22 wrote:
| I just used an click to load flash extension in firefox back
| then and everything was fine.
| DANmode wrote:
| True.
|
| That's basically how h.264 and DRM is being done in the
| browser for stuff like Netflix, today, right?
| hangonhn wrote:
| Flash was a poorly written piece of software. It had numerous
| bad memory leaks and a CPU hog. It was never allowed on the
| iPhone probably because it would have drained the batteries
| really quickly. On top of that HTML5 was starting to catch on
| and could eventually do everything Flash could and do it better
| without the memory leaks and poor CPU usage. I have the very
| unfortunate claim to the title of being an engineer on the
| world's biggest Flash/Flex app. The memory leaks were so bad
| that Adobe advised us to just restart the app periodically --
| despite Adobe marketing Flex as enterprise ready. We found
| compiler bugs for Adobe. Adobe and Jobs didn't set out to
| destroy it. Macromedia wrote bad code that performed poorly and
| it wasn't worth the effort for Adobe fix it once HTML5 won.
| cess11 wrote:
| None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand
| parent likely had in mind.
|
| Perhaps there was a memory leak in Unidentified Flying
| Assholes or the endless line of punch-a-celeb games or the
| thousands of stick fight productions and so on, but no one
| cared and enjoyed them immensely anyway. You could do
| something cool without ever learning about things like memory
| leaks or vulnerabilities in the underlying platform.
| wolrah wrote:
| > None of that matters for the kind of creative work the
| grand parent likely had in mind.
|
| Some of that did, at least for how that creative work was
| almost exclusively delivered to the world. Those bugs were
| not just excessive resource usage and instability, they
| were incredibly often exploitable security flaws that were
| regularly weaponized against a huge swath of internet
| users. The ubiquity of the Flash browser plugin was
| simultaneously one of the greatest strengths of Flash as a
| creative platform and one of the greatest risks to the
| average person browsing the web in the 2000s.
|
| The plugin needed to die. Unfortunately the Flash community
| was so firmly built around the web plugin as their
| distribution method of choice (presumably because many of
| us were browsing animations and playing games at
| work/school where we couldn't necessarily download and run
| arbitrary .exes) that the plugin was more or less a
| diseased conjoined twin, and when it died the community
| didn't have long left.
|
| Compare this to Java where the death of the browser plugin
| caused a number of badly designed banking sites to have to
| be redesigned in a less stupid (but quite often still very
| stupid) way but the community as a whole continued on
| without huge disruption. The browser plugin was just one of
| many places Java existed, it wasn't the dominant focus of
| the community.
| Wojtkie wrote:
| Yeah, it's kinda crazy people are brushing over the
| security issues. The nostalgia is huge, I get it, but
| Flash was terrible for browsing the internet at the time.
| as1mov wrote:
| Same here, I somehow acquired a pirated copy of Flash when I
| was 10 or 11. Went through the included offline manual and
| within a few days somehow knew I'll probably end up doing this
| programming thing for the rest of my life :D
|
| It's sad what happened to Flash, sure we have plugin free
| interactive content using JS but I'm not sure if anything has
| replicated the IDE. Though I guess the decline can also be
| attributed to the users moving onto other platforms. The kids
| making games moved on to making Android/iOS games and the
| animators moved to Youtube.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| The vast majority of games I played, for years, were flash
| games. I have a lot of fond memories of that time.
|
| However, Flash sucked. It ran terribly, it was insecure, and a
| mess to maintain. It needed to go.
| DANmode wrote:
| Unity.
| andai wrote:
| _A couple of years ago, an archivist named Ben Latimore put out
| an ebook. Since Adobe began the retirement of Flash in 2017, he's
| been preserving .SWF files and the history around them. His book
| is a chronicle of the Flash era, which he sees as a lost golden
| age. On the final page, he wrote this about that time:_
|
| >... intense creativity, easy-to-access software, notable but not
| crippling limitations, almost universal compatibility across the
| entire technological space of its time, widespread adoption by
| encouraging free consumption and sharing in an age where "going
| viral" actually meant something, all combining to influence the
| entire entertainment industry with one strike after another?
| That's something that we'll never be able to recreate, only
| remember fondly. All driven by a bunch of guys sitting in their
| bedrooms who watched too much Xiao Xiao.
|
| https://archive.org/details/flashpoint-a-tribute-to-web-game...
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| 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...
| andrepd wrote:
| I immediately thought of Animator vs Animation!
| anechouapechou wrote:
| That's so cool. I watched all of his work, and was in the
| animation scene, and I didn't even realize at the time, the
| creator is Chinese! I learned how to use Flash, dabbled into
| scripts, learned to do very basic stuff on 3DSMax, as a ~10 year
| old little shit, and all of that most likely wouldn't have
| happened, if it wasn't for his work -- it's safe to say that my
| life was dramatically impacted by him. Thanks for sharing this,
| OP!
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Oh man I knew exactly what it was when I read the title. Xiao
| Xiao (and Madness) was the best. Watched them over and over again
| with friends on my family dell. What a great memory.
| dmacj wrote:
| Loved Madness, surprised it didn't get more mentions here. The
| combination of over the top violence, techno music and hints at
| a deeper underlying story is what made the series stick for me
| even more than Xiao Xiao.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I loved playing the game too. They did a good job of making
| you feel somewhat like the character. Being able to shoot or
| throw basically everything lol
| coryfklein wrote:
| 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_.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| 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/
|
| [1]: https://ruffle.rs/compatibility
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://zhu.newgrounds.com/
| p2edwards wrote:
| H*R is up again.
|
| https://homestarrunner.com/main
|
| Using Ruffle. Like the others, it's somewhat recent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner#cite_ref-18
| eddywebs wrote:
| This was one of the .swf animation saved in our disk, I also miss
| the demo scene.
| alexchantavy wrote:
| newgrounds.com in its heyday was so fun.
|
| Also anyone else remember when websites used to make Flash intros
| that you'd have to skip to get to the content?
| SeanDav wrote:
| > _Zhu initially won in court. Then the appeals process ran until
| 2006, when he finally lost. The stick figures were too different,
| according to the judges, and the imagery was too simple to
| copyright. Nike was in the clear._
|
| I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the
| Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because
| it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to
| copyright in any case ... /sarcasm
|
| I could even cite the original ruling against Zhu as a precedent
| for extra kharma points.
| observationist wrote:
| It's not about right or wrong, it's about how many lawyers you
| can afford. If you can afford lots of lawyers, you can run out
| the clock, drain your opponents budgets, craft laws and lobby
| for their passage, and all sorts of creative ways of getting
| around doing the right thing.
|
| A random creator in China in the early oughts wouldn't have a
| chance in hell against Nike or any other big corporations,
| trademark and copyright isn't and wasn't set up for foreign
| citizens to leverage IP against domestic entities. Without
| starting with a big legal team and a US corporation and having
| all the reams of paperwork and registrations and forms in
| triplicate, he just wasn't playing the same game. He should
| have been reimbursed or gotten a royalty, from a moral
| standpoint, but he didn't have any valid legal standing.
|
| A court tried to be generous in the interpretation of the law
| in order to grant him his first victory, and that would
| probably have been a good precedent, but the law isn't really
| designed to be flexible like that - it's very rare that "the
| right thing" ends up congruent with how the law works in
| practice.
| dpark wrote:
| I'm not clear what the case against Nike was. Zhu did not
| create stick men. He wasn't even the first to publish "stick
| fight" videos. He filed a trademark of some sort but you can't
| take ownership over an entire class of art based on a
| trademark. Disney can stop me from using Mickey Mouse in my
| ads. They can't stop me from animating a mouse.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Nike come out of the whole thing pretty badly. Why didn't they
| just pay him a few thousand dollars to do the work?
| Pxtl wrote:
| This is what the world lost when Adobe Animate/Flash became
| impractical to pirate and switched to a monthly subscription fee
| for the Adobe suite.
| riidom wrote:
| Since nobody mentioned it:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/2085540/Stick_It_to_the_S...
| mercwear wrote:
| Some of these stick figure fight videos inspired me to make
| copies which lead to me learning flash which lead to my first dev
| job working in flash. Cool to see this throwback.
| cess11 wrote:
| Vaguely related is Haxe, https://haxe.org/. Originally a way to
| do ActionScript, now it targets a lot more and is quite nice to
| work in.
| joshtynjala wrote:
| And OpenFL https://openfl.org/ which is an implementation of
| the Flash API written in Haxe. It can cross-compile to HTML5 or
| native C++ mobile and desktop. Disclosure: I'm a contributor.
| pksebben wrote:
| Flash animation isn't dead, it's just called source filmmaker
| now. Whether 'skibidi toilet' is an upgrade from stick death is
| an argument that i'm sure lives on either side of the generation
| gap, but amateur internet filmmaking is unquestionably alive and
| well.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| shame on nike
| blixt wrote:
| Wow, blast from the past. There's a fairly recent game on Steam
| called "Stick it to the Stickman" which practically puts you in
| control of the character in these animations. In fact I think the
| game was directly inspired by them (There's a Devolver interview
| with someone working on the game mentioning it[1]).
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF2kGSAIljU
| dizlexic wrote:
| I loved stickdeath.com as a kid, but it seemed to have evolved
| into something much darker over the years.
| debugnik wrote:
| Two games I'd strongly recommend in this style are _Your Only
| Move is HUSTLE_ (YOMI Hustle for sort), moddable multiplayer
| turn-based stick fights; and _One Finger Death Punch_ , fast-
| paced brawler with a really simple control scheme.
|
| Many people use the former purely to make animations.
| HydroKai wrote:
| 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....
| dirkderkdurk wrote:
| Way back, before the year 2000, I desperately wanted to make my
| own stick figure death animations, but I was too lazy, and being
| in South Africa, we couldn't get any useful software.
|
| I did however manage to get Delphi Personal Edition off a cover
| CD from a magazine grey-imported from up-north.
|
| I proceeded to create "TISFAT" (This is Stick Figure Animation
| Theatre) in Delphi, inventing my own "inverse kinematics"
| algorithm, quotation marks not only because I had no idea what
| that was at the time, but I also had no way to look it up, and it
| was ghastly (the day I found out what atan2 did unlocked
| everything!).
|
| Being a cocky teenager, I thought, "this is great!" and sent it
| to the local version of "PC Format" magazine and got it on the
| local coverdisc.
|
| That's when I first learnt several very important things about
| having users! Always -always- version your file formats!
|
| Anyway, it somehow made its way onto "the world wide web", and
| someone set up a forum about it, and a small community built
| around my bug-ridden app. Then the religious wars of "Pivot vs.
| TISFAT" started, so I reached out to the author of Pivot just to
| say I wasn't any part of it, and I'd be keen to add support for
| the Pivot file format.
|
| Later on I learnt about verlet particle physics, made better
| "IK", made a Pascal wrapper for the Chipmunk physics library,
| allowing me to add physically-driven animation creation.
|
| I look back with awe at younger me, because I wouldn't have the
| energy to power on like I did, and I'd think more-than-twice
| about showing anyone my work nowadays (I have the physical Winamp
| part 2 video basically done, but the fear of showing it in public
| is holding me back).
|
| You can still find videos created with TISFAT on YouTube, and
| I've still got a complete rewrite sitting on a HDD somewhere,
| where I planned a "no UI" way of animating, targeting all the
| "new" multi-touchscreens back then...
|
| Ah, good times.
| xandrius wrote:
| Cmon show us the video :)
| OisinMoran wrote:
| Oh this is delightful! Such fond memories of the stick figure
| fighting craze, I even turned my first maths textbook of a few
| hundred pages into a flipbook stick figure fight, on both sides!
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