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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of staffing churn in the film world and many films are built by farming out work to dozens of separate VFX studios.

I speculate that having this open source increases its popularity, which makes more likely that any given potential hire or VFX company will have experience with it, which makes it easier for DreamWorks to ramp up new hires or contract out to third party companies.

When I was at EA, we switched from a proprietary UI tool (which was quite well suited for consoles) to Flash (which wasn't) entirely because it eased staffing problems even though the technology itself was a worse fit. The best tool is often the one that people you can hire already know.

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god, Flash wasn't suited for anything and yet somehow it got used for everything until Apple managed to kill it by keeping it the hell off the iPhone. It was kind of okay for so many things and actually great at none of them.

It might even still be in use at Cartoon Network, it's been a while since I last heard from my former co-worker in the dialup-delivered Flash cartoon mines who ended up as the animation director for Foster's and Titans but he sure was still using an old version of Flash/Animate long after the browser plugin was retired.

There's probably a lot of lessons in Flash's status as a tool that did a ton of different things half-assedly.

It was like the JavaScript of UX and 2D games for a while. It was trash as a technology, but it was a technology that millions of UI designers and indie game developers cut their teeth on and already knew deeply, so it stuck around much longer than it should have. Like grown-ups trying to ride tricycles to work.

I remember someone at EA talked to Adobe about getting access to the Flash (.fla) file format so that our UI tools could read it directly to export into the in game format instead of reading the already compiled and compressed .swf format. And they were like, "Uh... you really don't want to do that. It's like a memory dump of the entire application state. It's a giant mess. We're really sorry."

By all accounts, it seemed like the Flash codebase was a dumpster fire. But so many amazing little games and UIs were built using it.

hahahha, "It's a memory dump of the entire app state" explains SO MUCH.

To be fair that's how a lot of software worked in that era. MS Office worked that way too (doc files, not docx files).

The .fla format was a OLE compound file. It wasn't that bad -- I reverse engineered how it worked in the Flash MX 2004 days, and it was mostly editor data structures formatted like how you'd expect.

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