Interesting alternative to Flash animation

[Schala Zeal]

So, for the longest time, I've been wanting to work with Adobe Flash and make sprite animations for Newgrounds. The problem? It's $700! So I go to Google search and look for alternatives. I came across something called JavaFX. Its wikipedia article claims it's designed for web content and apps in the way Flash works. I watched some tutorials on YouTube, and while I realized you have to write your animation in code, I did get pretty excited when I saw a good deal of components that Flash also has, such as timeline, animation, scene, etc.

I think, in the long run, JavaFX is a better choice than Flash, because Flash is not only proprietary, but Flash app settings are stored in a cookie cache, which is pretty bad for games or what not. JavaFX is a Java toolkit, which has quite a few open source implementations, and you can also have your Java apps save files to your disk.

What I'm really interested to hear is if anyone would think adversely of this. I want to see what kind of criticisms JavaFX has. As for Silverlight, which is Microsoft's web content platform, I'm not touching it, because... it's Microsoft. You know what they'll do...

[tushantin]

I haven't really looked into JavaFX much (because I'm not a programmer, and it's Oracle, so...), but here's something I absolutely love using: http://www.synfig.org/cms/

As far as I know, Synfig is the only FREE 2D animation program on par with professional grade softwares such like Adobe Flash, Toonboom, and TV Paint. And it'll get even better once Cairo acceleration comes in, which is being actively developed (which uses GPU for rendering scenes rather than CPU). Though, I'd recommend using it with Linux mostly, because it seems to crash plenty on Windows.

But Synfig is a tool for feature-length animation and exports to either video or PNG sequences. It can't export to SWF, and that's a pain because Newgrounds only seems to support Flash animations. (Then gain, this is usually why I prefer Vimeo and Youtube rather than Newgrounds in the first place, despite the fact Newgrounds is like dA, but for animations).

Sprite animations can be done fairly well in Synfig, but I can't say the same about "tiling" maps -- you'll need to prepare full tiled maps in GIMP / Photoshop / Aviary / Pinta / Sumo instead. Be warned, though, Synfig has quite a learning curve (despite nearly mastering the seemingly-simple toolset, I still feel there's so much flexibility and creativity i haven't tapped into with this).

[Schala Zeal]

With the hobbyist decline in Flash, I think Newgrounds is only kicking themselves in the butt. Though I suppose I can always do conversion with SWFTools.

[tushantin]

Oh, and if you're on Windows and feeling adventurous, there's Giotto: http://vectorian.com/giotto/

Though I can't claim to have tried that before, so you're on your own here.  

I agree that the decline of Flash will eventually lower Negrounds' userbase. But I warn for SWFTools, or any video-to-flash conversion: it's okay for small low-res conversions as the output is usually much larger than either the original video or SWF content. For instance, a 6 minutes movie made solely on Flash would be 10 MB, while a video-converted version would be 60 MB (not to mention the horrible loss in quality). That's because vectors contain structure and data and point-based mathematical drawing, even for tweening, whereas videos are frame-based and contain data for every pixel.

[Schala Zeal]

Blah! Okay, Youtube it is.... or maybe Blip

Actually, thinking of perhaps JavaFX app, as a sort of read at your own pace kind of animation. Might host it on GitHub