#swf to video converter

[kerubimcrepin]

What do we know about Joris le Sans-Pouvoir (Joris the Powerless)?

Aka, addressing the "cancelled Nintendo DS game"-shaped elephant in the room.

While this blog has gone deep into the show and character dissections, I think it would be remiss to proceed without addressing the elephant in the room — the game, the myth, the legend, the 2007-2009ish cancelled game Joris le Sans-Pouvoir.

There isn't a lot that is known about it, and all the data in this post comes from two developers.

The only videos of it we have available are uhhh......,

...Please say "Thanks Ronik!" for this video in particular.

I spent hours trying to convert these two SWF animation video files, — which demonstrate how the game was supposed to look, — to something actually viewable. There were many issues, with at least seven different programs.

I suffered for crepinjurgenology studies, but I did it.

Instead of recounting the story in my own words and omitting anything on accident, I will simply present to you, what the portfolios of two different developers say (these two pages are the source of all the images, gifs, and gameplay):

Joris Le sans-Pouvoir is the main character from a feature film Ankama due in 2013. It’s a new character IP situated in the DOFUS universe. I had the chance to work on a platform game prototype that was all about delving into of the character’s backstory. We wrote a lot of background and had a lot of fun designing and developping a cute and quirky platformer with a hint of metroidvania elements and a dash of Grow gameplay elements in-between levels. It also was a great opportunity to work with Jono Takeshi-san of Radiata Stories fame who worked with me on the art direction. (SOURCE)

Joris was the first Nintendo DS project developed at Ankama (in partnership with Magic Pockets). I began working on the project as narrative game designer, then took on the role of Lead Designer and Project Manager. Game design on this project involved boss fight, level design, minigame design, UI… I also designed an original collecting system where collectible items were used in a minigame inspired by the “Grow” series. The developpement has been put on hold to match the release of the animated movie with the same character (scheduled in 2013). (SOURCE)

Neither the movie nor the game, survived their development, due to circumstances. (shorthand for: I have no idea what happened, man. Maybe one day I'll write a post about the history of the movie, and truly open that can of worms, but god, not right now. I don't want to spend more time on this.)

Eventually, The Wakfu film turned into three OVAs instead, and the Dofus film changed its plot a bunch of times, and became Livre 1 : Julith.

...For some reason, in some version of it, Joris had a tail. Yeah, I don't know what that's about either. Cool clothes, though!

We don't know anything about its plot, and unlike cancelled projects Dofus Donjons and Welsh et Shedar (which was cancelled for years, until its recent resurrection), the lore of this game carries no relevancy in modern canon.

The name, Joris the Powerless, as well as the log-centric gameplay, both seem to reference the early concept that Joris had log-based powers, — and that without his "magic wand," he couldn't do much.

(Joris and his weird fucking "magic wand" were, in turn, borne out of the idea of a warrior who had a woman's voice. Which makes me chuckle.)

(The following quotes are machine-translated and may contain errors)

(SOURCE)

This is, by the way, the reason why I personally headcanon Joris to be really bad at huppermagic. So bad that he dropped out of the Huppermage Academy, and almost never uses magic in combat. It's a homage to his original idea.

(Yes, there is an actual reason why I headcanon Joris to be godawful at magic, besides just projecting my neurodivergencies onto him.)

I suppose that, even at this time, Joris was meant to be a store owner:

The gameplay loop involves going from boutique, to missions, and so on, while those two pieces of concept art involve the said boutique section, and show a female character saying «Pas mal, boss !».

In my opinion, it might be this character. Proto-Simone, perhaps?

Since the store seems to be the centerpiece, and the Grow-style minigames involved collectibles, I would assume that the plot involved Joris going around and finding artifacts for the store. That would also explain the concept art gifs of him adventuring.

(Though, the adventuring would probably just be the inciting incident/a vehicle for plot development. Nintendo DS games loved using the jobs characters did for that purpose.)

This is the extent of what I can surmise about the plot.

The developer portfolios also included these example documents, but the image quality is too bad for me to make sense of or upscale. I am including them here solely for some French people who are very good at reading blurry text. (If you learn anything, let me know, okay?)

Overall, my verdict is that this game's cancellation was both a blessing (Joris without Kerubim and Atcham is like tea without water and a cup. How am I meant to drink leaves? Are you stupid? Why are you giving me leaves with nothing?) and a curse (THEY CANCELLED A GAME ABOUT MY BLUE-COLORED YOINKY SPLOINKY (who has a THIN, GRABBABLE WAIST)????? FUCK!)

Hope this was a fun read!

[autumnbrambleagain]

my computer is largely the same, structurally, that it was back in 2000. that means the original folder systems are all where they once were. that means i have a Media folder, subdivided into things like "Play These" and "Watch Mes"

see, back in the day, to watch something, you had to download it. streaming even short video was too much to expect from most websites outside of flash videos, and even that was in its infancy.

so when a new hot video came out, you downloaded it as a .wmv, or a .swf, or a .mov, or a .mpg

you'd build up collections of these, and when you had friends over, and especially during LAN parties, you'd share these around. that's how you watched the Fensler GI Joe parodies. that's how you watched the once-famous and now-utterly-forgotten Battlefield 1942 Slim Shady video.

you downloaded funny family guy clips, gollum's award acceptance speech, the CKY skeletor video, and obscure shit like immobilien jackass.wmv and poop today.wmv

but things like vimeo and youtube happened, and now there's twitch, and streaming, and we live in an empheral world where it's become difficult to hoard moving images like it used to be. we've lost the download links. now you need to use a sketchy website to convert and download things, or know how to isolate the video file and download it directly.

my Watch Mes folder has been here since at least 2000, but the rate at which things have been added to it has slowed. sadly, the same has happened to my Play These folder, which held my music. it's become harder to download music, to collect it, to listen to it by any means other than streaming it. gone are the download links. now it's soundcloud links, apple music mystream deluxe subscriptions, youtube magenta hotstream verified content tunnel memberships.

my folder has been here since 2000. i can't say i have the same confidence in the longevity of the streaming services.

[mkv-to-swf]

MKV, a widely used video container format, is known for its ability to encapsulate multiple audio, video, and subtitle tracks. While this versatility is appreciated in many scenarios, it can pose challenges when users intend to share or present their content on the web. SWF, on the other hand, is a web-friendly format that supports interactive multimedia content, making it suitable for online distribution. Converting MKV to SWF, therefore, becomes imperative for those looking to showcase their videos on websites or embed them in web applications.

[banaroo]

Was trying to animate last night then something weird occurred with my drive and the Flash 8 .fla just disappeared not even in the recycle bin. Downloaded photorec recovery but I didn't know how to use it. It was then I realized I still had the swf but thats just flat video, so I ventured forth in getting a swf decompiler that I also did not realize only exported .fla files to Flash CS5 through 6. Anyways internet got 50% slower for no reason trying to download a single gigabyte and a half then turned out CS6 didn't have a serial. Downloaded CS5.5 instead then put the swf-converted-.fla in it and got it in a 95% more useable state. A process that would make most other Artists in other programs simply go Insane Lmao

[archaeopath]

Running Java Applets and Flash Videos in Current Browsers

Screenshot Knightvision Chess PGN viewer on ingram-braun.net June 2023. One of the great successes of the early years of ingram-braun.net was the Chess Replay Utilities Synopsis which provided an overview over all then available chess game viewers ready for embedding in websites. Most of the projects enlisted there are now defunct. However, my demo pages are still there. Even of those viewers that were carried out as Java Applet or Flash Video. Both environments were removed from current browsers years ago. So i wondered if I can get my demo pages to run today? Probably the most promising way is to install contemporary browsers and extensions on a Virtual Machine but it would be very much work only to view the demo pages here. And as my site is TLS only this might run into certificate errors. In principle you can download the *.jar or *.swf files and feed a stand alone app with them. Alas, chess game viewers have the *.pgn files outside so this probably won't work here. There are browser plugins for both formats. The Chrome addon CheerpJ Applet Runner converts Java into WebAssembly and JavaScript on the fly. It works well with the Internet Chess Club. It fails miserably on ChessTutor™. The other Java Applets render the graphical interface as expected but fail to load the games in an operational manner. The manufacturer Leaning Technologies has announced a full Java VM in WebAssembly. Hopefully we will see better results then. Flash Video (*.swf = ShockWave Flash) should still be working in Lunascape Browser out of box. But this failed to me. There is an extension FlashPlayer - SWF to HTML for Chrome and Firefox browsers which provides a sandboxed JavaScript implementation of a flash viewer. It runs perfectly on DGT Chesstheatre. And it works on KnightVision Chess PGN Viewer, too, but fails to navigate into alternate lines. All in all I feel it was a good decision not to remove the demo pages but preserve them as sort of archivalia. Read the full article

[ferikmvp]

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[crtter]

I recently found out that this flash animation website I used to visit literally every day as a kid was indexed into the Internet Archive in such a way that, while some of these animations aren’t watchable anymore, they’re all still downloadable and I’m thinking of downloading them all and converting them into video files for easier preservation. The issue is that they all become .exe files when I download them and, while they all open and can be played with no issues, my computer recognizes them as being played through Flash Player 4 (which, according to Google, came out in 1999 and I don’t have downloaded on my computer in any capacity?) and I can’t turn them back into pure .swf files.

Hey, kind of a long shot because this is a pretty unique problem but does anyone know how to turn .exe files into .swf or some video format?

[thoughtsofananon]

god someone please help me. I'm trying to convert a .swf file into practically anything youtube will allow, i've been trying for half an hour and i'm honestly close to crying with how frustrated i am. Nothing will work, every conversion website i go to will say error and I don't know why. I used to use Swivel, but apparently it's not updated to where my computer is.

[ebonysable]

The hunt for Islands of Wakfu sprites...

Warning: very long post, probably a rant. Read at your own risk.

I know I’ve been posting a lot of Islands of Wakfu stuff lately - it’s because one day I had the brilliant (?) idea to copy the game off my XBox360 because I wanted a closer look at certain characters. I had seen some in high quality in an episode of Inside Ankama, but I wanted more. Copying the game was the easy bit.

Extracting the contents of the game was a lot trickier, and led me down a rabbit-hole of emulation and modding, but I got there in the end! I found the scenery, lots of artworks, all the pre-rendered videos, and more! But I couldn’t get the characters.

There was one image of Nora in with the scenery sprites, probably as a size reference, and all the Qilby holograms, but I quickly narrowed down the characters as being the files with the .apm extension. Them having descriptive filenames helped a lot - Npc_mina.apm gives away the contents. So I looked for a way to open them, and what luck! GIMP can open APM files, no problem!

There was a problem. The files were registering as 1 pixel by 1 pixel, with a ridiculously negative ratio.

And when I told GIMP to open them anyway, it gave me a horribly non-specific error message and failed. The problem couldn’t be that they were the wrong type of APM - I had checked and rechecked the file header, and it matched every time with what an APM should have.

But I knew it had to be possible to extract the sprites - I’d seen some somewhere on the internet, but so long ago I couldn’t find it again. So I went back to searching. Here’s the image in question. I believe I found it on Reddit, but reverse image searching doesn’t find anything old enough to be the source.

I found the websites of several of the developers, one of which had a good screenshot of one of the characters I was looking for. Alright, so now I only need three more characters. Two, minimum.

The same developer had created the tool that turned the original SWFs into the APMs currently in the game. I also learned from this website that the APB files were sprite sheets, but as I couldn’t easily find information on this specific type of APB, I left them to one side.

More specific searches on Google led me to one other person publicly taking apart Islands of Wakfu, but they were just looking for the music. Not something of much interest to me, since the soundtrack is available on Bandcamp, although extracting the voice lines does hold some appeal in terms of trying to understand them...

But I was getting distracted! I kept searching, trying to find whoever had extracted those sprites before, and coming up empty-handed at every turn. I even asked for help on a sprite-ripping forum, but no-one answered me. And then I wandered back into my old files.

I’m a file hoarder. And I’d been collecting files relating to Islands of Wakfu since before it came out. Artworks, trailers, papertoys... and a video I’d completely forgotten about: a recording of a flash animation from the Islands of Wakfu website.

This flash animation had all the sprites I’d seen ripped in the past, plus more. They were even animated! This had to be the source of those sprites, which meant... that no-one had publicly tried to rip sprites from Islands of Wakfu before me.

My current theory is that the APM files have been altered in some way, or encrypted in some fashion, such that only the game engine can read them. If I could find a way to reverse that, then I could extract the sprites. The only option I can see past that is contacting the developer who created the tool that converted them to APMs in the first place, and asking them for help. Unless anyone out there has any ideas?

[canmom]

Animation Night 48 - Independent Web Animators... 2!

It's hard to believe we're approaching the big 50... and in a few weeks I'll have managed a full year of Animation Nights every Thursday.

This week, I'm returning to one of my earliest themes: the independent web animation scenes we first visited in Animation Night #10. Last time, we went on a bit of a historical survey of the classics: the Newgrounds flash scene of Xiao Xiao and Bitey, the charm of SamBakZa's There She Is!, the wonderful body horror fractals of Cyriak, and the most recent stylish generation of indie animators on youtube like Felix Colgrave and Vewn. Check that post for the full list!

Well what's happened since then? Many of these animators have dropped new videos, and I've been introduced to a few more. So I have some pretty sick stuff to show... we'll get to that in a minute!

At the same time, the sword of Damocles has fallen: Flash player is now officially killed off - with lossy, high bandwidth raster video apparently considered preferable to building a secure, backwards-compatible swf player, as far as the powers that be are concerned! Sure, the actual software, now called Adobe Animate, still exists (competing with others like Toonboom as general purpose vector animation software), but while before just about anyone could get their hands on a pirated copy of Flash, the present version is locked into Adobe's subscription ecosystem...

(for more, see Nathalie Lawhead's v good writeup on the death of the Flash website)

Is this going to prove “good” or “bad” for web animation? Who the fuck even knows lol. It's definitely a very different scene these days: Flash has given way to genuinely free tools like Blender Grease Pencil, Krita and OpenToonz, and for those who can afford them, pro tools like TVPaint and ToonBoom. These tend to enable much more sophisticated animation workflows, but you also face a steep learning curve.

The economics has also changed a lot: nowadays people can devote themselves to it full time if they can attract some kind of Patreon audience. The way that shakes out is that a lot of today's web animators are doing much more “technically impressive” stuff than anyone could do in Flash back then, both technically and often narratively (NG's 5MB limit was a pretty harsh creative restriction)...

But something was still lost, I feel? Precisely because the technical standard was not especially high, the old Flash scene was a kind of supportive ecosystem where people could experiment without (much) judgement. Money was not involved, which meant that essentially everyone there was in it for fun - and that's a barrier for entry, admittedly. Still, that world meant someone like Felix Colgrave could get started with shorts like the one above, and find an appreciative audience, long before the days of ‘Double King’. Today, it feels like the pressure is heavier: everything has to be oriented towards self-promotion on the wheel of Content, to build that same Patreon or Youtube audience.

Of course, there's no point wishing for a more innocent internet... or pretending that, without nostalgia goggles, the majority of stuff on NG back then wasn't kinda shit lmao.

Luckily, there are efforts to preserve the old Flash videos! The Internet Archive has a clever WebAssembly-based flash player alternative, and an impressive (if hard to navigate) collection of Flash videos. Another substantial archive is maintained, using the original Flash Player in a special sandboxed browser, as BlueMaxima's “Flashpoint”. Meanwhile, Newgrounds have batch converted their entire database to raster video, and still seems to have a healthy community producing original animation for their weirdly gamified rating system - some of it, like Gooseworx below, is indeed really good. This won't save the stuff that's not part of these big archives, the swfs on obscure self-hosted websites, but it's not all gone!

Anyway, that's my little soapbox over! There are many ways things are much better for indie animators who can't afford to go to animation school. For one, there's so many more good, free resources now than ever before - to name a few who've helped me, check out *deep breath* [Toniko Pantoja] [Striving For Animation] [Dong Chang] [Studio Bulldog] [Howard Wimshurst] [Aaron Blaise] [Ian Hubert]... and there's an abundance of less centralised ways for people to get a start like Multi Animator Projects and animation memes. Not to mention the influence of the sakuga fandom giving people lofty inspiration... it's still an exciting time!

And who knows, maybe one day the Grease Pencil user community will be as vibrant as the old Flash one.

So who are we watching today then? Let's reel em off!

the returning stars...

the ppl we saw last time have not stopped animating...

Felix Colgrave, the extremely talented Australian behind Double King, dropped a new video called Throat Notes full of his usual surreal, psychedelic imagery! This one's about bugs.

Gooseworx is the person who got me to look back at Newgrounds, by making some really perfectly timed videos with a great sense of weird comedy and squishy, bouncy movement. Her Little Runmo we saw last time, but now she's dropped a much longer sequel to Elain the Bounty Hunter in Elain Gets Adopted! Can our triangle girl get out of being a human(...ish?) pet?

Jonni Phillips is hard at work on her feature-length film Barber Westchester (which may stretch the definition of 'indie' since she's now leading an outsourced animation team lol), but for now we can watch all of her wonderfully disconcerting lead-in series Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners! She has a really distinctive style, leaning way into extreme exaggeration and the 'boiling' lines effect (where every drawing is drawn twice and rapidly alternates between frames). Totally slept on her last time, I want to give her a proper showing this time around!

Vewn (Victoria Vincent) made a little short about a monkey since last we saw her - but I also want to show a few more of her previous stuff we didn't cover last time! She remains one of my favourite web animators, with a brilliant ability to ratchet up a sense of alienation and tension and an amazing way of using distorted perspective.

the newcomers...

and meanwhile I got familiar with some more animators...

Worthikids is one of the people who’s really flying with the possibilities of Blender grease pencil to combine 2D and 3D animation - and he's just a plain good character animator, especially for expressions, with a great sense of humour. We’ll check out his Bigtop Burger series about a travelling food truck run by clowns, and his recent short Wire in which a different group of clowns battle vampires. Clowns seem to be a thing for him.

Joel Guerra also recently made big waves with his ENA series, with a wonderful aesthetic taking after early CGI and clipart as a context for surrealism. Most of these videos feature ENA wandering around talking to various characters while we soak in the ~vibes~...

Howard Wimshurst is the host of a discord server for indie animators I've taken to hanging out in, but of course he caught my eye in the first place for tremendously impressive full-figure animation, along with really strong storyboarding and textured brushwork like Encounter.

Toniko Pantoja meanwhile is a CalArts grad whose educational videos are some of the most useful out there (if sometimes a little meandering!) He mostly works in the mainstream industry but occasionally releases very cool original projects like this!

Studio Bulldog are a tiny four-person indie anime studio, who appeared on the scene recently with some cute short films and very informative videos on the anime production process in English.

DawnOfNSSD, aka @bionicie on here, is out pioneering the genre of Bionicle stop motion erotic/fight animation. Their work is fascinating, and does some very clever little technical things (most stop motion animators have little interest in martial arts, sadly, since there's clearly a lot of potential!) - and honestly like, the absolute vision of it! Titty bionicles!

Shingo Tamagawa is an skillful key animator with credits ranging from Gundam Thunderbolt to 3-Gatsu no Lion, but he made an enormous splash in animation circles last year with his beautifully coloured short film Puparia. This film exhibited a level of drawing precision that would be hard to match for big studios with entire cleanup departments, and incredibly beautiful, moody atmosphere shaped by precise, manga-like drawings and a richly saturated colour palette. No wonder it made waves!

The old school...

We covered most of the main hits last time, but we gotta include at least some NG stuff right? Last time we covered the main ones - Bitey of Brackenwood, Animator vs Animation, Xiao Xiao, There She Is! - but we haven't quite covered all the good stuff yet...

Madness Combat by Krinkels is technically not in the 'stick figure fight' subgenre, since the guys are like little raymans or something, but really who cares about the difference hehe. It's a sprawling series on one very straightforward premise: a little guy kills a lot of other little guys, then probably dies. Well, these things became wildly popular because Krinkels had a decent sense of fight choreography and timing out the fights to the beat, which made his stuff stand out among all the stick videos. It's all about rhythm! I'm not gonna show too much of this because they are basically 10+ years of the same video getting gradually more elaborate, but we gotta give it a nod!

Nathalie Lawhead is best known as a game developer, but early on she was part of the Flash scene, with projects like the Rotfront Sovietoblaster music video and Alien Invasion. It's so wonderfully energetic and such a perfect encapsulation of its era that I gotta show some.

The Older School

Now, this playlist might not go very far. I haven't timed it out, I'm running late as it is. If it turns out these are so short we're done in a couple hours, I have a plan B: we'll check out some of MTV's Liquid Television block, which (alongside other similar festival-type presentations like Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation) is where you'd take your work before there was a Newgrounds: a collection of original, boundary-pushing short films. For me, it's most notable for incubating Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, which started this whole thing! You might say that Animation Night owes its existence to Liquid Television. Unfortunately, it remains available only in VHSrip form, but hey, that just adds to the flavour.

Animation Night 48 will start very soon indeed, like more or less right now at twitch.tv/canmom. Hope to see you there for an Animation Night the way we used to do it! There's so much different stuff I'm sure I'll find something you're into :D

[zephyr-together]

I spent all of last night and all today trying to find a way around a problem for my webshow AND I FINALLY GOT IT I’M SO HAPPY

[askfirestarterspitfire]

Flash End of Life Notice

Hey! So a brief notice about some things I’ve changed in the archive. Due to Adobe ending support for Flash in the new year, I’ve replaced any animations and interactives in the blog so you can still read them. Animations have been converted to videos and uploaded to YouTube and embedded - no issue there.

The games, however - there are six of them across three of my blogs - are harder to substitute. I’ve provided download links with SWF and standalone players until such time as Ruffle or HTML conversion tools mature, and I get the time to provide transcriptions (which will always be the inferior experience) for mobile readers.

It’s not ideal that Adobe has decided to murder a format with this much history with no regard to the culture they’re laying waste to in the process, but these are the circumstances we have to deal with and this is what I’ve provided for the time being. In the future I may be able to get the games working on a playable non-flash format.