A year ago, when working on server migrations, all Astra items were disabled due to an unspecified "outage". As time went on, several users began linking the breaking of Astras to the discontinuation of Flash in 2020, and the staff worked hard to find solutions with a goal of having Astras back up by 2018 (last I checked,
Codemonkey was on the case). Now,
two days ago, it was formally announced by Lanzer that there was no solution, and that without Flash, Astras were disabled for good.
Seeing as several Astra items, such as Curse of the Gray Wizard, Candy Coated, and Inversion all have effects totally different from their actual pose (with Curse of the Gray Wizard actually being all but invisible without the animation enabled) and other Astras such as Googly Eyes, Bubble Pop, and the various Falling Food items having missing effects/poses due to this (you could shake the eyes and pop the bubbles, and with the falling food items, 4-5 other poses would be totally gone as a result).
At the moment, there is one series of animated items that still work... the option in Lake Kindred to equip a kin with your avatar. I'm not even going to pretend to know how this is done (I believe HTML5, since it hasn't broken anything across browsers), but it gives me a tiny bit of hope that Astras can be saved.
In the meantime, even though 2020 is still around the corner, the ended support of Flash doesn't mean that everything flash-based on the internet is going to explode (remember Y2k?)- it just means that Adobe will no longer be updating Flash, and that the version released at the end of 2019 will be the final version available. While sadly most browsers have started forcing users to manually enable Flash to use it, it's still a feature that most (if not all) modern browsers have the ability to use. Therefore, since server migrations are complete, I don't see why we can't just reenable Astras barring some security flaw that I'm unaware of. In the meantime, artists and programmers can work on converting Astras to HTML5. While it would be nice to see EVERY Astra converted, my main focus is on Astras that would be totally broken or useless without their animations enabled.
TL;DR: Staff has confirmed that Astras are 100% unable to be animated without Flash, but several Astras would be broken entirely or lose several poses without their animations. Seeing as users are able to equip animated kins with their avatar, converting a select few Astras to HTML5 (or whatever is used to animate kins) is my proposed solution.
UPDATE: We are now halfway through 2020. Seeing as this petition was made back in 2019, and has had little to no results, I want to move into the next phase- archiving their animations. As flash has been disabled in dressup, the only way to properly archive these is to get recordings of them in action from people that own them. This is where you guys come in!
With 1,000+ Astras, I don't even know if we'll be able to record them all before the year's end. However, if you want to help with the community effort, I'll be working on
a thread dedicated to archiving specifically Astras. Thank you all for your help!
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