20 year old Moho files opened perfectly! Long but fun story

[heyvern]

This is amazing. I did an animation for a local cartoonist 20 years ago. we both lost touch and couldn't find each other. He said, "You dropped off the earth!" I said the same thing.
Anyway, over the years, this animation promo for a series floated around on my hard drives, getting transferred and backed up. I would occasionally try to find him. I finally got a hold of him, and he remembered me, so we are tentatively trying to get it going again... phew... 20 years later.

Here's the back story. I bought Moho... uh... 20 years ago... FOR THIS VERY PROJECT. These files were the FIRST Moho files I ever created. 20 freaking years ago. There was only one version back then, and it cost $50 as I recall.
Along the way, I had several major hard drive crashes. I thought I had this entire project with all the audio backed up, but sadly, I had lost all the audio for it. I still had some of the Moho files, but was very sad I didn't have the soundtrack and all the original sketches and Moho files.

All of the existing Moho files I still had that were missing audio were, of course, readable files using any text editor. I checked to see where the freaking heck the lost audio files might be. Luckily, it still had the exact path to the missing audio files on a very old drive that I thought was long lost. On an ancient hard drive I haven't seen in 20 years. Lo and behold, a miracle occurred! An honest-to-God technology miracle. I recently found a dusty, beat-up, ancient hard drive in a closet at the bottom of an old box of miscellaneous stuff. I had used this drive for backup back then. It was the same drive listed in the links to audio in the old moho files.

The drive was old, and I had lost the power supply. It was one of those old, nonstandard types of plugs from long ago. I found a power supply on Amazon for $35 and took the risk. Took two weeks to get it from Timbuktu. I was CERTAIN that the drive was dead as a doornail. This is an old-style spinning disk drive, not SSD. The drive was older than 20. I bought it new and used it for years before it died in 2005. I was certain of failure even if by a miracle it did work, I figured the files I wanted wouldn't even be on this drive. I hooked it up to my brand new Mac mini, crossed my fingers, turned it on and waited to see the bad news...

Miraculously, the error came up (I am paraphrasing the error for comedic effect), I'm so sorry, but Disk Utilities can not repair this ancient, beat-up, old piece of junk hard drive. However, it seems to be working well enough to copy the contents of the drive to a new location if you really want to save them. Every single file on that drive was fine. I was able to back up this blast from the past time capsule and all the Moho files and audio files were there exactly as I hoped.

Part 2: Opening the files in the New MOHO.
So, that was one thing. Keep in mind this was whatever version of Moho existed back in 2005. Would the dang things even open? If they did, would they be usable? I learned the first trick. Old Moho files DO NOT OPEN in NEW Moho versions. I renamed all the files to the extension .anme first. Then opened and converted.

Every file opened perfectly. There were minor glitches along the way with "old" shape effects, the old gradient effect a bunch of "splotchy" effects. What surprised me was how much I used scripting so far back. Back then, Moho was missing a bunch of features we take for granted now. I had written a bunch of scripts that had to be updated or simply removed. The biggest one was "Nested bone control" in bone layers. I had tons of files with scripts specifically to transfer bone control to sub layer groups like switches and other bones. Some of the scripts we don't even have solutions for now in the app, like linking multiple switch layers.

In conclusion, I am in the process of updating and finishing this old animation. 2005 was a long time ago, and some of the jokes don't work.

p.s. THERE WAS NO IPHONE IN 2005!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
p.s.s. I have some ancient versions of Moho on this drive as well. I had backed up my downloads folder, and there are a few old versions of Moho on the disk.

[Stan]

Amazing story, Vern! Thanks for sharing it - moments like this remind me how wonderful the Moho community is.

[Greenlaw]

Wow!

Well, now you HAVE to finish it, right?

[slowtiger]

This is one of the best experiences one can have with software: that it will open all old files. Moho does it, TVPaint does it, even Photoshop does it. Apple lost a lot of sympathy when they introduced FinalCut X which coudn't open any project from the version before.

[heyvern]

The really informative aspect was seeing exactly how I was creating Moho files 20 years ago.
The two main features that ALL OF THESE FILES suffered from it's lack was animated layer order and reference layers.
No wonder I created so many layer scripts. I basically, in a very crude way, had attempted to script them both with layer scripts.

In nearly every file, I had to have body parts split up into separate bone layers for each arm and leg, without layer order animation, this required TWO COPIES OF EACH LIMB LAYER, so I could "fake" layer order animation by animating the visibility. If an arm has to go in front of another character and then behind, I use two of the same arm bone layer above and below the other character and animated the visibility. This is why I created "master/slave" bone scripts. I used a single master bone layer to control all these other bone layers for each body part. Took me a while studying these old files to figure out WHAT THE HECK WAS I DOING. Especially when none of the scripts worked when first opened.

I fixed and updated these scripts so I could at least see what they did, so I could figure out how to eliminate them. Another problem I discovered is that the scripts worked back in the day, but in the current version of Moho, there's something not quite right when trying to animate bones the way I did it with layer scripts. Scripts worked fine playing in the app, but the animation export failed. The scripts weren't "running fast enough" or the app wasn't loading the script in the same way to refresh the bone matrix. Also, the dang script was doing too much. Storing the bone keys on frame zero, then copying bone keys from one layer to 8 other layers in 3 or 4 bone layers times multiple characters. No surprise, rendering didn't work too well. Not a problem. I knew they weren't needed and it was clear how to replace them.

I simply used reference layers and layer order animation. The main body layer has all the bone animation and controls the referenced layer copies. I duplicated/referenced that main layer for each leg and arm. Deleted the layers not needed in each reference. Bingo! Animated layer ordering and reference layers save the day. LOVE THOSE FEATURES.

p.s. I may... or may not... be able to show off this project. Too many things might be an issue. The main one is the FREAKING OVER THE TOP ADULT HUMOR. This cartoon was off the rails 20 years ago but it hasn't aged any better. Its funny as hell, but dang, the content isn't very appropriate. We are still figuring out where to post it. Probably Vimeo. It will get demonitized on YouTube, most definitely. There are a few family friendly parts I could post that won't offend too much.

p.s.s. I've fixed about 18 of the moho files out of about 30-ish. It's going fast, actually.