Suddenly broken Shape Tweens in Flash / Animate after a crash


Have you experienced this:
Flash crashes and when you reopen your file some Shape Tweens are completely broken.
Then thinking you have a backup, you open an older version of the same file which was not involved in the crash in any way, but the same tweens appear to be broken there as well.

It can be quite nerve-racking as it usually happens when you least expect and these Shape Tweens are impossible to fix by just adding another Shape Hint. They behave unpredictably; often the shape itself completely disappears in the middle of the tween.

If you open any of these files on a different computer or in a different version of Flash, they are just fine.

It doesn't happen very often to me, but when it does, it can be extremely frustrating.
After a second crash it may fix itself.
The symptoms clearly suggested a 'bad cache' issue.
But where is Flash's cache? And does it only cache in one place?


At the moment of posting, this seems to be new information on the Internet.

I was near completion of a huge animation and got this type of crash again last week.
Finally decided to be methodical and go to the bottom of the problem if I could.
For my serious work I still use Flash Pro CS6, so this is where I dug and this is what I found out:

In Config there is a folder called CodeModel
The cache files are inside. Deleting all that is inside CodeModel while Flash is closed, fixed the issue with the broken Shape Tweens in my current as well as older saved versions of the same animation.

So what do you need to do?

  1. Close Flash
  2. Go you your Config folder

    Win: C:\Users\YourUserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash CSx\en_US\Configuration\
    Mac: HD/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash CSx/language/Configuration/

  3. Find CodeModel, go inside and delete the two subfolders with all their content
  4. Start Flash again. It will create healthy new cache files automatically

Shape Tweens should now be fine.

There may be more applications of this manual removal of corrupted cache.
If you find any, or you find the method not to work in a different version of Flash, please share in the comments section below.


It's awesome to see you in the Adobe help forums too! Still trying to get a hang of using the tools lol.

I'm having issues with bitmaps corrupting upon crash (maybe other times too idk seems random). I've been having computer memory blue screens in general so idk if I just need to solve that or if there's other solutions.

In adobe animate cc 2021 I saved stuff to the new assets area and that was wiped upon crashing too :/

I have been using bitmaps as fills. I didn't know you could use it as a mask. Also yes I do use symbols as graphics so it's not that.

Thanks in advance if you answer~

Hi again, ModestNeko!
I remember we spoke on YouTube some time ago.

Just to rule out physical RAM issues with your machine, run some memory tests with MemTest86 or similar.
If your RAM is damaged it can manifest in all kinds of weird behaviour, crashes, lost saves and so on.

As for the rest, I can't help much. It seems that Animate has a limit of bitmap fills and above that it just loses the connection between the bitmap and the shapes that have been filled with it, displaying just red shapes.
If you import a bitmap, put it inside a symbol and use a mask it may be safer, but it will not tile the way bitmap fill will do.
I don't use many bitmaps in my work, so I don't personally have enough observations.
On top of that I only test our tools' functionality in Animate, but do all my real work in CS6, because I find Animate unbearable to work in, because of its sluggishness, bloated interface and huge amount of bugs.

Personally I have not experienced any of these issues, and also with CS6 I hardly get any crashes (3−4 per year).

I hope you will be able to figure out what is causing crashes. Could be that the bitmaps are too high-res, could be they are too many. Flash is primarily a vector program and bitmap support is quite limited.
On top of that comes 7-8 years of bad programming by the current dev team.

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