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AI graphics are really a turn off for me, sorry :(

Also, 4MB RAM needed + entire demo taking 30 MB on the HD with everything being streamed on screen is not really my thing either.

Nice demo, great music! Keep them coming!

Looks & sounds nice!

A lot of care and attention has clearly been put into this demo. It came across very well on the big screen at the party as a classic audience pleaser prod.

It probably is the ultimate expression on ST level hardware of huge data files and the ability to use hard disk streaming. Which I understand may not float some people's boats.

In my opinion, this is as valid an approach as the "Holy two disk limit". Others may agree or disagree but I enjoy both kinds of prods.

Very majestic fullscreens with many many dots, very well designed objects.

I don't see the controversy, 4 MB RAM is not uncommon, the effects aren't videos streamed from disk (can't be done in fullscreen). Like CiH I'm in luck as I enjoy demos, not just one type of demo :) Even if there is 18 MB of datas (I assume a lot of offline generated code) and 12 MB of music.

This prod was clearly in the wrong category. Nice entry for a wild compo, but with absolutely everything being precalc I can't really consider it an actual demo in a compo setting.

(3D in fullscreen is easy when there's no actual 3D - and while I applaud any trick fooling coders into not understanding how something's done - just streaming megabytes of precalc from HD isn't that)

this demo is like chugging boatloads of doping for the olympics and then ending up in 4th place, few people care either way now and noone will in a few months

Damn, I wanted to like it, I was seeing the presentation, the idea, the funny conclusion at the end and I was like wow what a demo. Meanwhile I wondered, how is this rotozoomer so smooth or the occluded dots, is it some kick ass code or animations? Then I read the comments and I am like "ohhh..". Shame as it's a great presentation and was going to be one of my favorite STE demos, but now it feels quite different if you know it's all precalcs.

-Ok, I think we are done, but something is missing. Like it isn't true Atari demo, if it doesn't last over 5 minutes and bore audience to death
-Well... I do have this cringe plot I wrote when I was 14 and could just feed it to some AI image generator
-Perfect!

Thank you for all the work you put into this demo! Kuba Husak's music still sounds in my head to this day, it fits the demo perfectly.

AI thumb

AI thumb. Also what Sauli said.

Ai thumb.

I love this! Keep up the spirit!

Nice effort to celebrate the Atari STE birthday (party topic) and cool to see Acid team and Jakub Husak back!

I am not a fan of the approach (too much in love with original pixel art) but as far as I can see this prod respected the compo rules and voters voted.

Maybe discussions should rather be directed towards compo organisers about revising rules or categories instead of thumbing down creative output by people using tools available.

Thumb up for doing what you like, guys!

Awesome music. And fitting gfx.

Always great to see any new ST/e release and there is some great stuff here (love the plasma and your datasets are gorgeous), even though there are elements that are not to my taste (i.e. what Keops said).

However, with regret this has to be a piggie for me, because I just can't abide by a "serious", major (and hyped) release like this essentially replacing hand drawn gfx/real graphicians (and all the design that comes along with this) with AI. This is not a vision for the future demoscene that I can get on board with, and feels like such a loss for both this prod and the broader Atari scene. There are a bunch of extremely talented graphicians who I'm sure would have jumped at the chance to be involved.

As an aside, it's pretty disturbing that the voting audience either didn't notice or care about the AI in this and other entries at this party. I didn't used to think this, but this is a pretty strong argument for separating AI based entries into other compo categories (perhaps even Wild, as has been suggested), or tightening rules as 505 mentions.

Makers: hope you still make more ST/e stuff though x

First, I love those occluded dots, the smooth plasma, and the smooth star wars scroller. Really looks great. The music sounds great too ==> Thumb up.

I don't mind about the AI graphics because they are not the impressive components of the demo, and are just here to support some story telling, I'm fine with that. That's a lot of images, maybe too much work for a human ==> Piggie.

When I first saw the demo, I thought "ok, they are showing images in between FX so that they have enough time to fill the RAM with precalc, which is fair given the complexity of what's shown, and even impressive to manage to precalc that on the ST". When I realized it was actually streamed from a huge HDD file, I felt fooled, because to me the ST scene has always been the one with coders that count every cycle, and make it happen for real. Feeling fooled ==> thumb down, but as this was authorized by the compo rules, well, piggie.

To me, this is an awesome wild demo, and I would have thumbed it up as such. Piggie it is.

Nice demo, watched on YouTube which is quite unusual for me.
The name does not apply for most democoders i suspect, would not many of them focus on tiny coding and runtime precalcs? At least I would!

Aside from the occluded dot at the beginning, this demo is an uninspired use of a video player. If you record all the frames of an animation, consider doing something more interesting than just a rotozoom.

I really like the music (except the Benny Hill bit) and some of the effects, such as the occluded dots, or the Atari logo on the 3d cube. And I do like the idea of better sound for the fpga/emu version.

But, given the title "a coder's guide to the demoscene", like others I have a problem with the streamed precalc. Coders' spirit in the days of the Atari ST was optimize to the max, and if you have to precalculate, at least do it on the machine itself. Streaming feels like cheating to me. If you had called it "An artist's guide to the demoscene", I would have had a different reaction.

FWIW, I also didn't like the story, or this particular AI generated art, but that's not the key issue.

So I'm really in two minds about this demo. If the scale were Rulez, Good, OK, Meh, Sucks, I'd probably choose Good, but I definitely don't think it rules.

It would have been nice with some awesome pixel graphics, but I have no problem with the photo/AI/whatever editing here. Nobody is trying to pass this off as hand-crafted and since it's all (clearly apparent) photo montages, the main characters all look the same throughout the story. The rest could just as well have been stock photo stuff. Strangely, the story itself feels like an afterthought. Instead of providing a coherent framing of the effects, I think it hampers the overall pacing.

I love the "cheating" used in demos, the clever tricks making the impossible seemingly possible. It's like sleight of hand: we all know it isn't real magic, but it's still damn impressive and confusing. With 19+12 megabytes of data files, I personally feel like we're venturing more into the world of wholesale prop magic and camera trickery.

A lot of time and effort has clearly gone into this production, and I guess the real controversy is whether it should have been placed in the Wild compo - which is ultimately a decision for the organizers. I usually know a demo when I see one, and since I'm unsure about this prod, I'm keeping my thumbs tucked away for the time being.

This!

I like it

Some cool ideas, and am looking forward to see the in (more) real time :)

Quite some controversy with this prod :)
Releasing new demos for Atari ST/STE certainly shows effort and dedication, and there's for sure a lot of work in this demo, which must be acknowledged
Music is great and original, +1 for that.
Gfx might be AI generated, but as already told by other it doesn't look that different from general ST GFX ; also if the guys have some coders/musician but no gfx man to do their demo, why blame them for finding a solution, even if it's not "human drawn" ? At least it allowed them to release a demo.

As for the huge data file and most of the effect being the result of streaming precalc data to screen, I agree this is not my idea of a ST/STE demo. As Alien wrote, at least demos in the 90s were precalcing things from the demo, which can be the real trick ; just streaming is really less impressive.

So, good music, good result on screen, but oversized HW requirements that make the demo "macic" not working for me. Would have been OK in a "Wild" demo compo.

Precalc? Who cares, all great demos have precalc. This just makes it better :)

I love the music and the effects, even if they're streamed. That shows the max capacity of the STE in fullscreen I guess.

Streaming data or animations from the HDD is nowhere new, remember something called STNICCC? And we all have room on our SD cards ;)

Thumb up for the idea and execution and the overall efforts put in this prod.
However thumb down for AI, so in the end I guess it's a piggy.

I'm annoyed with non creative layers writing about AI or streaming but having no idea what they are talking about. There's no pure AI content. AI was used to prepare initial sketch of some elements. There's no streaming. Learn how to create something good. Something more than another dancing bars, scroll or rotating dott ball. 4MB STe and HDD is now demoscene standard, if you're like it or not.

the demo is great and the effects look very amazing, but you can immediately see that something is wrong - everything looks too perfect, sub-pixel, there is no any glitch and this allows us to assume that it is precalc/steram, which unfortunately kills the true spirit of the demoscene, where most things it should be in realtime and not that I am an enemy of streams (in Rewind2 we use data streams in 3 places), but they did not completely replace realtime effects ..."

Very nice full-screen demo! It works perfectly on my real STE and finally takes full advantage of the machine's digital audio capabilities. Congratulations again!

I enjoyed watching this demo. Different and majestic (as evil said).

I can appreciate well done one screeners as much as full demos.
I can appreciate Atari ST demos as much as Atari Falcon030 demos.
I can appreciate chip-tunes as much as streamed music.
I can appreciate well-presented and executed precalcuated effects as much as real-time effects.
I certainly do appreciate hand drawn graphics but can still very much enjoy a demo without it.

What really makes me happy though, is when people show dedication and spend a great amount of time producing a quality demo, like this one, for our dear Atari STE. Thank you!

the story is nice, an immersion in the life of demo programmers or daily observation can be a source of inspiration for new effects.
Isn't this also a similar approach taken by scientists who observe the world to try to understand how it works?
For newbies this therefore allows them to better understand the demomakers approach.

Neat story-demo with some excellent music. The AI use in this I think is forgiven. Don't see how one could make all those slides without using some sort of already generated media.

the demo is enjoyable
too much precalc is killing precalc but hey, where is the limit and who has authority to decide what is pure or not?
great prod

Decent effects but I can't support AI generated gfx and to a lower extent, such a level of offline precalc.

Says who? The committee for demoscene hardware standards? Or just you?

Not a very strong point to defend a demo that contains lots of dot effects (including rotating dot objects).

That aside, this thing has its highs and lows. I appreciate a story-driven demo, but the story line is a bit thin and i don't really like that comic ending. The pictures look good (whichever way they have been created) but seem a bit too random to transport the story and the soundtrack - despite a few catchy phases - doesn't save it for me either.
But i do mind the size. 30MB to see still images, text and effects i have seen numerous times before, just this time in fullscreen? I'm probably not the right target audience for that.
But i do appreciate the effort and i do think there's some unused potential, so i am still looking very forward to watching your next release.

just great

This was great fun, and also some impressive effects there. I feel kinda whatever about the AI art, obviously some proper artwork would have been better, but IMO this isn't a huge deal.

So much hype about this one.

I for myself don't care at all what tools and technology were used to create this demo, most likely you got it wrong anyway (I had to laugh at the armchair experts judging my own productions -- so much BS about how/why/based on what I did this or that effect).

The STNICCC 2000 demo by Oxygene has been already mentioned and I can again only laugh when giving "We Were At" as the prime example how to do demos without obvious precalcs -- its bouncing squares effect (50 FPS, fullscreen) is completely done in Box2D and the author didn't make any secret of it. Does it make a less impressive effect/demo? Surely not.

However I can't vote up for this demo either.

I'm with Paranoid, if I were the author and decided to go "full SD card mode", why on earth would I chose redoing the most basic (someone could say most boring) effects from the ST era and accompany it with music which, yeah, sounds like from "We Were At" (and other sample streaming demos) which has drastic size constraints?

Why not do some serious 50 FPS 3D shit with shading and/or textures accompanied by some seriously-sounding music from a studio?

And yes, that photos and story... waste of time and space for me.

But I do hope to see more from you guys, don't let others to tell you what's fun!

Being one of the grumpy old sceners who've had opinions I've given this a _lot_ of thought the last few days. gwEm asked me on #atariscne exactly what I would say makes the difference between "ok cheating" and "just playing back a stream of data".

I ended up with "demo must be able to run off floppy". This fits well with the historical limits we had - and it's easy to limit to 1MB or 4MB RAM in compo rules setting even further limits on how much we can precalc.

It also sets a limit on how quickly you can load precalc into RAM, which means you still have to do the classic "hide your precalc/load in other effects" - or suffer the wrath of the voters having to sit and wait for several minutes.

But I don't set any rules, so this is just one of many opinions of course.

I want to clarify something in my original comment though: I really like this production - I've watched it several times. I just didn't think it's fair for it to compete in the same category as more traditionally produced demos where precalc time is hidden etc. Absolutely no shade on the crew - that's a compo organizer decision.

fun and creative

surprised to find this on sabermans retro channel ...

without getting into rules, demoquette and morals id say this looks like a fine demo for the upcoming Atari CD32 console to be released after the 7800+

As lamers we dont know whats meant by precalc b/c we always thought everyone has been using hashtables since 1969 so maybe that means something else but thats for the pros and the experts to debate.

If the effects are actual effects and not streamed frames id say ATARI LOVES DOTS !!!

As for the A.I. ... im usually totally opposed to it but in this case just like Theoderichs Amiga game id say its not abuse. If you cant draw for shit and you have to bring in a guy for the music i think the little punplot excuses itself in this case but most of all

(i tested it on a misterfpga ste 4mb tos 2.06) this looks like something falling from the sky as the perfect thing to test my incoming side cartridge on the 4mb STE Santa brought back after 35 years and 3 years of looking for a decent deal with utter respect to 2024 and the fact that wallet to my money is as scarce as real boxed version of CIV 1 for the st on ebay these days.

Just what i need to check that thing out

and also , i like it ... i can see why most would think this should be "wild" but im gonna stick with i like it ... creative ... even with the use of pitemachine

Some cool ideas and awesome music. Nice!!!

Great demo with a story.

I love the FX and music ...and the obvious answer, 𝑨𝑴𝑰𝑮𝑨. ; )

I really like the music here. The demo is OK, it drags on far too long though.

I don't care much about things that are precalc'd or "cheating", but using AI generated "art" has to be the clearest definition of what the demoscene should never be about.
We have and had so many talented graphic artists throughout the years, pushing this kinda "content" is insulting to their legacy. They didn't spend their life pushing pixels for having a "demo" with :"creative director" credits. Go back to the advertisement world where you came from.

Fun, great story and flow. I like it despite the controversy.

So, the demo launched from the original Seagate 50MB installed by default in MegaSTE...



So yes, it still works on STe with 8mhz, with 4MB of RAM and HDD...

The pace of the demo is too slow, somehow, perhaps because of the music... And the AI pictures looks... AI.

That being said, and while I don't support the use of AI illustrations, this demo was nice. I appreciated the nods to the "Demoscenes" meme (i.e. the birds/boids doing 3D shapes), the effects, plus the ending twist was kinda funny, hehe. :) And there was an attempt to narrate something. Plus it seems to work on old hardware, so... I think this more than deserves a thumb up.

Next time : faster, with more humour, less AI, and catchier music ! :D

Ditto! Got its charm. Good to see Dr. DF0 and Scorpio back. Would love to see your new demo in this vein, running from a single floppy disk on Amiga 500 :)

That's a weird one. Lots of work clearly went into it and the music is great.
I've also found the demo mostly bland. The story feels contrived and mostly goes nowhere and there are no effects here we haven't seen many times already, although this might have been the point.

I believe that creators can do what they want and in the way they see fit. It's simply creative freedom. However, when releasing productions, they must be ready for criticism, which is the case here. It is worth learning from criticism, but it must be done with a cool head - zero emotion.
For me, this production a cool example of doing things differently.