pouët.net

I have a temptation to paste that Andy McCoy quote here

Daaaaamn your modules are good, Yerzmyey ! :D

Or, if you want: 20 years later, and the retro demoscenes are the ones that are closest to being alive.

What did I do before scene? before 1986? Lots of things. I do some of them now :)
So thats what I will do after scene.
When I was active on the scene, I never thought I would stop it, but after loosing interest and time, it was a natural process to leave it seamless.
My last demo was a 256bytes intro in 2010..
Besides of a few 256 bytes intros, I didnt do anything really on scene since 2001.
The interest faded out. One of many reasons was by getting a programmer job. That fills up all the coding interest :)
So for me I have no relation to the demoscene.
I follow new releases on C64 and Amiga and watch them on Youtube. Thats all.

My only hobby activity on computers is still composing in Renoise.
latest release:
https://soundcloud.com/jvedels/korg-m1-test-71?si=a7c97caf03d54570ab01aae768297e2d&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

@TomS4wy3R

Thanks man. :) But once the demoscene is dead I'll switch to driving through forests. ;-P

I was not in school yet when this thread was started. Some of the sceners who have released demos in recent years weren't born yet when this thread was started!

64 bytes should be more than enough for some simple flowers, so the zombie doesn't sound that terrifying.

Yay necromancy. :)

Well... it happened long before 2004.

The Demoscene as we know it started in ~1987. Within months, it exploded and most of the founders was able to find a bunch of other demoscene dudes in their small town.

The first demoscene death was in ~1991, when virtually all of these guys came of age and work/studies demanded too much time. (Then headcount dwindled, at different points in time, by individuals starting a family.)

Deaths happened by individual platforms also: The C64 scene (and maybe 8-bit in general) had its dark times around 1992, the Amiga around 1997, and PC apparently in 2004. I could kind of see this in reference to OP's "coders obsolete": Why bother to make effects when you can render a movie to play back at full fidelity?

Which addresses the most recent death of the Demoscene: Youtube. Why bother publishing software for your beloved platform if nobody bothers to even run them - not even by drag and drop into a free emulator?

(The same is true for gfx and music also - we prefer YT-mangled sound over the sound chip and FB-mangled pixel art over CRTs.)

One important observation is that when a demo (definition: "like a music video, but with the effects running in real time on a computer") actually just becomes a music video, there is nothing to separate the Demoscene from any other art form. The Demoscene lives and dies by its participants needing, embracing, and using hardware. This goes for organizers as well. Yes, even if it can cause interruptions or make presentation less professional. )I think it makes it real and therefore MORE professional.

We can see that the die-hards are still around, this 'scene hasn't quite gone "stale and Jazz" yet (this will be the final death), and there's great enthusiasm around hardware, and perhaps more activity than ever on other forums and the like, "retro" is a hot topic, etc etc.

But the point I wanted to make OT is this: The Demoscene can only die when it's too much work to invent new effects. Now, this is very hard and requires imagination, lots of time and motivation, sometimes over several months to a year. This is also why we see so few new effects - virtually none, on all platforms, over all years. But sometimes there's a blip on the radar from someone who had all these things.

Seen in this perspective, the Demoscene has been continuously dead for all of its lifetime, with variations of existing effects and only slight design decisions to make it look a bit different. (With some dark years for each platform coinciding with running out of ideas/motivation.)

Now, all is not lost, because I know it's possible, because I have noted down countless new effects awaiting all of the above ingredients. So too have certainly many other coders. Why hang around or join the Demoscene? My meaning is that this is the reason.

To see what new audiovisual impressions can be conjured up, instead of just music videos.

It'll die way after I do ;)

As long as a single scener is alive, the demoscene is alive. Then, it may happen that somebody new to the scene rediscovers the scene, and the demoscene is revived.

It will take a long time until the demoscene will be dead.

This.
Form of delivery is a crucial part od the demoscene IMHO.

That’s why I think that ancient platforms/fantasy consoles demoscene will actually outlive cutting edge unrestricted size Windows demoscene in the end. Compactness and compatibility. When it comes to gigabyte sized demos it becomes ever harder to justify not consuming them via YouTube.

On the one hand side, you surely got a point there, on the other, those videos are merely captures which, IMHO, still transfer the "spirit".
So what is this "spirit" ? It's when you create things out of a gut feeling*, not because someone else demands them.
* hard to explain but to rephrase: the best creations are often the ones "done quick", versus "polished to death"

In an interconnected world that somehow demands "uniformity" this may seem increasingly difficult but I am sure (at least I hope) that there will always be people who leave their mark on society the way _they_ see fit.

So, is the demoscene dead ? It may be dying but you cannot kill an idea.

p.s.: more "punk" demos please, I'll at least watch the video :-)

One thing tho. When speaking of C64 (and some other platforms), for me, part of this “spirit” involves buttery smooth 50 Hz (on a CRT preferably, but whatever). 50 Hz (as in 50fps) doesn’t look that hot on a (? fps) YouTube video played back through 60 or 75 Hz computer monitor. It’s jerky. That was the spirit and allure of C64 scene for me back then; most games were jerky and most scene prods were smooth. That’s for the technical part of the “spirit”. The (sub)cultural part of the “spirit” involves shuffling files of a few dozen KB. Not streaming videos of a few hundred MB. If only to defy the reckelssly wasteful mainstream lamery. That would be closer to “punk” these days. So, not all that much “spirit” is left if we abandon vintage hardware in my view.

100%. I've seen recent prods posted on the pouet discord - and don't have the platform to run them, and been disappointed when there's not yet a YouTube capture. Because I appreciate the effort involved, respect them & their artistry.

It is NOT the same as "just a video" .. even if the experience may diff from old hardware with a CRT.. the use of an emulator is closer to the real experience, even if not as accurate.

i imagine there are a lot of lurkers here who are working on their own projects in private (yknow, 1% rule). i know that because i was one of them (and still am, unless you count the very minor contributions ive made). study gets in the way of this for me personally, if i had more time i would have a few demos out by now

Scene is already dead for a long time. We´re just necroscening for years. Still fun, though!

The demoscene may never die, but it will change to a point of being unrecognizable. The very word itself will mean something else, not what we would recognize as the demoscene. Arguably this has already happened. Many times, in fact. The scene in 1995 was nothing like in 1985. Not to mention 2015.

If we all left the scene, and passed it on to the newcomers, the youngsters we see at many parties, what they would do would be unrecognizable. Most of them are detached from our traditions, in every sense. They simply did not experience what we did. Being a teenager with an Amiga was profoundly different than being a teenager with today's *insert any technology*.

But then, this wouldn't be the first time. Have you read "The Real Programmer", and how it condemned "high school kids with their ZX Spectrums" with no respect to "real men"? Those kids were us.

The demoscene is an X-gen experience. We cannot really pass it on. We cannot share it. It was unique, and it's only ours. Others may have something else.

Also read my article for Jurassic Pack: https://tarnkappe.info/jurassic-pack/the-demoscene-a-generational-phenomenon-296412.html

Sounds like an excessively static analysis. As you said, the scene has been changing ...and also people have been changing, they're not just from one particular generation. Previous phases of the scene have left their marks on it. It's now a complex concoction of things from various eras.

My initial impression is that there is no any technological chasm now like there was between minicomputer or mainframe programmers and ZX Spectrum kids. Demoscene technology is mostly accessible and almost any type of programming can be applied here.

Demoscene is not a "technology". It's a vibe, a spirit, a "Zeitgeist". We use technology that matches this, but technology itself isn't a driving force. While we indeed have demos on every imaginable and unimaginable platform now, most of them were made as a unique challenge. We don't really have a Vectrex scene, a microcontroller scene or an 1980s-Soviet-desktop-phone scene. Neither of these or similar platforms would've ever given birth to our community.

Well, that's one valid point of view.
However, you could look at it from this other angle: both the minicomputer coders and ZX Spectrum kids coded in assembly, close to the metal, as opposed to todays kids.

Not necessarily. Scene isn't only coders, as we all know. I'm pretty sure most great pixel artists, animators, musicians, organizers, diskmag editors, etc. couldn't write a single loop in assembly to save their mother from the top of a tree.

Like I wrote, the demoscene was a product of an era, a "Zeitgeist". It needed the perfect constellation of many factors, and not just technological. For example, the democratic freedom of Western Europe, particularly Scandinavia. The end of parents and educators treating kids as cattle and future factory workers. The contemporary hype about computers becoming everyday items, and the stereotypical "wonder kid" image, the one you see depicted on the packagings of so many microcomputers of the era. The euphoric catharsis of the end of the Cold War, a victory of freedom and justice, regardless if it was real or we were just led to believe so. Rock and roll. Techno music. MTV. All new and all exciting.

Growing up today is much more doom and gloom. What would a today's teenager see? First of all, a constant pressure to conform. Do as you're ordered, or get canceled. Talk to others as if you were walking on eggshells. One wrong word to a girl, and you're forever a pariah. Obey the orders! You will never own a home like your parents did. In fact, you will own nothing (and be happy)! Everything you do will be under surveillance. Everything interesting is restricted. You go to jail if you offend some freak. Or if you just potentially could. And finally, the biggest: You aren't free to build your personality! You must choose one of the approved flags. If you dare to try otherwise, you'll be canceled to oblivion.

And you wonder why kids aren't interested in exploring the world and expressing themselves?

So... childhood and adolescence are dead too?

Holy crap!

In the sense how we experienced it, certainly.

We know about today’s kids ways and motivations even less than our parents knew about ours. So…

There’s nothing intrinsically “great” about the oldschool scene. If We removed the pink glasses of nostalgia, I personally remember it mostly being about a bunch of rude nerdy kids acting out, behaving in stark contrast to the altruistic ethos of the original computer hackers. Asolescents playing the make-believe game of neoliberal grown-up world. Losers from the track & field searching for something, some place where they can be winners. Not ditching the toxic game. Not even really rebelling against the world, but in fact conforming, repeating the world’s twisted patterns. Some of the kids painting themselves into the same corner, the same rat-race the real world was increasingly becoming. Don’t get me wrong, taking it all in small doses back then, I loved almost every little part of it, but let’s not romanticize it.