pouët.net

well no. of course no.
but hey, just show me a demo from near past which made you saying: "Oh, holy shit, how did they do that?"
but there are. Poem to a horse, squish, hs7... well none of'em was a demo... maybe raw confessions, but that wasn't such a jaw-dropper to me...

Just show me a demo that uses pixel or vertex shaders, period!

I think the only ones ever to have used shaders are Mad Onion, and I don't even consider them as part of the demo scene since 1999.

Oh, and if you're wondering what is our old Statix (Psychic Link / Acme / Pulse) is doing, just browse to his webspace and download "tom thumb"!

http://www.bluespoon.com/

I really admire this guy's "high level" of quality.

33: um, "horizontal cool", "fable", "raw confessions" all use pixel shaders, and that's just from the top of my head. and there are gazillions of demos that use vertex shaders.

I suggest you shut up and go bitch elsewhere.

seconding sagacity. just shut your fucking mouth '33' and get a grip on the subject's you're ranting on about. custom shaders aren't exclusively meant to do "special effects" or anything you might consider "jaw-dropping." . in fact, they serve a broader scala of purposes. and besides that: everything done in a vertex shader can also be done on the CPU... without any visual discrepancy (unless your CPU is dead slow ofcourse ;-)). just to underline the fact that you can't always recognize a custom shader in action by experiencing a "jaw dropping effect"... which is something you seem to think.

"but there are. Poem to a horse, squish, hs7"

poem to a horse is a nice show, but that's about it. i find squish plain ugly (name *any* element of it that qualifies as a "wow, how did they do that" one), and heaven7 is a showcase of nifty optimizing and fairly good design: the same goes for those mid/late-90's productions you named. it's just that back then, a relatively larger percentage of people didn't have any clue what things were about.. do you still believe that second reality was 'far ahead' of it's time? :)

well snap out of it: it wasn't.

it's about time we dropped this "hunt for impossibilities": the effect-era is clearly over and done with. besides that democoding became a much more timeconsuming task (it's a relatively *easy* task yes, but certainly not less boring and lengthy... <- this is where effort and discipline come into play, you know.. those things that stop most people from being productive on a non-profitable basis). people expect more, not only from the coding front.. but especially from the 'content front'. do you have an idea how many willing coders spend more of their time searching and asking for content than coding?

i'm not trying to breed disrespect for productions of the past btw, i'm just trying to poke your eyes in the right direction.

you tell 'em, Steve-Dave

sagacity: Do not mix pixel shaders with vertex shaders...

While I have consulted those 3 demos (because I haven't seen any of them before), I now remember I did see some older demos with shaders before, but I'd say they were very limited shader usage. Nothing like what a GF 3 Ti or Radeon 8500 can do, anyhow.

But I agree, maybe I complain, but I complain for a good cause. Because the latest crop of demos are clearly not innovative or uplifting towards technology as it used to be.

http://www.gamedev.net/columns/hardcore/dxshader1/

;°)

a gf3 ti can't do all that much. more than we've seen up to date, yes, but not that much.

and do you have the slightest clue how MANY people still have a geforce ][ or worse? (yes, coders too).

33: how do you think you can comment on current demos if you haven't even seen any of them? ("I haven't seen any of them before") and if you want to see certain kind of demos then DO IT YOURSELF. we're all doing this for free so you have no right to start bitching about what you want people to do.

Steve-Dave, would you say that today's sceners are poor bastards compared to (for example) 1995-1997 sceners?

I remember in 1995, the NAID 95 compo computer was something around an AMD 486DX2-80 and had like 40MB ram and 200mg hard disk. I don't remember if it had Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. Most compos were written without considering hardware accellerated graphics, but considered a GUS to be a good mod playback because of it's directly accessible hardware voice channels which saved some cpu usage for graphics and caluclations. But those computers were nothing like what we have today!!!

In comparision:
A 486 DX4-100 for example has around 100 MIPS
A Pentium Pro 200 has around 500 MIPS
A Pentium 4 2Ghz has roughly 5000 MIPS

Now consider that we also have extremely powerful graphics card for 3D accelerated graphics, and that we dropped tracked music for MP3 playback (which uses no more than around 20 MIPS).......

We have great powerhouses!!! I don't think we should forget about this fact. Everyone should be aware of this growth and that we need to think about how to use all this technology... I think scene members should be greedy and think about how they can use all this potential.

I suggest a referendum (?)

raimo: I'm doing music for free ;°)

And, about recent demos, I regularly download recent demos. I just don't download ALL of them.

I ran that on a 486 back then. Very high-end indeed!

In fact, none of the demos you named had anything "enevelope pushing" save for the impact they had on people.

Crystal Dreams 2 maybe. When I watched this on a 486 DX-50 for the first time, I was coming to the creeping suspicion that my poor 386-DX-40 was a piece of crap.

And since you're involving Statix in your delusions: remember Bleam? THAT was a tech-spec pusher, not bloody 303.

The whole scene has been singlehandedly spanked by one single man, John Carmak.

And now with Doom 3, the marging will draw even wider as all the scene coders will look even more like lame idiots....

33: It all depends on what you're trying to reach and how. Compare visual quality of a good demo released in 1995 and one released in 2002/2003. What were you saying.. we're not using it? Oh yes, i'm pretty damn sure that CPU (and GPU) can be pushed more.. but regarding that i'd like to refer to my previous arguments (which you haven't been answering in any way).

Another thing you'll have to keep in mind is that most active coders are quite new.. they're still picking up the tricks of the trade (the entrylevel became a lot lower ever since the late 90's). Most older coders (or "older", like myself, since i'm not really oldschool ;-)), have other things to do than spending hours implementing that fancy algorithm using mmx/isse instructions or writing that particulary cool shader.

If i get off my ass to code something scenewise, i'd just like to forget the bitfucking i have to do at work each day and play around a little... and those moments are not the ones that result in particulary chic code.

And yes, most sceners are poor. Always been. And yes, decent display adapters became relatively more expensive.

coding what carmack codes is not exactly hard. carmack is the perfect example of a mature, more than sufficiently skilled, coder, with a lot of smart ideas on how to obtain good-looking visuals in a hardware-wise (relatively) cheap way. doom3 isn't really all that fancy when you get to understand how it works. and remember: the content decides how it looks. demos are non-profit, and thus can not afford the same high-quality artists (of which most have never heard of or aren't interested in this thing called demoscene).

carmack spanks nobody, he just spends a lot of time coding on his SGI box :)

we got some deus ex ][ stuff running here.. looks just as good as doom ]|[. so ion storm singlehandedly "spanked the whole scene and made them look like lame idiots" too? you should see the code.. i guess you're wrong :D

"sagacity: Do not mix pixel shaders with vertex shaders..."

ofcourse not. your point being?

"The whole scene has been singlehandedly spanked by one single man, John Carmak."

Well then, why aren't you playing Quake right now?

I agree.. why don't you either quit the scene and play quake or go make the high end demos yourself? I can't afford any new hardware but I try not to bitch about it and instead watch demos someplace else than home..

Keep the spirit up sagacity and violator........

Anyhow, I'm sticking to music. ;°)

and I'm assuming your music is really original.

:Do not mix pixel shaders with vertex shaders

else you're gonna end up with a terrible headache next morning

well, then stop bitch about code and make your music. If you think coders are too lazy to make demos that you like then perhaps you could learn too code and make them for yourself. Or are you too lazy too learn the shit that coders are too lazy too perform??

where is edit when you need it? repleace perform with produce.

Something that hasn't been mentioned: There's a new high-end graphics card every four months or so. I'll be damned if I'm going to be spending $500 several times a year just to keep up with the demoscene.

I was telling you and you didn't listen! PCs suxx, PCs are not for real demomakers, PCs are for the toilet. YOU Didn't listen!!! =PPP)>