pouët.net

I tend to run demos realtime when possible, failing that either youtube if I'm just half interested or the best quality capture available if it's something good.

I'm on osx, so I'll watch any mac demos realtime, for windows demos realtime is pretty rare these days. Problem is, I rarely boot into windows, and when i finally do the drivers are hugely out of date and windows update wants to download a whole ton of patches, which makes it quite a pain in the arse. So it only tends to happen after a major party :(

I reckon watching a capture or emulation instead of realtime is roughly comparable to renting a dvd instead of watching a film at the cinema.. there's a big quality difference, even with a HD capture some how. Much more than you might expect.

1) Make a great video that look demo-ish
2) Fill in a .exe file with a lot of random stuff
3) Upload both on pouet
4) See how many thumbs up you get before someone notices

It's as simple as that : there is no interest on doing demos anymore since the day it became possible to watch the video instead. If we were all having 56k connections and megabyte-sized hard disks, it'd be a lot better :)
And yes, that's why I stick to my old 8bit Amstrad CPC.

And btw, opensourcing a demo so it can be updated when new hardware/os won't let it run is a lot better than a vidcap.

btw, on the subject of videos: what about non-realtime demos? as in coded, but the code writes a video instead of drawing to the screen.

I too use a Mac as my main machine, and it is only on special cases that I watch demos on my Windows computer these days (time-constraints being the primary reason). However, I still know they're demos, which is what matters anyway. When I see a HD Vimeo-version of a Fairlight or ASD demo -- that's just fine -- they're still demos, just enjoyed differently. Take the first DemoDVD -- what's on it is still demos, even though they are now gigantic VOB-files, right?

psonice: I've been thinking about that too... nowadays with demo tools and shit, oftentimes you wonder what's the difference between a demo and an aftereffect (or whatever) production, when you take out the real-time factor. If all one does is a flyby, then why not just animate a camera in Max/Maya/whatever and press render?
And then you've got those real good productions, with, you know, the stuff that HAD to be coded, shaders that you didn't see before or animations so complex it had to be generated rather than placed by hand.

Demos are realtime stuff, making videos out of them is perversion. In some cases it´s useful, though

I use youtubed versions of demos when showing to people outside general understanding of what the demoscene is and why you should run them realtime.

I also use captured if there is a special part I want to see.

But for most of the time I watch/hear the realtime version. Highres and no compression loss.

I am like Gloom, using exclusively Mac for development and for day-to-day affairs. I too enjoy most of the demos on my Mac. I don't think there's anything bad with video captures of the demos, in the end I know that I am watching a demo and the effort put into it is what matters. I wouldn't enjoy a wild streamed right out of Adobe Aftereffects any more than I enjoy a demo.

psonice: That's one great idea. It's like 4k procedural graphics, but instead a video :).

Good way to put it. Dunno how well 4k would work though, i guess a frame dumper wouldn't take much space but it wouldn't be too good to play back :) But a 4k that "unpacked" to a 1gb video could rule.

strict .. platform dependancy .. everything else is for the lame 2.0b I'm still running *painful*

Captures are at least useful considering that i have an ATI card (and a sucky one at that) :D

By the way, it occurred to me that many of us have just migrated to Mac as the time went on. How about investing some of our efforts on this platform then? Wouldn't it be useful to have Mac-native demos considering the best thing so far that came out for it was Variform :/.

It's indeed quite weird to see 40% of macs (I was on a full mac table at numerica) and almost no release on that platform!

in other words, osx is killing the scene

In other news, someone is being as conservative as McCain... well Gargy, if there's one thing that doesn't change it's the change itself. The scene has never targeted any single platform as granted. It was Windows because it didn't suck this much or because better alternatives (= Mac OS X) were on unfavorable architectures (= PowerPC). Or maybe suddenly all of us decided to move to Mac for no fucking reason. Who gives a shit? Now that we are on Macs somehow, we should really consider releasing for it as well. I don't give a shit if suddenly the preferred platform for the releases becomes a 7.5" netbook's crippled Ubuntu.

This is not killing the scene, it's supplying the scene with fresh blood, get over it.

fresh blood? eh?

nah... fresh blood does not come from the hardware/OS, but from the people developing for it.

The last many years have shown the fresh demos are not dependant on the platform or OS at all.

Bad thing in videos is that because being offline renders, they always match the targeted framerate, no matter how crappy the code is. One part of a good realtime production is the quality of code and part of that is how fast the effects run. If I see some lousy cubes that run sub-par framerates on my rig I know that the coder has been lazy or is incapable to write fast code and bash him for that. This is something you can't see from a video.

Though I agree with nosfe. If you make a video, lossless full hd or gtfo.

oh yeah, another bonus side effect of the videos (actually i just use youtube or demoscene.tv in most cases) is that my prod comments does not look like "well, that would be nice, except that a friggin' 486 should run it ten times faster" anymore :)

Really, how do you want to judge this with todays hardware? If the demo does not run smoothly on your intended platform you simply reduce the number of polys and simplify some shaders. There is often very little visual difference. If a demo is too slow it is usually because your computer is less specced than the target HW.

Oh but that's even worse with something like video capturing. You have the throughput performance which can be solved somewhat but you also have the worst case performance.

For example the code might not even be realtime-compliant and could very well be full of bugs exhibiting poor / jerky framerates: blocking for a few ms in the realtime rendering thread for example.

That kind of buggy coding becomes totally invisible on a video capture, whereas it could very well be visible on a decent machine.

With video captures, you also have funny things happening like the output being "more correct" thanks to the constant framerate than what was actually shown live in the demoparty.

Without capturing I cant watch Elevated <3

So it's fine by me.

i like having video captures. especially stuff on youtube, vimeo, capped and demoscene tv. that enables me to peek new demos at work etc.

oh, and for the shitty code vs. great visual content in captures - who cares, the demos are normally shown real time at parties and thus their rank is not based on the capture.

It's also about the convenience:

1) Click on youtube/demotv/capped link
2) watch the prod and bitch about it on pouet
3) goto 1

vs.:

1) Download prod
2) unzip
3) realize it needs some new dll
4) update dx, .net, etc. completely wrecking your os in the process
5) realize it won't work on XP, "and i always wanted to upgrade anyway"
6) install Win7
7) realize it will work *only* on Vista
8) install Vista
9) realize it needs SM4 card
10) buy SM4 card
11) realize it will work only on NVidia card
12) with the little money left buy NVidia SM4 card
13) see that it runs like crap and is really bad
14) curse the coder/demogroup on pouet
15) try to cut your wrists with 5¼-inch floppy
16) goto 1