pouët.net

a quick look on the market shows that a gf8600 can be acquired for ~40 euros - but sure, go buy a macbook instead like the rest of the thread. *cough*


that's bull and you know it.

and you know what, it would be well within the rights of demomakers to release their demos under a license that explicitly forbids the distribution of video versions. sure, it would exclude part of the crowd who REALLY can't watch it (not that i've ever seen the actual realtime version of planet potion more than twice), but it might be a small price to pay compared to someone who takes a five second peek in the youtube version and thumbs it down.

Gargaj: Look, I can't watch PC-demos (read: Windows demos) without having a video. And you know, my platform of preference to code for (Falcon) has a really narrow audience with real hardware. I guess a big majority are watching our demos as a video. Nobody seems to thumb them down because of it, so why should that be the case for PC-demos?

evil: i'm trying to differentiate between watching demos in video out of a) necessity and b) convenience/indifference - the latter annoys me (and apparently a lot more active sceners)

Gargaj, for me is not. It is just my opinion. It is just that I have no idea about it... really. Remember that I am an oldschool demoscener, without a gfx card to try to code something on it... so I've completely lost the idea of what can be and can't be done...

Please do. I am already looking forward to the lates 0day demo warez on youtube.

i have no problems believing that it's hard to tell what's impressive or not - but blaming it on the hardware is just an excuse, nothing more. sure, on a fixed platform it's a lot easier to represent the awesome numerically - 128 sprites is more than 64. one-frame is better than two-frame. but i think that argument got lost ever since AGA and PC became demo-platforms

we've recently seen that the copyright violation form on youtube works quite well :)

At this point, I really think we for better or for worse better start working on justifying realtime performance of a demo.

Organically, the demo itself can justify its existence as a realtime performance through the following means: displayed data is too dense or too complicated to be encoded to video in a satisfactory manner, (like in the last few mfx demos); usage of changing (non-static) data sets; interactivity with spectators.

Few of those methods will work in the context of demoparties, and I don't trust organizers too much to really set a standard here. After all, there's always going to be an "element of pleasing the audience"

The other direction as Gargaj pointed out is to concentrate on the experience of watching a demo live on a big screen, by making demos exclusively watcheable in that context (through licensing for example)

This doesn't help of course with parties where demos are played as video recordings, such as numerica (which butchered my demo's output to be honest)

I'm certainly am looking for my own answer to the whole question.

@Gargaj:

I don't want to blame hardware at all. I love current hardware demos, these are awesome. What I mean, is that since the fast evolution I've not been able to adapt to it at all, and since then, I am not differencing so much if it is a video or not... I know, it is sad... but it just me.

For me it is being really hard to appreciate the coders effort in current demos :( I know it has to be hard, but not knowing the difficulties of it, I feel again as a non-coder

In a way the question we might ask is whether we haven't "dropped" the ball in terms of distribution methods, too. Increasingly it has become difficult to distribute demos, for example intros, without having to cope with people's stupid virus checkers blurting out false positives.

Another aspect is the windows ecosystem which has started to suck. It seems microsoft really does not know what to do with its platforms anymore, or is stuck in between, especially with their focus on x360 as an independent (and heavily monetized) platform. At some point it was believed that microsoft would mandate powerful graphic cards for its next OS.. the market however does not look capable of following such move, due to the business centric approach that Windows-based PC always had.

So the divergence between the scene's methods of distribution and the rest of the world's does not make executables such a convenient delivery method they once were.

It seemed to me at some point that this was one of the huge advantages of Flash and Processing. You however see people there encoding their flash + processing demos to video too, this time because they either would be too embarassed by their realtime performance, or because they want to work on huge datasets/resolutions.

A naïve hope would be a re-unification of the platforms used throughout the scene towards a single capability platform. What makes it naïve is that
1) a computer user today is more a network user than a computer user -- so they are satisfied with platforms of varied graphical capaibilities --
2) less focus on PC gaming (and increased usage of consoles) means that advanced graphics on a PC is less "needed" than before
3) the scener population has aged and this has reduced the number of sceners who would've been interested in buying a powerful graphic card for anything else than demos. Vicious circle here, since the obvious answer is to provide and watch videos, which further reduces the need for a standard hardware.

knos: Average Joe is not an issue here - if Average Joe cant watch my demo because his computer is from '97, well, gotta break some eggs for an omelette, but i'd like to assume that demosceners care more than that, it's just that somewhere among the line, compromising became acceptable.

What makes a demoscener nowadays? Think how their age and computer usage has changed. Take my musician friends: (who all started on trackers) 60% of them use Macs. Maybe ony 20% still use trackers. (which means they are less forced to use the same platform) 35% of them game, mostly on consoles. 20% of them have kids. None of them still watch demos regularly. They still are mostly enthusiasts, however only through video captures, and mostly online. In any case they increasingly go the laptop way, and will favor independence/lightness/size over graphics: buying expensive graphics card is out of question.

Back in 2005-2007 I used to arrange tea + demos nights here at home to show demos off (mostly because I had invested in recent hardware to encode videos for the scene.org awards)

None of that is needed anymore now that a simple mac mini plays h264 videos in a speedy way.

And those of us who dabble with code don't spend enough time dealing with the new sophisticated hardware to justify even buying it! Learning the new hardware is a full time job. As a hobbyist by the time you'd be satisfied with it, yours (and your practice) would be obsolete.

On top of that a lot of my friends (even amongst the sceners / ex-sceners) rely on second hand / used hardware and haven't had a top of the line PC in years.

It's been years now that I've been increasingly thinking that *I* should be doing more demos, and more than run on my friends' hardware rather than whatever hardware a compo organizer has arranged.

Demos should be made to be shared and watched. We however lose a lot of the impact when they are played next to the dramatic chipmunk or a (altogethere quite nice) vegetable orchestra.

What I'm getting at here is that a "demoscener" nowadays is more or less the coder who wrote a demo.

All the other artists are .. what are they? Average joes?

Before there were real GPUs you had to buy new CPUs or a whole new computer which were the same price (or even more expensive) than a new GPU today. Today you just go and slap in a new 80€ mid-range graphics card and off you go... IMO it must have gotten much easier to watch PC demos in realtime...

i have a low budget pc and a business laptop. both suffice to my needs for demo coding, however they can't run todays demos :-)

Capture em, tie em up & spank away! That will teach em!

Actually, let say that I'm lucky and just got a gf8600 free (true story). Now somebody please throw me a new motherboard, a new processor with it, and maybe a new power supply, so that I can actually use it...


Yes, because what we *REALLY* want is less audience, yeah, right. This idea is stupidest than all the over-the-top RMS rants together.


I would instantly thumb down any demo with such a license without watching it (which is something I deeply condemn - in normal circumstances). I guess I wouldn't be alone.

i'll just feed the troll here.

get a job.

so what's the difference? you're missing the point - why should demomakers respect "the audience" if they get no respect for watching the demo as it was intended?

ok, go on, make demos with license forbidding watching them. why should i respect your work when i'm not allowed to even watch it?

Gargaj, money is not necessarly the issue. People who don't "upgrade the whole set" are not "losers" as you seem to imply. Able yet not being willing to is what matters.

DESIRE has to be created.

I disagree. I don't think we need to justify what we do, any more than a sculptor needs to justify making things out of stone when he could be using 3D modelling software instead. Or papier mache. Or Lego. Realtime is the medium that we choose to create our stuff in, even if it isn't the final delivery mechanism... and it defines how the final product turns out. If you sat me down in front of Renderman or AfterEffects, I wouldn't have a fucking clue what to do. I certainly wouldn't end up with something that looked like a demo.

I'm kind of reminded of a documentary I saw about the early days of Aardman Animations (you know, the Wallace And Gromit guys) where they'd make a fly-on-the-wall audio recording of everyday office life, or a market stall or something, and then spend 6 months recreating it as a stop-motion animation. And half way through, they'd go "Why the hell are we doing this? Why do we not just go to the office and film this shit?" But they'd finish the project, premiere it at a film festival, and the audience would be on the edge of their seats. And so it is with demos: if the creator has worked within those constraints, it *will* show through in the end result, regardless of how it's delivered.

i have no money to buy new hardware to watch new demos on
(and we didnt' even qualify for the NVIDIA-hardware give out last year with flo as we aren't good enough demomakers)
so i say fuck off to anyone who thinks that watching demos from videos isn't acceptable.

and all videos should be: LOSSLESS

I think as long as you can watch demos realtime, you should, but still I don't think there's anything wrong with videos even if you could. This is what I tend to do myself.

if it runs in WINE ill watch it realtime :)