"Demos are like movies or animations, but the effects are calculated in real time!"
category: general [glöplog]
I'm putting this in General, as it's usually the non-coders who don't care about whether this is true or not. (Right, coders?)
"Demos are like movies or animations, but the effects are calculated in real time!"
Are we saying this to describe what the demoscene is about to newcomers and/or outsiders? Are you?
In that case, shouldn't we make sure that's what the demoscene is about? I'm just saying this because lately, I think I've caught 3 heavily popular demos at prerendering or storing in them the entire visuals (with suitably synced flashes or scene-changes to hide it).
The reason I bring it up is that it will make the above definition false if it carries on, and it seems to me we would lose any cred we may have in the eyes of new computer-freaks. Do we want that? If it's the only thing that makes the visuals possible, still, do we want that?
I did a Maya render and converter and font for a skull that reads a scrolltext, but I got cold feet when I thought about this. Even if I put in quite a bit of time making this and it looks good, I hate the idea of it and it will never be used. I made it on a kick off some textmode demo, that octopus thingy (not necessarily relevant to this discussion).
Oh sure, any demos extending limited platforms will look better - and demos obscuring the GHz by "going all pixely and charactery and shit" may appeal to oldskool. And there will always be some compression scheme or codec porting, or character attribute trixxxing to justify the impressive being just animation, but unless it's obvious to everyone it's animation player time (nice Celebrandil demos, or cool Twenty clips) (or some generic lib is released making it the point of the demo), wouldn't it make fools of less cynically minded and more dedicated coders, and wouldn't the scene become animation player time all around, and we would lose what defines us?
Maybe it only defines what I do, but I don't think so. And the discussion is as old as 1991-06-28 or 1989-06-02 (or even 1990-07-16, hehe), I guess. And this is of course not about the wrong guy winning, when Booze Design entered they won, so the universe is in harmony. :) It's more about "why should a coder try to code something nice when he could spend 10% of the time coding an animation player that does the effect even bigger and better?"
Maybe it will soon be for all sceners as I learned from teh Pantaloon last week, "You can't trick the eyes anymore". I hope that will happen, and that we will have real, nice animations instead, and prohibit passing on prerendering and animation players as effects with size limits and precalc times. And fucking code for and on the platform we want cred for supporting.
Well, I've shared my take. Slap me with your thoughts.
/Photon of Scoopex
"Demos are like movies or animations, but the effects are calculated in real time!"
Are we saying this to describe what the demoscene is about to newcomers and/or outsiders? Are you?
In that case, shouldn't we make sure that's what the demoscene is about? I'm just saying this because lately, I think I've caught 3 heavily popular demos at prerendering or storing in them the entire visuals (with suitably synced flashes or scene-changes to hide it).
The reason I bring it up is that it will make the above definition false if it carries on, and it seems to me we would lose any cred we may have in the eyes of new computer-freaks. Do we want that? If it's the only thing that makes the visuals possible, still, do we want that?
I did a Maya render and converter and font for a skull that reads a scrolltext, but I got cold feet when I thought about this. Even if I put in quite a bit of time making this and it looks good, I hate the idea of it and it will never be used. I made it on a kick off some textmode demo, that octopus thingy (not necessarily relevant to this discussion).
Oh sure, any demos extending limited platforms will look better - and demos obscuring the GHz by "going all pixely and charactery and shit" may appeal to oldskool. And there will always be some compression scheme or codec porting, or character attribute trixxxing to justify the impressive being just animation, but unless it's obvious to everyone it's animation player time (nice Celebrandil demos, or cool Twenty clips) (or some generic lib is released making it the point of the demo), wouldn't it make fools of less cynically minded and more dedicated coders, and wouldn't the scene become animation player time all around, and we would lose what defines us?
Maybe it only defines what I do, but I don't think so. And the discussion is as old as 1991-06-28 or 1989-06-02 (or even 1990-07-16, hehe), I guess. And this is of course not about the wrong guy winning, when Booze Design entered they won, so the universe is in harmony. :) It's more about "why should a coder try to code something nice when he could spend 10% of the time coding an animation player that does the effect even bigger and better?"
Maybe it will soon be for all sceners as I learned from teh Pantaloon last week, "You can't trick the eyes anymore". I hope that will happen, and that we will have real, nice animations instead, and prohibit passing on prerendering and animation players as effects with size limits and precalc times. And fucking code for and on the platform we want cred for supporting.
Well, I've shared my take. Slap me with your thoughts.
/Photon of Scoopex
Says Stamnes
what defines us? lots of beer and soda
What is the demoscene, a group of people who never leave their basements except for an occasional party where they can show off their cool amiga prods! :)
What is the demoscene, a group of people who never leave their basements except for an occasional party where they can show off their cool amiga prods! :)
It's all about cubes, glow and ribbons.
"The scene is that thing that died in 1992"
That's what I tell people when they ask me about the demoscene.
That's what I tell people when they ask me about the demoscene.
LOOK AT THIS ANIMATION. IT'S A PROGRAM. IT'S NOT A VIDEO. IT'S YOUR NEW GOD!
and it's all Stamnes
A demo is that which looks cooler than an animation of the same size. Says xTr1m.
You never get a hot effect running at low FPS in a video. It's the truth.
low fps means there's some serious shit going down, maybe even a record
Code:
A demo is that which looks cooler than an animation of the same size. Says xTr1m. i thought it was just a joke sentence, but then i read it twice. no kidding, it's not a bad starting point for a serious definition (not that we need one)
lol, [code] -> [quote]
Photon, I know what you mean. Just beware that it's a slippery slope to be too categorical. You might end up in some quagmire where you aren't sure what falls into the pre-render box and what doesn't.
I am assuming that you're talking about 64 or maybe even amiga effects here. Here's one amiga effect that I always wanted to do in back in '94: do inconvex vectors using a pre-processing step where you clip lines of overlapping faces so you can draw all faces and fill them with the blitter "as usual". Now the thing that (AFAIrecall) was the main obstacle was to find all edge intersections per frame. The idea (which was Blazer's, not mine) was to just precalc all intersections as triples: ((int)lineIndex_0, (int)lineIndex_1, ("float")distance_from_starting_point_of_first_line_to_intersection) and store them. This would be easy to play back, but it would be non-interactive and it would in many ways be a (a very effective) compression scheme for the animation.
How would you judge this effect?
ps. I may be off the chart here, if I misunderstood you then please ignore.
I am assuming that you're talking about 64 or maybe even amiga effects here. Here's one amiga effect that I always wanted to do in back in '94: do inconvex vectors using a pre-processing step where you clip lines of overlapping faces so you can draw all faces and fill them with the blitter "as usual". Now the thing that (AFAIrecall) was the main obstacle was to find all edge intersections per frame. The idea (which was Blazer's, not mine) was to just precalc all intersections as triples: ((int)lineIndex_0, (int)lineIndex_1, ("float")distance_from_starting_point_of_first_line_to_intersection) and store them. This would be easy to play back, but it would be non-interactive and it would in many ways be a (a very effective) compression scheme for the animation.
How would you judge this effect?
ps. I may be off the chart here, if I misunderstood you then please ignore.
Let's talk about jazz musicians.
Suppose you want to introduce someone to the world of jazz music. You might tell them that it's a style of music characterised by syncopated rhythms and complex chord progressions, and typically performed on instruments such as guitar, piano and trumpet.
Then you discover someone who plays a kickass jazz harpsichord.
Does that destroy the credibility of jazz as a musical genre? Fuck no.
The 'rules' of an art form, whether that's jazz music or demos, exist as a framework for people to be creative within. They exist as a shared interest for people to congregate around and be inspired. They do not exist for some whiny bastard to say "no, that doesn't count because it's pre-rendered / interactive / doesn't have a D&B soundtrack".
They do exist to stop people shitting in a jar and calling it art. In other words, just because we can't come up with a precise definition that distinguishes 'our' art form from others, it doesn't mean we have to throw our doors open and accept *everything*. If something is done in the spirit of the demoscene - realtime or not - then we know whether it belongs here, regardless of whether we can define it.
Suppose you want to introduce someone to the world of jazz music. You might tell them that it's a style of music characterised by syncopated rhythms and complex chord progressions, and typically performed on instruments such as guitar, piano and trumpet.
Then you discover someone who plays a kickass jazz harpsichord.
Does that destroy the credibility of jazz as a musical genre? Fuck no.
The 'rules' of an art form, whether that's jazz music or demos, exist as a framework for people to be creative within. They exist as a shared interest for people to congregate around and be inspired. They do not exist for some whiny bastard to say "no, that doesn't count because it's pre-rendered / interactive / doesn't have a D&B soundtrack".
They do exist to stop people shitting in a jar and calling it art. In other words, just because we can't come up with a precise definition that distinguishes 'our' art form from others, it doesn't mean we have to throw our doors open and accept *everything*. If something is done in the spirit of the demoscene - realtime or not - then we know whether it belongs here, regardless of whether we can define it.
Demoscene for me involves going to a particular airport once a year to walk past a rotating carousel of well lit sausages.
For me, a good effect is about what it appears to be, not what it actually is. So yes, if you can pre-calculate something without it being obvious, all the power to you.
Thats why I'm hooked on AVIs. Says Stamnes.
Notice how particle demos are quite popular, and how they have that funny characteristic of giving encoders a hard time not doing pure crap. I find this interesting: you get a cool effect that you just cannot appreciate in a video with current technology.
A demo is simply what it is, and you may or not enjoy it for that.
Talking about jazz musicians I was looking at a flyer with the programming of a certain cultural venue around here and they had a section for Music and another for Jazz. I guess you can't bring your children to one of those.
Talking about jazz musicians I was looking at a flyer with the programming of a certain cultural venue around here and they had a section for Music and another for Jazz. I guess you can't bring your children to one of those.
Quote:
It's more about "why should a coder try to code something nice when he could spend 10% of the time coding an animation player that does the effect even bigger and better?"
let me ask a question back: why should he code an animation player?
i think that is why 4k's and smaller intros are beginning to become more popular. its going in the opposite direction. i wonder why the demo filesize limits are so high nowadays, of course it is because of the texture sizes, high polycount-models and the more features the demo needs to make it look good etc.. (and that is a result of new and "better" technology, faster cpu's and gpu's..). remember those times when a demo just fitted on a disk? or it was like about 5-8 megabytes in size.
does a polarization between oldschool(old platforms) and newschool(new platforms) increase faster because of bigger filesize? do we care? I dont think I do. is it the polarization that causes the doomsday-prophecies of the demoscene? do you think it destroys the demoscene? Not that i would think so, as long as most coders and sceners know the difference between megabytes and gigabytes, (hz/)mhz and ghz, " " etc.. i really dont think so.
Quote:
It's more about "why should a coder try to code something nice when he could spend 10% of the time coding an animation player that does the effect even bigger and better?"
Quote:
The 'rules' of an art form, whether that's jazz music or demos, exist as a framework for people to be creative within. They exist as a shared interest for people to congregate around and be inspired. They do not exist for some whiny bastard to say "no, that doesn't count because it's pre-rendered / interactive / doesn't have a D&B soundtrack".
+1
To me, working on demos is about doing something I love. Its about coding for the sake of coding, and trying to make something beautiful. Sure, its great to be appreciated for something you've poured your soul into, but first and foremost its about exorcizing your raw creative drive as an individual. Everytime you compromise that for what a demo is "supposed" to be, the scene dies a little.
The only "limitations" we need are the ones necessary to carry out competitions. For example: everyone must respect the 4k limit, or the sizelimit of the combined demo compo, or the fact that you're not allowed to download content from the web.. or any one of those compo specific rules.
Apart from that: anything goes.
Apart from that: anything goes.
.. says Stamnes
gasman has leading.
Anything goes, and there's new effects and apparent visual/musical beauty, but limitations are the only thing that enables people outside the demoscene to appreciate the technical achievement behind a demoscene production. "Runs on a C64 with 1MHz" or " has 4k file size" is much more impressive than that brand-new point cloud thingy or whatnot...
