pouët.net

demoscene is about rabbits.

I mostly just get a blank stare from people......"Real thyme, what?", usually followed by; "calculated?".

mu6k: you got it first time! ;)

iq: no, that is a very bad definition - not that I was trying to define what demo is. It's more about what we tell others that a demo is without going redfaced. For example, it doesn't rule out small intros with 8 minutes of precalc and 2 minutes of replayed animation.

Hyde: that's what was done 1991-06-28 (or earlier), and also later :) I saw an AGA one as well, I forget the name. Some big hollow cubes/solid grids in space.

gasman:

I don't believe in parables that are too far removed, such as comparing jazz and demos to some generic, like "artforms". (See the Are Demos Art? thread.)

It's completely irrelevant to me whether demos *look* like art, or movies, it's just a plus to me if they are so well made that they do. Some of the best PC demos with good storyboarding are already close to both, but they are nevertheless in real-time, which is exactly what makes them demos.

But you mention rules. Yes, they are there for a reason, and coders are clever buggers so they can mask abuse of them well, even to other coders and certainly to someone learning which demos are cool or not (and sometimes the orgas wittingly or unwittingly assist this by recording video instead of getting PAL equipment, any long precalc is not recorded).

I think a tightening of the rules may help in screening out these to me unwanted animation player/precalc/decompressor demos. But I'm leaving it open and asking you if you want them. Do you?


Maybe you want some constructive hands-on rules, well, let's see...


How about not lumping together precalc and running time into a max time of 10 minutes that is rarely reached, but limiting decrunch/precalc to 30 seconds and allow 9.5 minutes running time? That would at least force coders to spend a good few minutes showing cheap FX and drag them out in order to make some FPS gain in the animation player part that follows (or other unimpressive things that will make coders think twice).

Nothing stops coders from extending the power of an oldskool platform by loading an animation from the very popular flash card solutions for those. But that shows up in the filesize, so I have zero problems with that. What *could* be nice would be to show the size with the prodname in all compos as a rule.

So I'm sure we can make it better without harsh categorization, just using rules that are more what we want than before, tuning them as the scene changes. (Not that I mind definitions and categories, we already have a few of those.)

Demoparty orgas could take the lead here and be known for the most cred party because it has the most spartan and purist rules! Make the size display an exciting "thing" that builds expectation, show it in hex and jumble the digits until they come up at the demo size, I dunno. It could even be done for tracked music, or coders going below the 4k/64k limit, but I think it's a good standard for comparison. Doing a lot with little *is* more impressive, and it would be appreciated I think. It's just when the hunt for the impressive becomes so important that coders code towards loop holes in the rules, and even reasonably seasoned sceners are not aware that it happens, others will jump on the train (to Awesometown) and we won't like it after a while - since most sceners will absolutely downvote the less impressive, yet real-time effects that is what oldskool hardware can REALLY achieve if banged really well. :)

(A final suggestion which is basically as arbitrary as preselection is that orgas judge if a demo is not real-time and simply put them in wild if not. But I think it's better with good universal rules than arbitrariness.)

Actually, I think we'd all like it better - simply if the nagging doubt of a demo's (or track's, etc) awesomeness is removed by having rules that decide what we want to see in realtime compos - rules that would do nothing more than simply move a few demos from realtime to wild compo.


Finally, again, we can't do without animations in demos, or even some precalc. Just limit the ways in which and the extent to which coders can pass on the animated or precalced as realtime.

i always go for "demos are like music videos made with the same techniques they use for making computer games!"

maali+1

imo this is much less of a problem on pc than 64/amiga - just because most things that are too slow to do in realtime if precalced would result in such huge amounts of data that it's prohibitive (unless you come up with magical compression schemes or find things where its worthwhile - in which case, cool! go for it).
youd basically be left with looking for whole sequences that are actually rendered out as video, which are a) usually something you can spot and b) usually blocked by compo rules.

precalc, lookup-tables, delta-packing, ... , FTW!!!!!
basta.

for me demoscene is all about two things: (1) impression and (2) impression.
(1) stands for "this was nice and way better than 99.999% (music) videos out there"-feeling after watching a prod, and (2) is for "how the fuck did they do that?!" scent that you can't find anywhere else outside the scene.

wrong. in any creative scenes people end up saying "how the fuck did they do that?"

Yes, I am sure. But the question was: would you consider that to be pure animation?

In terms of oneliners to try to describe a demo / the demoscene, there is none. Trust me, I've tried them all. :) However, I've arrived at a set of slides that help convey the message quite well. The first one goes like this:

:D
http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=51
http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=4379

Photon:
yes, the computer can't draw the grafix, make the music or code by itelf. (thanx god for that)
little exception is selfmodifying code. :D (which was for sure not used very often)

demoscene=what is possible with computers, if you are able to do it

Haali's definition is a good simplification for outsiders indeed! But it also shows he was content with reading the thread title and replying to what he thought was the topic. I'm not after harsh categorization or defining demos, demoscene, or whatever.

But his quote I think corroberates the 'assumption' that everyone has. In order for a demo to not be a video (player), it must do what games do. Games have video ('cut scenes'), and they are not games; if they look and move in more detail than in the game, it's because it's replaying a baked animation or playing a rendered video outright by including videoplayer.lib. So the parts outside the cut scenes where you can play is the game and the rest is animations/video.

And that's fine.

If those are well made, it's an achievement in itself for the artists involved. So basically, if someone made some nice Space Ace type animation clips in DPaint and just wrote a textwriter between them when the next is loading, that would be a nice "animation show" prod, and we could all enjoy it, and the group can show off their cool style, and great talent of their artists -- just like a slideshow.

The only problem is when sceners applaud what they think is a demo that is better than they've seen and way better than #2, only to later come home and find out that the whole demo was precalced or an animation.

I just think it's not too much to ask to not hide minutes of precalc or prod size from the audience. Do we think that's harmful? Also, I mentioned setting a rule of precalc time limit. That's not really necessary either, as long as the precalc "part" is shown that's fine, as it's what we'll see when we unzip the prod at home. Then again, I think neither the orgas nor coders want to show 2 minutes of nothing happening on the bigscreen, so a rule of shorter precalc may not be as bad an idea.

Another way could be to really enforce only real hardware in compos (again, orga cred from stricter rules), as that would show the precalc, avoid demos that only work on the coder's exact maxed out computer, and keep the real platform alive. But again, this (using emulators) is fine, as long as nothing's hidden. If the demo at the time of deadline requires orgas to run it in an emu, type "This partyversion is run from emulator, but we have every assurance from the coders that the final will run on <platform specs here>" on the bigscreen.

And of course this is not about modern PCs, as no precalc is needed. But I'm sure some pre-voodoo precalc demo has won some democompo?

So really, moralizing or setting stricter rules is not necessary, it's just that hiding information from sceners make these few demos more impressive than they think when they check them out when they come home.


Hyde: of course it is. You have removed every single calculation and mainloop consists of a WaitNextFrame, Swapbuf, and for-loop drawing n lines, while anyone who doesn't know the prod is big might think it's an impressive 3D routine with sorting, clipping, light-sourcing, face-removal, etc.

You could make Gouraud shading by coding a Gouraud routine and converting it to vector and use the same line drawing loop. Have you coded Gouraud? Yes. Does the demo render Gouraud? No. Will drunk sceners at 2AM on a party think it's a Gouraud effect? Quite a few might.

Now, the Gouraud coder will look much better than both a coder that shows his best Gouraud routine and the guy with the good plain 3D routine, and even the guy with precalced plain 3D. :) But the demo code is exactly the same, instruction for instruction.

That means the effect is the line drawing loop, the 3D or the Gouraud are not effects. Now, here's the nub: do we in future want more effects, or more line drawing loops? If we do, and if we don't the answer is the same: tell us what is being shown.

Again, no moralizing about wrong and right, please make precalced demos and we'll all enjoy the animation (if it's nice of course) :)

When I try to describe what demos are I say something like:

And I think that combines pre rendered animations and realtime stuff.
For instance I <3 HBCs stuff, its not realtime but its (probably disputable) totally demoscenish imho!

What really make it are probably the details: pushing limits in technology and size and platforms and style. If an animation is not doing this too its probably less demoish as well.

Can you give some specific examples where this has happened, please? Preferably with actual demo names, not just oblique references to dates in 1991. Right now you seem to be the only person on this thread who's convinced that this is a significant enough problem to actually *need* fixing.

In fact, let me start: I was fairly disappointed when I learned just how much precalc there is in Weed by Triebkraft. But, at the same time, there's enough innovation in the code and design for it to be a worthy compo winner. Maybe if they'd just rehashed the same player routines over and over in future prods, then yes, that would be lame... but they didn't, and I have enough confidence in A) the audience's ability to spot lame tricks and vote them down accordingly, and B) coders finding it more fun to code interesting new stuff rather than cheat with lame tricks, that I don't think such things will ever threaten the scene.

While we're (apparently) pursuing this idiotic need to classify things: shouldn't we differentiate between precalc and statically included data? Because most of "Elevated" sure was precalced, but we don't poo-poo that, do we?

Gloom: how about "statically included data that describes single frames of the resulting animation" (eg. the outlines of SOTA's dancers as opposed to, say, meshes or textures)

Imagine a movie or music video, which is really cool, but has absolutely no sexual/pr0n related material! ...that is a demo.

Need More Pr0n In Demos...

It pretty much has nothing (as in, no narrative) in it, if you describe it like that.

Also: Showing >> lengthy, misleading descriptions.

kb: Then what if we took those SOTA outlines and applied realtime deformations or other postprocessing to them? :)

Korvkiosken: That would be cheating of course. :)

I was pretty disappointed to learn that most of Mental is animations. (I mean beyond the obvious.)

But.. what *is* art?

artsy fartsy