pouët.net

In the old days, there were lots of 'world-record' demos... who had the fastest circles, lines, polys, etc... And who had the best-looking 3d engine, etc etc...
It seems that partly due to the introduction of 3d hardware, demos took on a different form...
Concentrating on visual art rather than coding art, it seems...
What are your opinions on that?

o
/ \
o o

o o
/ \ / \
o o o o

o o o o
/ \ / \ / \ / \
o o o o o o o o

just a question of perspective.

the higher you are the farthest you see.

It´s not 3d hardware that changed the demos, it´s the computers. On a c64 people is still able too present a record in bumb-mapped polys etc. bla. bla but on todays platforms, which all looks different, records could be hard to justify. If I have 40000000 blobs on my screen running in 60 fps, you could have it in 2 fps depending on hardware and drivers and everything else.

Probably the only 'record' code now is that of size-limited intros. That probably explains the recent interest in 256bytros

And 64kBs :-)

Actually I was just trying to fill the messageboard, and get that disgusting stuff out of the way :)

Anyway, I didn't mean that 3d hardware changed it.
Even software demos are of relatively bad code quality these days (at least on PC, Amiga stuff is still going strong :)
But it started around that time... '99 or so, I think.
It seems that a lot of software demos these days are software because it's 'cool' to use software, now that 'wimps' use hardware. Well imho software is okay, if you at least make it look good, and perform well, which most people don't...

Anyway, yes records themselves are troublesome on PC with such diverse hardware, but that's not what I meant... I meant the pushing of the hardware itself.
Many 3d engines don't exactly push the hardware to the limits... In the old days, demos were optimized to the extreme, to get the last bit of performance out of the hardware... that's the art I'm referring to... what happened to that?

Using hardware != wimps

If the limit of your challenge is to do 3d scenes with X,Y,Z effect, then sure, using hardware to pull it off is taking a lot of the challenge away. That's not to say there aren't challenges to be pulled off with current 3d hardware though.

Sure, a lot of this gives way to design along the way, but the cutting edge is there, its a quetion of whether you can be bothered to chase it. :)

I specifically wrote 'cool' and 'wimps', I don't agree with that.
I don't say that NOBODY pushes hardware either...
But, there's a few that stand out far above the rest, it seems...
3dmark seems to really push the hardware to the limits... Farb-Rausch stuff aswell (even in 64k, impressive). But compare the poly count and framerate of these with most other productions, and see what I mean...

A lot of prods don't *seem* to push the limits, it seems. (Not that I can complain, its not like I've ever released anything! :) Weather that's just cos of time (I read a lot of "coded in xx hours before the party" infos) or just the tradeoff between making a point and driving it home with some really serious effort on the optimization/refinement side just gets too silly I don't know.

Farbrausch stuff is pretty unique cos they have excellent design as well as techical skill that's the product of hours and hours of refinement just for the hell of it, and it shows. In the FR-019 final they say "If you can't do better why do it?" and this is part of the reason I'm so damn slow at releasing something :)

Daaah, that makes no sense, never post when you're pissed...

To be short: Not coding is art, but the result of (good) coding can be art. And I still love many old DOS demos for their atmosphere, something that I'm missing in many Windows demos (luckily there were some quite nice releases in the last time).

This isn't going to be another software vs hardware discussion is it ? :)

And what's the point of optimizing something if it already looks good, fits the concept and runs at 70 fps ? :)

I hope not, I hate software vs hardware discussions...
If it looks good and runs fast, I don't care how it's rendered :)
As for running at 70 fps...
Well, I have a 1400 MHz machine, with a GF2GTS running at 240/400 MHz, 512 mb, and well... I hardly ever see 70 fps, which is the point I was trying to make :)
Apart from a select few, most demos don't use the hardware efficiently enough to get a good framerate out of a setup such as mine, which I consider to be reasonably high-end.

Back to Scali´s question, what is our view on that demos became more visual art than coding art?? Even if a demo is a visual art in itself it´s still code that brings this to life. If a demo is made using flash or something similar it´s only visual art, but then I don´t, personally, call it a demo (or intro or whatever). If the visual art is made with code than it´s coded art, isn´t it??

e-coli: I think it's hard to define what's is coded art and what's not. Making a difference between scripted flash or director movies and demos which basicly use the same rendering techniques to define what's coded art and what's not is a bit vague.

I mean coding art as in sophisticated and extremely optimized code.
Like how demos used to be.
Early demos didn't have much design yet... basically they just showed off the coder's routines...

Then design entered the picture, and visual art became more and more important...
But as I said before, I think the visual aspect is pushing away the coding aspect.

>In the FR-019 final they say "If you can't do better >why do it?" and this is part of the reason I'm so >damn slow at releasing something :)

I have seen that it is the same message appearing in Arte/Sanity at the end scroller with the vectors. Whooww.. 10(almost) years after ;)

Generally I love this old style of the demoscene. It is an obsession, a gigachallenge, something that motivates me thinking of pushing something to the end, doing it perfect, better than the others and stuff. Generally my mind works like this when coding, even if I have released shit till now. I would love to code some amazing stuff in the future (Fortunatelly I can stick in old CPC now if I can't stand the PC world) I still understand and like the design too in some demos (depends on the design) and would like to do some too, but my mind is motivated to work more by breaking challenges and pushing an effect to the end!

If we want hardcore coding, we could do stuff to bring it back on PC. I am already dreaming (ok since ages) that I will code something totally amazing in an older hardware (I was seeing the oldschool 486 compo's and was thinking that I would like in the future when I learn more assembly, to code something optimized for that, that none had seen,. but that's just a dream :) I will surelly head to code software stuff for older PCs, just a dream of mine! =)

I am also a bit interested in tiny intro coding, even if the speed optimization obsessed my mind the most in the older times.

I also have build a 386 and I would love the idea of coding a demo for that old little baby, like when Impact Studios coded Legend for the 286 ;)

If I had a working 486 (but I will find one too) I could think of coding something for oldschool future compos, wow!

Just an obsession and a childs dream for me ;)
Don't eat me, I have done nothing in the scene yet, but the spirit/motivation is inside me :)

Optimus

Saying that fr-019 pushes your hardware is complete nonsense. It looks cool, but it doesn't push extreme amounts of polygons. (which is not criticism, mind you, but it's just dumb to compare it to, say, 3dmark)

Also: Using advanced features of modern 3d-cards, or using a lot of polygons will invariably lead to complaints of people stuck with an old ATI Rage 128 who'll say your demo runs slowly, or doesn't run at all.

Whatever.

I would say that one could better code some interesting things (fur, physics, etc) now we have the computing power for those, instead of trying to push the hardware to it's limits while rendering a distorted sphere with one million triangles.

physics don't really have a place in demos. in demos you can just fake it, and in intros it's mostly used for dropping cubes on top of each other. big whoop. :)

and fur (or at least, the shell-based fur) has been done plenty o'times already.

Scali: Yes, I totally agree with you that the visuals is pushing away the code and I think that is sad. In the early years demos looked like crap compared to todays visual masterpieces but they had another kind of touch, a demo could look like hell but still be groundbreaking. Todays hardware makes it easier to create very beutiful demos without much effort so offcourse this reflects on the scene today. Better code doesn´t make beatiful demos but beautiful code makes more interesting demos.

demos should scratch the limits of hardware. they did in the past, but now we are expecting the next breakthrough from id software or mad onion, and not some scene group. in the past you could impress non-scene-people with the technical aspects of demos, today they are bored because they have seen much better stuff in games. you can't even impress a scener with technology, since scener know games, too. since we can't win against id software anyway, most sceners try doing unique art instead of unique coding.

and it's no use wining about the old times where real coders wrote real demos. my best work are rotating zoomers on amiga, in WOC and in Roots, but now you can have all that for free with hardware. and it is NOT oldschool to ignore hardware everybody has. the people who coded the old school used every hardware-register they found.

i doupt demo scene progression is done in engine features or speed optimisation, although lame code still hurts a lot. i put my bets on complexity, but i havn't really figured out what that means. doing 64k intros is a good starting point if you are aiming for complexity, i though 2 years ago, but i am still stuck here.


PS. fr-019 pushes around 100.000 poly a frame most of the time. somethimes all of them are animated with the cpu. and it still runs well on a matrox g400 with fast cpu.

to grab the first points: what's wrong about demos changing ? it would all be quite boring without any progress, both in style as well as in design.
if you feel like living the oldskool way, you still can take your 286 (or older) and do some stuff.
however I still believe demos are amazing due to the fact that most people would do the same as a video taking a full cd (that is, if organizers would finally stop pushing the demo size limit to 20mb or even unlimited. I hate this)chaos: complexity is just the necessary follow-up to your own ideas. I'm working on a intro system right now and every day I have to include more stuff just because new problems or ideas are popping up =)
all for now, main thing is, that this stupid "girl" thread is kicked ;))

7002

exploiting the medium instead of computer only.

optimizing systems (wetware/software/hardware) instead of hardware
only.

i think the reason that today coders prefer visual art than coding art, is that the partyplaces now have many non-scene people which can't understand that the XYZ effect is better than ZYX because of the way it's coded, even if ZYX looks better. So the nonknowners (:P) votes the ZYX and not XYZ. Eh, so since visual art gets more votes than coding art, coders makes visual art instead of coding art :).