pouët.net

every time this kind of thing comes up i seem to spout the same thing, but here i go again:

the demoscene as an oldschool hardware hacking curiosity appealing to freaks, geeks and nostalgics has limited "grow" potential. hell, i myself find it weird and have very limited interest in it. the demoscene in terms of the modern, forward thinking, pushing, newschool side has grow potential - there are more "creative coding" hobbyists out there than ever, computer graphics is more mainstream than ever, realtime graphics are able to be better looking than ever and more accessible, and quite a lot of people find some of what we do potentially interesting - but only if it was to change dramatically to fit that new profile, perhaps shifting away from the "essence" of what makes it the demoscene.

in summary : fuck it, let's just keep having fun as we are, enjoy the occasional brief crossovers and exposures in the normal world, and let it slowly decline until it eventually dies out - because to grow would be to change, and to change could be to make it something that's not the thing we love(d).

i think you should remember to capitalize Freaks.

Outside of the scene people don't care about limitations or real-time. They enjoy what they see & hear or they don't. Real-time graphics cannot compete with pre-rendered stuff. Whatever you wanna code, why not do it as a 3DS Max or After Effects plugin and then render a video? There are so many beautiful videos to see on the web, competition is hard!
The only real-time thing people are interested in is video games, because it's interactive. People like to be part of the show and also create their own stuff (MineCraft videos, etc.).
Now, as we demomakers like to control the flow, the music synchro and provide a perfectly tweaked experience (at least we try), do we really want to add interaction that can potentially totally fuck up the flow? And would people be interested in playing with an interactive eye candy? I don't know, but maybe it's the way to get noticed outside of our world. Now, as smash said, maybe we want to remain the ones we are, and don't want to change our rules and what makes us love demos just to get more popular.

I think the Demoscene doesn't need to advertise itself in the mainstream. People who could be interested in this kind of thing will eventually find out about it by themselfes. These people then have the true intrinsic motivation and most probably will be a bit productive in the scene.

And while the interest in realtime indeed seems to be declining at the moment (even in games, where 30 fps "are enough" these days) there will always be the people who want to look closer at their hardware. No matter if it's an iPhone, or a 20 year old computer.

After the initial wave of accelerators the landscape is to varied to hit 'every' machine. Unlike the fixed platforms of the old guard c64/amigaaaaa! etc. If you take a demo with say, performance requirements of 5 faces as an example, what percentage of of PCs out there in the real world can can actually run it? If you spend 100s on a card you expect it to run things well! only gamers and the dedicated sceners have reason to own that tech. This lack of consistency in performance and availability on the most common platform of all is not good for the scene when 3d accelerators are leading the arms race.

Your average person can't run most modern PC demos any more. The other fixed platforms don't have this issue (they just have the other issue of obsolescence and limited availability)

IMO The best outreach is that which breaks outside the scene demographic away from us aging ex-amiga / c64 / speccy era guys into existing communities where different types of computer use is happening, especially by teens, like the arduino / beagleboard / raspberry pi / maker type scenes where other types of use and programming is happening. Open their eyes to the other possibilities of their platforms. The times i''ve been shown scene type stuff by co-workers who know i have a scene interest is from site like http://hackaday.com

However I believe the problem really is that

1) there is not an open, common, programmable computer of fixed(ish) performance out there using the same hardware.

2) on the gfx front. the learning curve is too great, and things like unity, processing etc distract from that.

3) everything else i mentioned (be it amiga/c64 or raspberry pi) is too niche to outreach into

4) videos of cats doing funny, cute, cool shit is too distracting as is the rest of the interwebs.. hell there are even magazines out there trying to make you "youtube famous". so is this > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3ytTKZf344


its not that the scene isn't what it was, its that the world around it has changed.

The best way to make people aware of the demoscene is slapping them in the face with a large fish and yell "DEMOSCENE BITCH!" in their face.

wouldn't it make dramatically more sense to yell DEMOSCENE FISH at them?

creativecoding, processing, kinecthacks, webgl, openframeworks, cinder, some cocoa + ios/android scenes, even some indie games scenes (and even shadertoy!) - these scenes would once have been part of "the demoscene". that lot encompasses thousands and thousands of active people.

the problem is the world around the demoscene has changed and the demoscene hasn't and it's no longer relevant. the demoscene used to be at the centre of creative hobbyist coding on home computers and now it's not. the format and presentation of "a demo" hasnt changed in 20 years.

as i said - it's not an outreach issue, its not a question of where to look. outreach in its current form is kindof pointless overall. for the demoscene to grow it would have to change to become relevant - it would have to change, and to change would make it something other than the demoscene as it is now.

people, put more cute cats into your prods!

Maybe it's time to start adding some kind of interactivity in our demos. Those touchscreen devices, you know.

Youtube is evil.

Compared to the "outside world", the only viable thing that the PC demoscene has nowadays is the size optimized stuff because that has the potential of making people go "oooh". If you're doing outreach and want to impress people on technical merit, I think that would be it.

Otherwise: what smash said.

Stream grew in attendance every year it was organized. Revision gathers enough visitors every year for there to be a Revision. Payback was just fully booked in 5 minutes. All this without anyone going out of their way to do outreach.

For a subculture centered on an artform that only makes sense within a specific historical context, I think the demoscene is doing quite fine.

Why I used to be so fascinated about the demoscene in my youth: because the people in the scene have more brainpower than those who have the political power here in Central Europe.

AT LAST a positive comment \o/

I raise up that question, as few years ago... while doing a rush shopping into some arts boutiques, I end up with someone asking me about my Mozdilla t-shirt (which I won within a demoparty). I was in a rush, so I summarize where I got that t-shirt. The guy (about 60 years old) as no idea about "demos" but he seem very interested about this kind of arts to deal with limitation (colors, sounds or code) to produce an art form.

So, I think about that kind of people... which may be interested to create art forms using their electronic things... but may never know about demoscene.

Yeah, that's what we need, even *more* old dudes in the demoscene!

i kid, i kid, ^_^;

Yeah, that's why they are not into politics.

The most important thing to remember is that most people just don't give a fuck about the scene anyway.

I also agree with Smash here, it seems quite plausible that any noticeable growth of the scene would probably change things. Things that become popular have a reasonable chance of being diluted and dumbed down for mass appeal.

I also really don't see a need for growth. Considering the amount of parties every year, and the amount of people visiting them every time, I think we're doing fine and I like the scene the way it is where it still mostly feels like a big family (: <3

we need to print www.pouet.net on the back of beer bottles!

The bi-monthly scene is death thread. \o/

Seriously, no. That's the problem right there - instead of opening up to other forms of digital creative expression (even realtime) people in the demoscene say stuff like "dumbed down for mass appeal". Is Shadertoy "dumbed down"? Or really WebGL per se? Or other forms of visual programming? Or indie games? Or the people building weird electroning stuff in maker spaces?

Stop the oldschool worshippery already. I like to see what new tricks people can get out of old platforms as much as the next guy, and if you look at the X2014 releases, I mean, whoa, man, what the freaking frack. BUT: That's not in any way better or "less dumb" than what other people do. On the contrary: Oldschool prods would've been fucking stuck if it weren't for the people who write tools, codecs and code generators on modern PCs, or having ideas like "oh wait, we can use that one trick we researched for Frostbite on the Amiga, too".

And of course there's this whole universe of in-jokes and weird scene idiosyncracies that are just plain fun and that we would endanger when we add people to the mix who haven't been trained for years to know that wearing pants was scientifically proven to be a detriment to the enjoyment of digital art. But then again - More people doing cool stuff with computers and such, how can that EVER be a bad thing?

i think the outreach-people are not about the scene being too small as it is but more likely are afraid of what will happen once the current generation gets too old for partying and competing (which will eventually happen in the next 10-20 years).

the demoscene as we know it is deeply heterogeneous(?), meaning there are a couple of different sub-scenes with different approaches and motivations behind them (does demoscene needs to be subdivided?!? ;) and many of them want to continue what they love together with the people they love and dont care about what comes after.

but on the other hand theres a lot of (usually younger generation) people who are still dreaming of the scene as a place were they can actually get good exposure (and maybe even a good job offer) for the newschool stuff they are doing while at the same time gathering skills and experiences for "higher goals", whatever they may be.

someone once said that the demoscene isnt popular in the U.S. because its so hard to monetize it, but i think once you move away from obsolete platforms that have no (serious) market anymore there is an area where the time you spend on demomaking can be indirectly monetized (mostly by acquiring skills along the way that are actually still in demand).
and, like it or not, thats where the lines between scener and software/web/whatever-developer/digital-artist blur and where the most potential for newcomers lies.
you have to give people a reason to be part of your club. the reason "look at all the nice folks ive been drinking with for 20 years now" usually doesnt cut it for them and your c64 twister doesnt make them 'whoa!' either, simply because they havent grown up with the c64 and have no idea what it is capable of (or, more exactly, what it should NOT be capable of). you can tell them and they will (most likely) understand it on a rational basis, but the fascination for it wont be there.

bottom line:
there is no such thing as the "scene" longing for outreach, most of the folks actually dont care (and it is their good right not to).
there are, however, people who are constantly trying to put the artists of the scene into a bigger light and perspective and they should be supported. that also means you have to cope with people who are looking puzzled if you shout AMIGAAA to their faces, think of SID-music as unbearable noise and want the compos to be over in time for dinner. other people are not less intelligent and therefore dont 'get' the demoscene (right, adok?), they just come from a different background and need to be taken from there to here (or maybe we need to be taken from here to there? Or meet in the middle somewhere?).

Let me ask you this then - do you prefer Elevated as the intro or as the shadertoy version?

Eh, really? Who? All those people are active in all those scenes kb mentiond. Stuff that actually helps to progress their career.

Sorry for not reading through all the crap, but why does it matter if "people" are aware about the demoscene or not?