pouët.net

I'm all for restrictions - they are one of the, if not THE, best way to promote creativity.

Developing for proprietary platforms such as SEGA Megadrive - sure, if you want. If you can make something with good ideas and good production value, then who really cares which platform it's on?

"Bare metal" PC low/medium/high specs: those are arbitrary and IMO pointless distinctions. All they do is force you to make lower resolution assets.

again.. restrictions are good. But let's make more interesting restrictions at least. Like the Slummy Rubber Vector Epic Coder Face-Off, which was a fight against the hardware, as opposed to an arbitrary set of restrictions such as running off an USB drive.

(well Slummy's challenge was more than a fight against the hardware.. it was a fight against the hardware, under the conceptual restriction of having to be the most epiquest, bestest, rubber vector evarrrrr)

Boot is nice idea, but then again I wouldn't like having to reboot my machine everytime to see these entries. (Youtube to the rescue :)

IMO there aren't that many demos as there used to be because of "AAA" demos that discourage people to "just do it" as they used to in the past, because they're affraid to be compared to people that do creative coding professionally. Not exactly because the lack of hardware limitations, or the lack of personal / group skills, or partying hard or what ever.

las:
any limits/restrictions in the demo category are scheisse ;)
i want to use meshes, mp3, real textures and even videos... get things done...

plaf: the word you're looking for is challenge :)

And personally I disagree with competitions. You should only compete against yourself.

Maybe it's the same. It took skills years ago to even write a 3d rasterizer, so a 3d cube was impressive. Now you can draw triangles for free, but doing something interesting with it needs effort. New APIs, same competition.

My guess is that we are just getting older. Young people had all the time and enthusiasm. We have jobs and/or girlfriends. At least the tools makes it easy even with our limited time to draw some cubes and add some hypnoglow and call it a day. But dedicating time or motivating ourselves to make a truly kick ass demo is a luxury for most of us.

superplek: ah yes, there it was, thank you, had been looking for it all morrrrrrning

i rather spend time on actually making a demo than making sure the demo runs on hardware config A, B or C. and in fact, the final specs of a demo usually originate from the dev hardware it is compiled on.

limitations sure are fun as a challenge, but, in a scene where more and more people appear to have less time to spend on a whole demo (work, family, midlife crisis), focusing on time consuming challenges will only degrade the overall quality even more. or ppl would simply even stop doing demos at all cos nothing gets done. that's the reason the number of blockbuster demos decreased and sceners with plenty of blockbuster demos on their c.v. rather spend time doing something less intense but still fun to make.

+1000 Gargaj's posts (in particular the first 2)

Demoscene is something that just happens. You can't control it man

@xernobyl: but competition is the reason why the demoscene exists! :D

I didn't imply that generally. I said it about Gargaj.


No. You can act like you are not a teenager anymore and take part in the discussion.

looking forward to your self-booting demo for revision2015!

There really is no discussion left at this point, or at least nothing that I feel needs any further clarification. So as per usual, we'll see this thread peter out after everyone has dropped his or her $0.02 in the form of verbal jabs, dickswinging, different variations of the same statement and move on.

.. is what they said about the earth orbiting the sun.

(oh this was so worth it :D)

thread closed. on to the 3.0 reboot!

The argument was never about preference. The argument was about plausibility.

As Scali said, you can potentially make a "bare metal" PC demo if you stick to VBE - a standard from 1998. For anything more, you will need drivers. Suggesting otherwise is grossly inaccurate. Suggesting that it's the way to go? Even worse.

Well you can fairly easily get your hands on NV20 specs so something GeForce3-era would be possible as well Gargaj, don't be THAT quick to dismiss ;)

las is right. Without enough time between parties and without proper restrictions, there will be just more fastmade demos with fake (animated) effects and no true art of code. This is even more important because today's people unlearned to tell code from fakes, so they judge fakes by visual standards or code (not by visual standards of animation!).

plek: Again, plausibility - "can" isn't "should" :)

And here I thought that part of the effect coding fun was deluding people into visual complexity.

Alone_Coder: Think of all those poor TBL demos man!

You can show any visual complexity with animation. So, some parties even have a compo named "realtime demos".

What's wrong with TBL?