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The gist is: You can generally trust the organizers at a demo party. They don't want your demo to crash either, and they'll do what they can to make sure it doesn't.

Worst nightmare I can think of is fire alarm, with couple thousand teens trying to drag their beloved computer box with them out from the overcrowded hall..

wow, sol, now i am sure i won´t ever visit any assembly or gathering! ;)
paranoia++;

I've talked with the security guys at assembly, and they have plans for that scenario; they can empty the hall (of humans) within minutes. Still, woudln't like to be around to see it.

I prepared a demo for f9, finished it on the party place, it run fine on my machine, on iq's laptop, and on another neighbour machine as well. It crashed on the compo PC. I went back and forth trying to change something and hoping it didn't crash anymore, without any luck. The compo started, and the main organizer had one final idea... he had another PC with Windows 7 beta on it, he tried it, and the demo ran to completion once, just in time before the last-but-mine entry was shown in the compo. My entry was announced in the slide while the compo PC was switched, and everything went smooth. Gargaj, you were awesome!

So yeah, even though that was hell on earth for me at that time, you can sure trust your organizers.

I don't think crashing is that bad, it can usually be fixed (and often the demo works on a second go or a different machine) and in any case people are probably quite understanding about it. My nightmare experience was at Stream 2005 when September and Snowfall didn't crash but got horribly out of sync for some reason. It completely ruined the demo and I think the music ended something like 30 seconds before the visuals. I've never seen it do that since.

The organisers somehow forgot to copy the video file for my demo at Revision 2015. During the compo the amiga organiser had to run through the hall to bring it to the compo team and it was shown out of order iirc. All fine in the end but it was one of those moments in the compo when you see your slide thinking 'There it is!' and then ?!?!.

At Assembly 2008 our demo (Amiga OCS) was shown in the compo without the other audio channel. So half of the sounds were missing. I think they showed it again later or something. It was quite shit though.

At Assembly 2002 our PC demo was quite dark and the capture they showed in the compo clipped most of the shadows. You could hardly see anything in a few scenes. They tried to show it again (same capture I think) at the end of the compo or something with increased brightness but it just made the clipped shadows grey instead of black. You still couldn't see anything. Meh.

Kb already revealed some of our super secret tricks at revision. Let me add some details:

- It's a great idea to develop your production on a machine that is as close as possible to the compo machine setup (same OS, libs, drivers, similar gfx card etc.) - that usually makes your compo organizer a really happy person because everything is super likely to work out of the box. Try your entry on as many machines as possible - fix it. PLEASE.

- If your entry does not work on the compo machine - it's your problem in the first place. Organizers are usually friendly persons and will maybe even fix your entry (eventually while yelling at you, it sometimes help - trust me on that one) - or try to help you out with some debug information (gshaderreplacer has been a pretty helpful tool in the past in this context. ADD THAT DAMN #version tag - REALLY.).

- I don't know exactly how many 4k/8k/4k gfx entries I started live at revision but I don't remember a single one crashing during the compo.

- The delays we have are usually caused by fancy live acts. :D

The absolute worst thing is when the demo runs, and you're the only one who know that there are rendering or sync errors.

^ -yeah :(

a) Missing a deadline
b) Not missing a deadline and sitting there watching it, knowing you could have done a good release if you had started sooner
c) Not missing a deadline and sitting there watching it, knowing you could have done a good release if you had started sooner and be out of alcohol to numb the soul pain (hasn't happened yet! :D)

Why is it not demoscene law to record all Amiga productions in Mono unless specifically stated.

Dodke: Yepp, and it wasnt the first time it happened to my tune :/ bad memories from ASM'92.

djh0ffman: 20% separation ;)

What's also somewhat awful is when
a) you're really late with your demo and basically need to spend the whole party trying to get it done
b) you get ill on the first day

Happened to me this year at Revision. I was popping ibuprofen to keep the fever down so I could still code. Not necessarily feeling like going through that again!

But you can still fuck up the stereo to mono conversion during recording (unless there is a dedicated mono output right in the hardware?) :D

Once a demo that I coded accidentally muted the Windows audio master after the demo ended [it was an accident! I promise!]. The following demo in the compo ran in silence...

It took the orgas a while to find the problem and fix it. Yet I didn't end up dead in a ditch. Lucky me, I guess :-)

d) Not missing a deadline and sitting there, watching it, feeling good about your release until you see all the other releases and then hit the bottle because you feel ashamed of the thing you made.
e) Not missing a deadline and sitting there, waiting nervously how the audience will react to something truly heartfelt, personal and different you made, then hearing people next to you snickering about it.

For me the worst nightmare is to get some rare or hard to find hardware to get stolen, broken or drenched in cofee/beer.

As it happens, I don't have a working Oric Microdisc anymore because some drunk person managed to get his feet in a power cord, dragging some laptops and my oric floppy drive crashing to the ground.

That kind of suck.

When i submitted my first ever compo entry at revision 2012, i was so hyper nervous. It was just a c64 entry, so all the hardware is pretty much the same right. But i had chosen an experimental build of a fast loader to compensate for my lack of skill and it would crash 1 out of 10 times.
Dudes at the compo were super chilled and i was told all entries get recorded, so i was okay with that. Then, when the deadline came close, names were called out XY please come to the info desk, something wrong with your prod. I just thought o m g if i have to fix something that late, that would be the end.
Except for KB forgetting to crank up the volume lever at the beginning of my Prod, everything was cool. I had a blast of a day, although it was really just some kind of firstie/compofiller.
Funfact is: when i revised the code at some later state, i found out, the whole thing just worked out of pure luck. The demo itself has some of the most terrible pointer errors, wildly shooting random bytes into the code sometimes, woah.
Aneways, the worst nightmare for me would be to ever attend a demoparty again without having a prod. I felt so damn useless at datastorm14. Luckily, all the nice swedes and elite sceners really helped to forget about that fact.

Brand new computer got smashed on the plane to Asm 2006. The case, GPU and soundcard were dead. I managed to borrow a laptop to work on a demo, but there was no way I could finish. Total waste.

I thought this thread was going to be about running out of beer.

Und was ist das schlimmste? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tHKqteUg8I

This. Or watching your remote entry on stream and feeling sick in the stomach as the sync is completely broken and everything glitches. Then later find out it played perfectly at the party and it was just errors with the stream.

At TG11 our 4k was tested without problems on the compo machine in the lab. However, when the very same computer was connected to the (main) projector instead, intro consistently crashed after a few seconds. Never happened before or after the compo, or even when the computer was brought to the secondary screen/projector. On top of that they would normally have a video backup, but since this was one of the very first dx11 demos, tools couldn't capture it yet..

the projector difference brings bad surprises indeed.

also, the chrome autoupdate (after the testing, and before the actual compo) for browser/JS prods is very sneaky ;).