pouët.net

I live in Wellington, New Zealand, which is about as far as you can get from the European demoparty scene without buying a boat. The demoscene as a whole is pretty unknown here. Wellington has a fairly strong development community - we're the home of Weta Digital and now 8i. The company I work for has way more talented, creative and enthusiastic people than you'd expect for a company that does accounting stuff. Every year we have a development team gathering roughly following the unconference format, with a day of talks followed by a day of open discussion (followed by booze). Not sure how many people are going to be there this year, but it'll be in the hundreds.

I submitted 4 talks for day 1: three dealing with database design and MS SQL Server performance tuning, and one on the history of the demoscene. Nobody voted for the database ones. The demoscene one got through. I'm cool with that.

My plan is to give a whirlwind timeline/tour of the evolution of the demoscene and hopefully show a couple of recent prods. The aim is to give them a background of the scene and maybe, just maybe, light the spark of interest in making demos. The problem is that it's an insane amount of material to cover in 30 minutes and while I've been following the (PC) scene for a little over 20 years, it's been very much as a sofa-scener on the other side of the planet.

The things I'm going to try and cover (albeit briefly) are:

• The evolution of the home computer from the early 8-bit machines, the Amiga and other 68k machines, the rise of the PC.
  
• The birth of the scene out of C64 cracktros.
  
• Demoparties and the demoscene culture (unfortunately I can't describe this first-hand).
  
• "What is a demo" - the intersection of code, graphics, music and direction.
  
• The distinctions between intro/demo/megademo.
  
• How developments like VGA and the GUS made the PC an attractive/viable platform.
  
• The evolution of demo effects and style through the early to mid 90s.
  
• The evolution of music production from SID to tracked to MP3 and synths.
  
• 3d acceleration and the migration from DOS to Windows.
  
• The decline of the scene from its 80s/90s golden age.
  
• The resurgence of size-limited demos and the raymarching era.
  
• The role of video streaming in preserving demo availability.
  
• The continuing activity on oldskool platforms.
  
• Where to go for more information (and watch Moleman2)
  

I'm currently trawling through pouet for some influential demos from the C64 and Amiga era - I'm not familiar with that side of the scene, so I'm open for suggestions. Another question I had was around the end of the DOS era - I got the feeling at the time that some people felt that the rise of 3D acceleration was a threat to the scene, since it enabled any muppet to get decent looking 3D without much effort. Is that correct? Also is the list of topics any good? What have I missed?

(When my presentation is finished I'll try and share the slides so you can rip it to shreds.)

In before 'where the fuck is AMIGAAAA' comments!



hell yeah! Windows was pretty hated in the beginning too and if you didn't do it in software you were a poser. I remember a specific 3D Accelerated PC Demo Compo happening at The Party '98 and all entries were shit :D

wouldn't say decent looking 3D, but, it kinda made the 'art' behind coding fast routines for software 3D engines obsolete ;)

That's an insane amount of material for 30 minutes. I've held a similar talk for a few times and I'd take out at least the evolution of demo effects, decline of the scene (which is debatable anyway), video streaming (or mention it only in passing). I think it would be more important to talk what demos are than get into gritty details. And find the time to show at least some stuff (I'd suggest one quick oldschool C64 prod, one Amiga/DOS prod from the Nineties and one modern PC prod).

And yeah, people were bithing all the time about 3D acceleration. And SID. and MP3. And youtube. And probably will bitch about stuff that hasn't been invented yet.

Actually, why did I say SID? I meant AGA :)

It would be nice to not forget that oldschool is not synonym of C64 and Amiga ;)
There are wonderful things on Amstrad, ZX Spectrum, Atari 8bits, Atari 16bits, and other platforms I do not really follow.

what preacher said. better just keep it short and basic, no need to meander into details even active sceners find rather trivial. do a brief history session with like 10-20 second videos to demonstrate how old demos looked and how they evolved. tell them what a demo is that there are groups making them, that there are parties to compete with them.. round off by showing them 10-20 second videos of some cool modern day shit (and not 10x FLT, but diverse stuff :P) optionally by briefly throwing in some comments like 'this is amazing because it is displayed in EGA that cannot display that many colors normally' or 'this is a 4k, thats like 5% of what an empty .doc file would need' , etc...

Like Preacher said: cut it short. You could provide further informations online for those who are interested :) good luck with the speech! :)

what preacher said. but i would also add a thing: short introduction to pixel graphics ;-)

foreach(every pouet user)
{
"Keep it short, but make sure you add [...]"
}

Does New Zealand get close if you buy a boat? I could urge you to buy a boat. I wouldn't mind visiting NZ, and if you get the said boat maybe flights could also get cheaper.

Thanks for all the tips... I might have to shelve the original plan for an in-depth "How to Code a Tunnel", followed by showing pb00: paardicle & Kevin...

But yeah, I'm planning on keeping it very basic - if it goes down well I can always do an extended talk later.

Instead of trying to explain things according to some top-down science-legitimateish-sounding framework, how about letting some concrete individual scener tell her 100 % subjective story? :)

The sort of things I want to touch on are the changes in design trends... eg: debris won BP07 with a demo that was pretty much the pinnacle of the farbrausch 3d content-generation flythroughs, the following year at BP08 the top two demos were stylistic 2D (masagin & metamorphosis).

@bloodnok: didn't know there are sceners in NZ, was there end of 2012 (even in Wellington), so we could have easliy met for a beer or two... real pity :-(

I'm always up for a beer or two if anyone's in Wellington :)

also planning on touching on the spill-over of demoscene talent into the game/movie industry, and/or things that look like they could have come straight from a demo.

What Preacher, Gargaj, and xernobyl said. This is awesome! I hope it goes well and you do spark some interest! Best of luck!

PS I was pulling for Red Peak :) . Oh well...

if you want to have a solid picture of the scene in the 1980s, here's a very good read:

‘Illegal Guys’
A History of Digital Subcultures in Europe during the 1980s by Patryk Wasiak

Thanks dipswitch, that looks very in-depth.

Man, this 30 minute timeslot is bullshit. This could be a full-year lecture programme.

Keep it short, but make sure you add HYPNOGLOW.

Keep it short, but use at least 10 minutes to explain Rob is Jarig.

and don't forget to show variform2 to make everyone leave!

Keep it short, but make sure you mention the real party is outside!

Yay for the talk, but the amount you're trying to cover is way too much. Even if you didn't have the 30mn limit, that would be a lot.

I'd suggest you keep it focused on one aspect, and reserve maybe 1/4~1/3 of your time for an overview that gives just enough context for your topic to make sense.

You can always keep the rest as a bonus for follow up questions, or for future talks. ;)