pouët.net

At least writing coder's own machine config would be nice.

What dex46 said...

Tbh most of my intros don't run properly on my machine :P

What's the point writing my specs if its not running the demo well full screen. Should I write the compo machine specs then? So 7700k 1080ti so be it.

what's the point man.

what's the point in anything at all?

I'm still running a now pretty tired GTX970 at home and I can still run most things, albeit at 720p. OK the FPS isn't hitting 60 but they are still enjoyable to watch and look a metric fuck ton better than youtube

Taken into account even most commercial games/software products state min/optimum system requirements which are way off the real thing (and thats with a lot of testing beforehand), I can understand why it is hard to impossible to specify those for demos. Maybe a "crowdsourced" database would work where everybody puts down their system specs and an average fps count or "crashes on AMD" or something, but I cant see this task being done by the coder alone.
Plus expectations regarding a "smooth" demo-experience differ greatly. Some find 720p/20-40fps to be completely watchable, others press esc if it doesnt run at 60fps in 1080p (and probably watch the youtube vid instead).

Having that said I always found it to be part of the experience to try your hardware-configuration with demos, tweaking settings (if avail) and try to make them run as good as possible. Imagine someone states the optimal machine-specs as hardware-requirements and a lot of people wont even try running the demo realtime....

Old pc demos never really had super accurate specs either, look through some old files and more often it's "tested on a p133 and needs a gravis" iirc. As (for some reason) most demos are only released at parties now you can probably check the compo machine specs as the default.

youtube.com doesn't need specs

For me it's hard to determine from a screenshot if any of the released stuff is working on any of my (mostly retro) machines. Therefore some specs would be nice.

So, windows demos are pretty much animations now, not made for the realtime experience for the average viewer, but to be rendered as video for Youtube or Vimeo and watched there for the folks at home. As the developers of the demo intended. ;)

Video killed the realtime star.

I think drzeissler raises a valid point (although I agree with Smash that you can assume PC demos to run decently on current HW).
But for everything else there might be a "non-obvoius catch", for example 64 shades of grey comes to mind, which does not run in dosbox, you have to boot an actual MS-Dos to run it - so yes, I think it would a nice courtesy to mention those things in the nfo... again :)

abductee: except that i said so, not smash, he just quoted me!

The simple answer is because if you're lucky enough to get an NFO with the demo these days, they write what they want in there.

The best person to know the specs is the coder. That is not to say that the coder is to blame for everything. But yes. You made a release. Write an NFO just for the bragz. Put the stuff required to run your code in there. Takes 3 minutes.

It will create ethereal circles of luminous smoke around your frontal lobe if you make it to heaven. Also, whichever direction you look, there will be cascading rainbows forever. And ever and ever. Telling you man, it really is worth it. :)

Altough I never release anything, for my little test stuff I use my girlfriend machine (2x 290X crossfire), 16GB RAM and a medicore i3. Thats the dev platform, so tell me, what would be the required minumum spec if you don't have enough machines to test?

Or so to say, I have only one machine to test... it works there.

Btw, "gateways" was coded on a computer that's below the minimum spec of the demo. When I first saw it on the compo machine (which was much higher spec than the one I worked on the demo on) I was impressed =)

Why not crowdsource specs on pouet's prod pages?

Specs are irrelevant and complicated nowadays and people watch demos on youtube anyway. It’s not like we have three possible configurations that are easily quantifiable nowadays.

Specs should be in nfo indeed .. Good for now and the future ..

"Can someone please go back 30 years and update those infofiles for DOS demos so I know if they'll run on my outdated retro setups? Someone should do that for me because that's all I care about. Go on, I'll be here on the internet, complaining and waiting."

it’s pretty obvious lol
if your computer is more than a year old or cost less than $2k, click on the utube link

Also depends on the platform, for Amiga it is not harder now than it was 20 years ago ... So specs should be there if not just a small note on dev. machine maybe..

because they're too fucking chicken shit material to take responsibility for their slow ass code that they all too happily hide behind cheap branding

that’s a good wending! maybe we can use that in another afsnit.