pouët.net

If you want to avoid being made redundant on the demo scene by UE and Notch and like to stay behind the times there is always Amiga 4 u!

here's another one:

rloaderro: There is always C64 as well. Not to mention all the other 8-bit machines.

PC oldschool as well, if you're more familiar with Dos & x86 ..

I enjoy coding demos.
I also enjoy competing with other coders.

I also enjoy watching UE demos.
I just don't enjoy competing with them.

Bike races and car races can both be fun. But as a biker wouldn't really enjoy a race against cars.

@jimmi: this is what all coders doing software rendering said when the first accelerated demos came out. It appears that only the scene itself, as collective movement of creative people, will decide what is "allowed" into main demo compos or not and will at the same time arrange other containers for the rest (wild, oldskool, retro whatever).

This platform, this size limit, make the machine produce a show. Why is that not enough?

The question about drawing triangles in software vs hardware is a platform issue.
The "who made which parts of the so-called engine" question is something different.

given that "3d hw" nowadays means "shaders galore", isn´t it all software again anyway`? ;)

yzi, T$: I see you are bored, but me too, so yeah.. if you think about it deep enough, you can get into conclusion that any trick/algorithm worth doing with current hw will eventually end-up being implemented in those massive engines (UE/Unity), because economy. Also, because economy, it will most likely be implemented in commercial engines first, that is, before it will appear on the demoscene. So in short, resistance is futile.

nobody understands crap. look at what the hw does down to the atomic level. its doing arithmetic operations / computations. so its all "software" implemented in hardware. do we really need to get this low level.

when all coders abandoned software rendering in the past, because of hardware rendering taking over. i am honestly thinking the same when it comes to unity, unreal engine and the like. if all coders abandon programming because of tools taking over, will it be the end of the demoscene?

OK, so ask "where is there currently space for innovation?" "what can I bring to the scene?" or "how do I demonstrate the effort that I've put into this?"

If someone uses UE or any other comprehensive engine (even their own, after the first or second showing), I want to see something fucking mind-blowing. I also want to know up-front if they've used an engine.

If people who don't use comprehensive engines are exempt from showing something mind-blowing, I'd rather they used engines...

Hardware/software means, how easily you can re-define it to do something you want, instead of what the original makers wanted. Back in the triangles days, software rendering guys wanted to do triangles their own way, so it was more about how than what, compared to hw triangle guys who didn't care exactly how the triangles are drawn, as long as they're drawn fast. So they could concentrate on the "what do we do with all these triangles anyway" question. Maybe something very creative and touching like ... spiked balls? Factory fly-bys? Space ship and planet and explosion?

Yeah love the implication that if you code everything yourself it's permissible to just churn out the same bland crap over and over. That surely keeps the scene alive.

On old-school platforms you're constantly struggling with what you can fit in memory, which should, in theory, lead to more varied stuff, as you can't reuse everything all the time..

So using hwaccel in demo compos was an issue first. But now we have separate oldschool demo compos so everyone can compete in their own league. Both are enjoyable, and most people are happy with it.

Maybe we'll end up having "hand-coded" demo compos sometime in the future. I'd surely enjoy them more, even if they don't look as good as future UE demos.

That's not fully accurate though; a software rendering demo on Windows would still count as newschool. The current split is via platform, not toolset/technique. There was, indeed, a split around the 2000s between "accel" and "non-accel" demos, but that was still essentially based on hardware, not software.

technically speaking any party is free to define whatever compo rules they like. so if your party organizers enjoy the concept of a special "no external engines" compo they could easily set it up and use it to differentiate their party from all the others (and hopefully attract more visitors who share their vision with more foreign attenders and remote entries?!)

same way some parties have ohp compo, or 256byte compos, etc.

but somehow i feel such a compo wouldn't have that many entries.
maybe a special award for the best entry that is "hand made"? good luck unambiguously defining the rules of what constitutes a "hand made" demo though.

I...

Wow.

So you really think taking the whole "democoding" idea and relegating it to an "Endangered Species" compo is ATTRACTIVE? :D

damn this thread is getting better and better! :D

Yeah, well, Gargaj, are you sure that Javascript demo vs executable demo is not about the toolset? Javascript/Web is in fact nothing else but a scripting language for the engine, which is coded inside the browser. It has nothing to do with the hardware.
Also your argument is basically - we can't, because it's status quo.

Yes. Browsers and native code all interface with the graphics API in a fairly equivalent way (they're both OpenGL subsets); even if you add something like three.js you'll only get as far as LibCinder or XNA would get you. From the perspective of a coder's creative process, there's not a lot of difference between a browser demo and a native one. Most parties, for that reason, no longer differentiate between native and browser demos.

Isn't what you just said an argument for making a separate compo for UE/Unity? As those are way more than OpenGL subsets?

But I do see a difficulty making a distinction like this. It's basically hard to draw the line between self-made engine (Notch, Tooll.io) and non-demoscene engine (UE/Unity).

"Organic" compo : how they did it back in the day. Oh wait, there's the oldskool compo already. "I can really code myself" compo ... there's live coding for that. There are various oldschool and newschool platforms, there are size-limited compos, ... All sorts of platform limitations, but aside from live coding, I don't recall a HOW you did it limitation. Even the "no pure animation players" limitation has felt out of place, and invented by someone who's a bit misinformed. If you can do the same with a video player, then the size limit is clearly too big.