pouët.net

I definitely favor unity builds for any large code base. It's the only sensible thing to do.

Good lord no, they make the compile so much slower. :(

and if you use .asmdef with Unity, your builds go even fastaaaah!

Professional tools like Unreal Engine, Unity and Färjanmaker are killing the demoscene.

Do you also want to know more about Destop?

All this discussion about the cool tools make me really curious of trying it out myself. At the same time i'm afraid. Once i ported "Hypnoteye" from ASM (which i worked on for quite a time) to shadertoy in a matter of minutes (as opposed to hours). All shiny, super fast, convenient, compatible. That left me a bit hollow. Now if i imagine having a tool chain "doing everything for me", then i would need ... ideas, concepts, direction ... right?

Nah, you can just buy that at the asset store

Fuck off all this discussion. It does not matter, in the end.

I can't hate you, really.

This is all good. No hard feelings.

Maybe I will enter a compo with a Unity prod then, and have some fun as well. Cannot deny that more comfortable it is. =)

Cheers.

imerso: plenty of demos use ripped commercial music, and people learned to judge it accordingly, less merit for not being original music, extra points if it complements the code well enough to make irreplaceable by a clone. not all demoparties require complete original content, typically only the major ones due to copyright law issues. also, 3d models from asset store have been used in the past, and will keep being used in the future. as long as people credit their sources and not claim something ripped as their own, it's not where you got the material from that matters, it's what you do with it, atleast in my book. i'm sure plenty others rather do 100% original assets where possible (also gives them more control over them) and they'll get more props for not cutting those corners.

imerso: it's not about you. Maybe you haven't understood how this forum works. I was like, who is this imerso dude and why is he telling everyone to fuck off? Oh, he's the original poster, he thinks everyone knows about him and his original post. No. After the discussion extends to the second page, you become a nobody and nobody cares about you and your original post anymore. The discussion goes to random directions, new people join in and contribute more random crap and it goes on and on. Nobody knows or cares where it started.

Debvgger, spike: yes, the quantity of pc demos has been decreasing. yes, the quality of demos is not as technically high as you see on other things (like videogames). but there are a lot of reasons for that, you can't blame a lack of restrictions on it. imho your whine on that issue is more about your own expectations of what is a high quality pc democompo should look like. and this is where the comparisons to videogames and music videos comes in: you see the highest grossing industries in the world doing these things in higher quantity, creative and technological quality (well, some of it atleast) and you're left hoping for the 90s demoscene to still be competing with that. it's already been concluded that our hobby (despite having extremely talented people) can't quite compete with teams of dozens of paid professionals who do those things for a living full time. sure some sceners can reach those levels, but it takes months of demomaking and we're not teens anymore. does the fact that we can't reach those industies mean demomaking is worthless? no. but if you're making demos just to be compared to those things you'll have a much harder time achieving your goal successfully, hence the folks who were only on the demoscene focusing on that aspect have mostly moved on to other things. whilst people who makes demos because they enjoy exploring this unique medium and culture still try to keep active, when they find the time and an interesting enough idea to do something again. because once you did over a dozen demos, the appeal to do more kinda wanes out a bit unless you find something to inspire you again. also, real life gets in the way, as we all get older finding the free time to do all the things you're interested in becomes harder, it's more and more precious, and i for one do not wish to be wasting it on things that do not bring me personal pleasure, relearning for the nth time how to implement and optimize a 3d engine because "that's the true way to do demos" does not fall into that category. i'd much rather just do my demo instead, when i have an idea for one, instead of spending my time redoing throw away tech that i'll forget all about how i made it in 9 months. but like i said before, if (re)learning how to code these things yourself is what brings you pleasure, by all means, go do a demo with your own engine, awesome. just don't come lecture the rest of us on what we should be using or not using to keep the hobby we been nurturing for decades now, we kinda already know how to make demos and why we do/don't make them as often.

^ indeed. Also, it would be a lot more convincing if the people demanding better demos (or more restirctions, or AMIGAAA, or whatever) on this thread would actually have produced top stuff. The whole "put your money where your mouth is"-thing, you know. The only person with authority about true AAA graphics quality on this thread as far as I can tell/remember is smash, and he doesn't exactly agree with you guys.

To be fair, smash did suggest to prohibit demos using right sound channel in PC demo compos.

No, he specifically said to do that for the *music* compos. Doing it for the PC demo compo would just be silly.

prohibiting the right sound just does not sound right

yeah that one usually isn't connected anyway so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

All I can say to people complaining about demo quality is "make a demo about it".
(;

that would help quantity, not quality!

who cares about quality when theres comedic value and repetition anyway?

I actually liked the comment by spike saying that "If it weren't for the old farts like fairlight, cncd, cocoon and asd (and that's about it already) pc demo compos in recent years look pretty bleak, if you would be honest with yourself".

I would probably slightly extend the list of my favourite PC demo groups, but it does not matter. What matters is that despite all the talk of technicality, when Big Design comes to town, Big Design rules. And it is all that really matters to me.

Re: comparing demo groups with commercial game development studios ... The content in demos doesn't have to depend on production values. For example the music in 90s oldskool mods is perfectly fine, even if a lot of it was made by some teenager with an Amiga. My kids love many oldskool MODs, even though they're used to hearing big international hit productions as well. If your stuff is honest and you have an idea, that's enough.

For whatever reason you are misunderstanding me. I'm not trying to lecture anyone, in fact I mainly asked questions because I genuinely am interested in knowing people's opinions. I have had my own blunt share of Unity hours already and I don't think there is any problem with people using whatever they like. In fact I think that is fantastic. The real question I'm asking is if bicycles and cars can really stage a somewhat fair race or not. And if not, shouldn't they have their own races. There's no discussion possible about the merits of the work done by using or not using Unity, because nice work is always nice work.

For some time a demo competition could be partly seen as an engine / toolset competition too. So I don't think it's that surprising that using game engines can trigger some reactions of surprise.

Concerning the original question of the thread, it's an easy one for me:

When it comes to voting in democompos, I tend to try to rate the direction, graphics, sound and code.

So for me it is an easy decision: When someone is using a commercial game engine, he just will get less "points" from me than a release that uses an engine that's created by the group's coder(s) itself.

I just try to respect the effort of engine coding into my voting. And I admit that using a commercial engine costs you at least one partymeister star as default, when I'm voting.

That's just the way I do/see it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hm.... maybe the answer is just like "PC Demo compo is dead".

New stars arising like 8k, 256kB and so on.



By the way... For me, democoding is not just about "Coder Arrogance", but also by twisting yourself out of dreams, just by a fucking loading screen!

Debvgger: to answer your analogy directly, the agreed norm is that it's fine to use bycicles, tractors or steamboats as long as you say what you used to get to the finish line.

Personally i'm more in favor of not having compos, just showing what you been working on and just released, maybe have some special jury awards to stuff that distinguishes itself in one way or another to help people navigate the sea of releases if it ever comes to that. But culturally the competition factor has an historic value to the scene and some folks still enjoy stealing votedisks although i would argue 80% of the stuff delivered to compos nowdays doesn't care much about winning, just wants it to be presented on the big screen and hear the feedback from folks whose views they respect.