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There were several occasions where the compos at parties were so successful (in the sense that there were many entries) that it resulted in compo nights getting too long. And I say "too long" not only because of personal preference for getting to sleep before 04:00. Running this late also had material disadvantages. I was present at Revision 2023 and Deadline 2024 where relatively large fractions of the visitors had already left the hall when the peak time of the compo night happened. It may have been exhaustion, or external factors like having to catch trains and flights the next day and some rest being needed before that. This is unfortunate for both those who made the entries and those who had planned to watch the compos. In some cases the long night may delay the prizegiving which can also complicate things.

This is not to say that anybody made any mistakes in organizing. After all, many entries are a sign of success, and the overall party organization was great.

So the suggestion is this: Why don't party timetables aim for a much earlier final compo block? Starting at 20:30 for example? Of course the deadlines would also need to move to an earlier time. In the best case there are many entries (resulting in small delays) and peak time will be at around 23:00 to 00:00 and people not yet too sleepy. If there are fewer entries than expected then the DJs/live-acts can start earlier, play longer and visitors can dance more. What do you think?

+1 for this. Getting to sleep only long after 3 AM at Zoo (a very enjoyable party otherwise) last Saturday was quite a heavy experience – not just for me but other middle-aged guys with daily jobs and schedules. A plea to C64 sceners: demos don't need to last half an hour to be impressive :)

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Hehe, we gettin' old!!!! I agree though, especially since I no longer drink, raw dogging a demoparty is exhausting and I need to get to my quiet hotel room to deflate for at least an hour before I can sleep haha.

I always thought the gig break was for the beam team to take a break, but KB told me that has been improved loads, at least for Revision, but with a schedule as busy as Revisions I wonder what is even possible planning wise.

For smaller parties, at Outline, because of house rules, all the compos and prize giving were always (p much) done before midnight, and that was when it was atari heavy with loads of compos as well. And I believe TRSAC managed the same, though I've never survived a beer and schnapps break...

I personally don't mind staying up late, although getting home from Deadline at 6:30 (and this time not because of getting drunk at the bonfire) was a bit much ;)

However, cp has an excellent point in that many people have good reasons to leave earlier and it plain sucks to be showing the main compos to a half-empty hall. Hence I'm in 100% agreement. I also wouldn't mind having more time and energy for partying and socializing after the compos..

This is also an issue for voting, if people use live voting but have to leave early due to the length of the compo in question, only the first half of prods will get a proper vote (1 to 5 points) and the remaining ones will basically get 0 points if voting is still handled like that.

In this case it's nice to be able to vote remotely (for people watching the remaining demos on their way to the hotel or next morning in their hotel room) and/or have the voting deadline right before the prizegiving instead of early in the morning.

This has been quite a recurring problem at some parties. I have complained about this at Zoo Party several times when the demo compo has been going really late and the gems are shown around 4 am or 5 am when I'm so sleep deprived that I'm half asleep during them and can't remember anything of them. In 2022 I noticed that half of the audience had left before the show was over. It's a disservice to the creators and the audience even though there were really marvellous entries. One problem is that several demos took about 15 minutes. It's a must to schedule the compos significantly earlier, disqualify some of the entries or set a time limit for the entries. At least this year they did it better and I think the show was over about 2:15 am.

Revision 2023 had the demo compo run all too late as well. I didn't realize how late it would go and how early I need to catch the train to the airport the next day. Also having the shuttles leave once an hour didn't help. I was nervously watching time and had to run catch the 2 am shuttle so that I would have at least a few hours of sleep before leaving and had to watch the winning demo on my cell phone. In 2024 I learned and knew not to plan an early leave the next day.

There's a simple solution here: Add preselection for demos, just like we have for music or graphics. (For bigger parties, of course. If the party is already starved for entries, no preselection needed.)

Yes, it means not everybody gets to show their demo at Revision. There are lots of other ways to get your demos seen now (the Internet exists), and I doubt it's unhealthy for the scene if 20 smaller parties get 1–2 more prods each.

Yes, this actually does happen and I think it's a pity. Imagine there is a future classic released at a party you went to but your personal memory is about watching it alone on a small screen in a taxi or something.

What the earlier planned start date does not solve is that some entries will still be in a "it is done when it's done" situation. Bugfixes for the compo machine an whatnot. But the timetable will at least provide a different reference point when organizers think about whether or not to allow more deadline extensions.

To be honest, I’ve never really understood why DJ live sets are scheduled before the demo competitions.

Yeah..I know the compo organizers would love to have more time and all… but from a dramaturgical perspective, it makes absolutely no sense to break the crowd-vibe at its peak right before the demo compo starts.

By then, people are already worn out and then (since in the running order dramaturgy is suddenly given attention) the audience gets “warmed up” (LOL) by the first half of the not-so-exciting demos, get tired, bored and annoyed.

And at that point, people start heading back to the hotel to watch the end of the democompo.

Even i do so...after a long day i dont want to wait until 2 or 3 in the morning, hoping to get impressed.

My suggestion still is:

Run the compos earliest as possible in the evenings and let the crowd dance and celebrate afterwards.

That would make sense.

what docd said... because i already said that ~10 years ago... demoparties were becoming more party than demo. if you want to dance, go to bloody Tomorrowland or smth!

This.

Compo starting times are in fact aimed much earlier. In actual practice that just doesn't work out very often, unfortunately, for a multitude of more or less valid reasons. Unless, it appears, there are practical reasons to make it work out, as alluded to before.

I'm personally not too bothered by such minor imperfections though, if I get tired before the compo starts, I go to my hotel and watch the compo from bed, the next morning, or not at all, or whatever. Bottom line, it's no big deal to me and has little impact on how much I enjoy the party.

Just talked about this with alkama the other day. Another big advantage of starting earlier would be that there’s time to talk about the demos directly afterwards the compos. Even for old people who need to go to bed at a reasonable time. ;o)

I am old and wholeheartedly support this.

Demo parties are about demos first, and party second. You can dance to stomp music outside, later, or at home. Or whatever, in fact I don't mind if compos start at 4:00. Ad-hoc style imperfections and CHAOS are what make them perfect. Biggest complaint for me personally is too many lesser compos (photo, klemmbaustein, pc, ...) and too much noise from stomp music and jingles. Best thing is still that every party is different and has its unique flavour.

watching a demo compo at 04am was not easy 30 years ago, now its just impossible :D

I take that half hour to be hyperbole - sure, many a demo at Zoo was longer than necessary, but none of them went on for more than 10 (or maybe 15) minutes, surely?

In any case, C-64 demos used to be more long-winded before Youtube ADHD etc. were a thing. :)

Well, half an hour was a little exaggerated but, say, 5–7 minute time limit probably wouldn't decrease the quality of the compo at all and would keep it more manageable for both the organizers and the audience.

One aspect of making sure compos are on time, is to stop giving seemingly endless deadline extensions. At Zoo an entity in the main organizing crew kept promising more and more deadline extensions, with no interaction with the compocrew other than "oh btw I gave them more time". It puts a massive strain on the compo organizer(s) and will in many cases directly lead to compo delays.

I too want compos to be dealt with sooner than silly A.M., so I fully endorse this threads initiative.

+1 for earlier demos! The thing that is most central and important to the event shouldn't be left for the last moments.
- people can sit down for a drink and discuss the entries afterwards instead of everyone suddenly evaporating into thin air
- more time to vote and think about your vote than just rushing through the entry list
- you can party hard without missing the compo block

and by extension +1 for earlier deadlines:
- people should be hand in their entries early and enjoy the party, but instead we have a culture of relaxed deadlines and deadline extensions that enable people to work on their entries up until and including the last minute... this is not healthy for anyone
- more time for compo organizers, maybe they can finish early and enjoy more of the party

I 100% agree with _docd. Nuff said.

Aside from all great reasons this is probably the one that stands out. 100%!! <3

What I don't really appreciate is that many parties are increasingly trying to have an almost continuous programme, which means it's always loud and it's really difficult to talk to anyone inside the hall - let alone finishing your demo.

Most C64-demos are released at C64-only events anyway, so organizers probably know what to expect and forcing a time limit doesn't make much sense in this context.

I also agree. I mean, "we had so many entries at Deadline the compos ran until 5AM" is a fun story to tell afterwards but I remember how tired I was and how much even less than usual I remembered from the last few compos . There are a lot of good points made in here.

To spill a bit of insider knowledge because it's sometimes not that easy though:

It really depends if a party has different people for compo team and beam team (as for example Revision and Evoke do) or if it's the same person on the actual compo/beam machine who has to prepare _and_ show the compos (for example at Deadline).

In the first case (let's talk Revision here) there's not much of an excuse. As soon as the compo entries (in exe or video form) arrive at the beam team and the data in the party system is right, we can run a compo.

So if the compo team struggles to get the preparation or recordings ready in time, let's move the deadlines to a bit earlier point and/or if push comes to shove, preselect so that we limit recording and show time. Party scrollers and obvious compofillers go first, Färjans and other inside jokes get reduced to one per compo and one minute of runtime (but actually it's nice to keep a bit of that in to lighten the mood in the hall), and then let's preselect by "quality / experience" (a newbie prod that's a bit crappy should have a bigger chance than veterans phoning it in). Oh and hi C64 scene, we know loading from disk is abysmally slow and you need to bridge the time to load the next NUFLI picture or giant chunk of speedcode somehow, but there's no shame in making something of smaller scope. There's always X where "Insert Disk 5" is truly appreciated and celebrated :)

As for the Beam team Okkie is right, those DJ sets aren't strictly necessary. They're nice for having a break (and by the way that also goes to the visitors. Watching compos all the time is hard.) but in recent times we're set up well enough people and tech wise that we could run all the compo blocks back to back with only a bit of downtime in between.

(cue everyone in the Revision Slack getting mad at me because I made them work harder now. Ah well.)

It's a bit of a different story at let's say Deadline though. It's a way smaller party with a way smaller organizing team, which means that there are mostly just two people (Insane and KeyJ who are doing a truly awesome job there) that have to prepare _and_ run all the compos, and both steps are done on the same machines so you can't really prepare one compo and run another at the same time, unless one is oldschool and the other is not. So an hour of downtime between compo blocks is actually needed there. Preselection also only gets you so far because in order to find out which prods to kick out of the compo, you'll need to watch them all at least once nevertheless (and go through all the trouble with non working ones before determining they're bad). Moving deadlines doesn't help too much also because the deadlines are usually set to "when the compo people actually have time to look at all the stuff", and that doesn't really change.

Disallowing remote entries in the main compos might work, but then again you never know how many people come and how many releases they bring. 2024 (at least the parties I attended) has been a completely bonkers year in terms of total partygoer and release count - Evoke as well as Deadline both had unprecedented amounts of people in the hall and prods to show. And on the other hand Revision was more or less the usual, and had only kinda few PC demos after the completely almost-m&s2002-insane number of them in 2023.

What could also be possible is changing up the timetable as soon as we as orgas have an idea how packed the compos will be and in what order we can get them out. That's actually what happened at Deadline - Hoffman's set was moved to the exact slot the compo orgas needed to get the last blocks in order, and the other one was sadly canceled altogether. But how much can we do that before visitors get mad they missed "their" compo because it ran at a completely different time than initially promised?

So, it's a bit complicated. But you've been heard.