The Best Of The 2009 Demoscene - incredible mem management | Hacker News Reader

The Best Of The 2009 Demoscene - incredible mem management

gamesetwatch.com

47 pointsaresant24 comments

I'm kinda sad that these things can run in realtime on modern hardware, but my fucking computer can't play a low-res video of the actual animation without stuttering.

First video felt a bit like an autechre video.

Your computer is not the culprit, Flash is.

You don't need flash to watch the videos. If you follow the links for each video you can download them in mp4 format.

Are there other (former/current) demomakers around here ?

I released these ones a long while back (ie circa 95-98):

Obez/KlOon http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=17268 (soft real phong rendering)

Nikki/Jinrikisha http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1368

I'm planning to experiment with ruby-based demo (maybe using Jemini - see http://www.learnivore.com/search/jemini) when I'll have more time this year.

I'm an assembly hacker (long time reverse-engineer, lately focused on compiler/kernel development) looking to get into the demoscene, but I've spent more time thinking and less time doing. I've built a few little fun things that are almost demo-related (I built a (x86 PC) bootblock breakout game that used the actual VGA memory to do collision detection, and a few other little things), but no actual demos. Is the best way to get into the scene to just start building things, or is it worthwhile to seek group contacts and try to get on an established team?

This will likely sound horrible for someone who wants to get into the scene, but I have a hard time coming up with an idea that's both interesting and doable given the restraints in which I want it to operate. This has been my biggest stumbling block so far, but I think that once I get one real project under my belt, I'll be considerably better off.

As a sidenote, if anyone here is interested in starting up a little group, I'm game.

Well back in the days, I just started out experimenting with some effects (ie standalone piece of graphic effect), or music. At some point I had various effects available handy, so I started sharing this inside the college, met a few people, went to demoparties etc.

After that people approached me to ask if we could work together etc.

Well I think the most important thing is to try doing a little something, see how it goes etc.

This can be time-boxed like any other hobbies.

Start building doable things, and start now. The tricky part is not to find interesting ideas but to find the time to implement these.

You should look around. At least get one gfx guy and one musician and you can probably start turning out stuff. Setup a site and just start releasing.

If you want to participate in the parties, you most likely have to find one you can personally attend in order to enter. Depending on where you are this can be either easy or hard.

But it's worth the trip, demo scene parties are tons of fun. Even small ones with a dozen people. I probably went to a dozen or so small scene parties and one big one during my peak in the 90's. And this was in the U.S. which tends to have far fewer parties than Europe.

Checkout http://www.scene.org/sitser.php for irc servers, you can usually find lots of sceners hanging around in #trax.

Actually I went to the Syntax party in Melbourne last October. You can see the retro invitation in the article (number 5).

I met some cool Sydney based sceners and we had beer and food at my place a couple of days ago. We've just formed a new group.

We'll be doing PC based demos and c64 demos.

In the scene in the late 80's for a couple of years, then lurking for a lot of years... and now back in.

I used to do graphics in the demoscene, and contributed to a couple of demos. Here's the ones I remember best:

Tesla - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=33

Contour - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=31

Live Evil - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=297

13/10/99 - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3291 (This one is actually a video demo, something I made alone without a coder.)

Nowadays I've turned to programming and make visual effects software. Most likely I never would have ended up on this career if it wasn't for the demoscene, so I feel lucky to have been there!

I was a musician for a while for a number of relatively unknown groups.

I mostly tool around now with a bunch of semi-retired sceners. We occasionally put out a small demo. Nothing as good as these, but we do it all for fun.

http://fulcrum.antisoc.net/

I still put out the occasional tune.

The point of real-time is also not to watch a video. The real thing is almost always better. If you want to watch it real-time it can be a good idea to ask the author for more compatibility.

Also check this 64k, my favourite this year: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=53643

Whoa. Thanks for that link! I only follow the demoscene sporadically these days as I always lose a couple of hours everytime I end up at Pouet!

By following that link I also had the pleasure of ending up on your demoscene group . I had to watch a few, and timestamps may be off here (could only watch the video) but at 2:02 in "Extatique" I had this shiver down my spine as it sent me back to the 90's Amiga scene with resizing-bob-starfield (only lasted for about 2 seconds before I was yanked back to reality, though). :D

Nice productions!

PS. Nice to see that you guys seem to provide source for everything!

Edit: link for those who might be curious: http://www.vimeo.com/8607459

Hey thanks. The low-tech feel of this demo wasn't intended tbh :)

For casual watchers, good stuff from recent years:

Stargazer/Orb & Andromeda: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=51438

The Beauty/Einklang.net: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=50144

Texas/Keyboarders: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=51448

Receptor/TBX: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=51449

Rudebox/ATZ: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=53937

Masagin/Farbrausch: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=50131

Everything ASD: http://pouet.net/groups.php?which=1317&order=release

The technical overview of direct to video is very interesting. It's sort of funny, it is the modern day pixel-draw-image effect. With GPU's the old demoscene of low level hw hacking is still alive.

Not only that but you're seeing some serious artistic effort put into these things. Not just 3ds shows which were a problem in the late 90's early 00's. Wonder when we'll start seeing demo's at moma.

I've been wishing for years that digital-only media had a better representation and recognition at publicly accessible museums, not just relegated to the odd art-opening gallery showing, on par with colored paste applied to fabric with horse hair.

Pouet.net is an excellent source of demos

One group's demos are especially impressive - http://www.theprodukkt.com/demoscene

Just watch their fr-08 or play that 64 KB FPS

I don't really see what the title has to do with the article - it said that these are for "demos", i.e. no size limits, and the #1 entry came in at about 60 MB. It'd be a lot more impressive if they fit that into 4K.

Well, it used to be just 4K of executable code. Perhaps the code used to produce the video was still extremely small?

The article explains. Since computers have gotten so much more powerful, the demoscene has fragmented - 4k/64k demos are now called "intros", and "demos" refers to programs with no limits except that they must render in realtime.

From my memory, this split (4k/64k/more) existed long before 1995.

More recently, see http://ind.untergrund.net/ for a list of very small (like 32, 256 bytes - not kb).

Sure. The split has existed since at least the second Assembly in 1993.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_demo_party#Demo_and_in...

I haven't been able to find an earlier example of the split; prior to that, it seems demos simply did not compete with size limitations.

Still, you can compare 60MB vs 2GB of RAM or ~512MB of gpu memory.

I dare anyone to look at these and not declare them art.

Participating in the scene is one of the most fun activities I've ever done.

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