Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the demoscene and gamedev culture is the antithesis of the FOSS one.

That was always the best thing about old days demoscene, specially at the parties, having one group proving that something deemed impossible on platform X was actually possible, and then having other discovering how they might have done it, and topping it with something even better.

The game dev culture evolved from the demoscene.

Nowadays due to the FOSS influence, there are some people sharing, but they are mostly the exception to the rule.

View on HN

> The game dev culture evolved from the demoscene.

I'm not sure that's the case. The demoscene really started with the Amiga in the mid 80s while game development was already its own thing. Maybe they influenced each-other but I wouldn't say one evolved from the other.

It actually started on the C64, as a by-product of game cracking. People would first add their "handles" into cracked games, then some small intros before the game. These intros soon became competetive, and were made stand-alone, known as demos. There was some overlap of game and demo-scene, but not much until around 1992 or so, on the Amiga.

I'd say that's correct these days, with one exception: DICE came from The Silents (TSL), who were well known in the Amiga scene.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DICE_(company)

Back in the Amiga days there did seem to be a bit more migration of ex-demo coders becoming game developers. Probably Team17 were the best known.

I'd disagree. Gamedev may be closed-source, but most developers (ea being a notable exception, i think?) release white-papers, and do presentations concerning technical and workflow innovations they've achieved, and make them available to the wider industry without patent.

The papers tend to cover everything from general implementation, to details such as cache optimizations they discovered later on in development. If you reach out to the devs over twitter, they're often more than happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Not open by foss plug-and-play standards, certainly. But technologically, they're absolutely open.

Actually EA has released a lot if interesting stuff in recent years.

Frostbite technicaly solutions: https://www.ea.com/frostbite/news Rendering research papers: https://www.ea.com/seed/publications

Most of those presentations are available via IGDA membership and GDC attendance.

You also don't get to learn about anything that is game console related unless you get access to the Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google internal dev forums.

Finally, yes there is stuff like GPU and Game Gems book series, but usually when one mentions that, many seem allergic to buy such books at 50+ € a piece.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com