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Comment by dwaltrip | Hacker News Reader

That intro was very cool! Does anyone have pointers for a fullstack web dev who is interested in the demoscene (or computer generated art in general)?

I've actually played around a bit with rust [1] (I understand it probably isn't ideal for demoscence), but I haven't really done any graphics programming before. I get the feeling it is a pretty deep rabbit hole.

[1] https://github.com/dwaltrip/advent-of-code-2019-rust

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In this intro and in almost every modern 4kB intro, the graphics are made in a shader. To play with shaders, I'd recommend you to look at https://www.shadertoy.com/. Check also Inigo Quilez's website (https://www.iquilezles.org/), it has a lot of fascinating content.

Thanks for the links! Very helpful

If you're a web dev, then <canvas> may be the obvious option to get started! There's a fairly large creative coding community.

The Coding Train on youtube has a ton of content [0]. If you really want to start from the beginning then I would also recommend Coding Math on YouTube [1], which is sort of graphics from first principles using JS/canvas. That even starts with teaching trigonometry, vectors, etc. So if your math is rusty it's a good place to start

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/codingmath

Thanks! I’ll check it out.

> but I haven't really done any graphics programming before

I've never written any demos but do enjoy playing with GPUs. Regarding anything and everything graphics related, try not to get overwhelmed by modern APIs; it's very easy to lose the forest for the trees. Shadertoy is a really good starting point.

My impression of the demoscene can be loosely summarized as extreme code golf for graphics and sound.

That all makes sense. Thanks for the advice.

Javascript demos is one option https://www.dwitter.net/

That site looks pretty cool! Some very nice animations on there.

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