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Comment by thristian | Hacker News Reader

Elevated is one of the most atmospheric, cinematic demos I've ever seen, and the fact that it takes only a fraction of the disk space of the icon used to represent it in the file-manager is ridiculous.

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Demos of this caliber are like F1 cars from 60 years ago: a single genius, or small team, creating something totally beyond the reasonable expectations of everyone who is familiar with the technology in question.

I really hope it continues to be possible for this art form to exist.

>I really hope it continues to be possible for this art form to exist.

Hopefully AI doesn't one day ruin the demoscene as well. Seems like a Pandora's box for cheating and/or asymmetric resource advantages.

The same may have been said about most other technologies introduced. The fact that a Windows .exe can do a lot more because it has access to DirectX doesn't invalidate the effort made in a demo of the same size made for the C64. There simply are different categories.

I don't think they'll be much ruining going on. The people who make these demos use everything they can get their hands on, as long as it helps with cool visuals, a great soundtrack, and sandal executable size. In terms of how they get there everything seems to be allowed and even expected. And if one of those things is a trained network, so be it. Many groups have their own custom tools or even one-offs for only one demo.

Well put, I think you're correct.

How would one even learn how to do something like this?

I feel like I have a high level understanding of most parts of the stack, but graphics programming has eluded me thus far.

Would writing a ray tracer be a good starter project? I know I've seen it recommended by several people before.

I'd recommend starting with javascript:

https://thebookofshaders.com/

https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_geometry_terrain_raycast

I appreciate the recommendation to start with JS, I'm actually trying to avoid targeting the browser as much as possible with my projects, with the exception of things actually returning hypertext or that I get for free via wasm or something else.

The Book of Shaders looks quite interesting however, thank you for the link!

I'd encourage you to reconsider that. Using WebGL lets you skip over a lot of tedious initialization. Or, even better, using a platform like shadertoy.net lets you skip all the JS as well and just write shaders.

Using these tools doesn't mean your final project has to be JS-based as well. It just happens to be a convenient way to focus on specific aspects of the project.

I fell the synth is overlooked. There's a lot going on there in a tiny amount of code.

Definitely true! I've played around with audio a little bit before, and am a little more comfortable there (though by no means proficient).

Thankfully for the graphics the very person who did the graphics in this Elevated demo is very generous with their time. Inigo Quilez has many instructional videos on his channel in how to code procedural graphics from the very beginner to the advanced. I link a couple of examples. You can watch the more advanced video even as a beginner but trying yourself is easier at the beginner level.

Beginner. https://youtu.be/0ifChJ0nJfM

Advanced. https://youtu.be/BFld4EBO2RE

Website. https://iquilezles.org/

Indeed his videos are amazing. My recommendation though would be to start with the "beginner" video -- which is completely 2D but at least gets some ideas across. Then watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGtv-dBi2wE which isn't his but introduces how you get 3D out of fragment shaders. Finally just drink from the firehose -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfe5UQ-1L9Q is fantastic, yes it's five hours but worth it. (Definitely come into that familiar with the idea of raymarching though... the first few minutes start off super basic but it goes to eleven real quick.)

great! Thanks for your course!

For basic 3d graphics rasterization concepts and implementation check out 500 lines C++ TinyRenderer and its wiki here: https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer and the 100 lines Python version (only numpy dependency) here: https://github.com/rougier/tiny-renderer

Raytracing in a weekend is also useful: https://raytracing.github.io/

> Would writing a ray tracer be a good starter project?

Yes!

A good starterpoint would be any old 8 bit machine with bitmapped memory and a copy of Newman and Sproull.

Specific to this demo, Inigo Quilez did a breakdown back in 2009 called 'behind elevated' for Function 2009 but I can't find it on his site today. Maybe it's there. But here's the archive link to the pdf.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120119015415if_/http://www.iqu...

And finally 'Elevated' commented in Shadertoy with links to the techniques on his blog.

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MdX3Rr

The most impressive one for me will always be fr-08, the .product, released in 2000:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dcrV_7JpXQ

Pouet link if you want the binary: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221

It blew my mind when I first came across it in 2003, and it's still highly impressive even now.

Ah man you just took me back to middle school. The 90s and the 2000s were such happy times in my life. Everything Farbrausch produced evokes such happy memories.

For whatever reason I became obsessed with this lesser known demo called g-cube and watched it a lot in 2011.

Just wanted to share(anyone remember it?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0gh5wnItw

My most favourite demo of 2000 was "Heaven 7" by Exceed [0]. That someone could do smooth raytracing (of course with many tricks, but still...) was mindblowing for me.

[0] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5

The most impressive for me, in a slightly different way, is A Mind is Born, because it manages to do some simple but impactful sound and video in 256 bytes, on a Commodore 64:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26511266

His other work is great too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNCqrylNY-0

I still listen to that song just by itself. It's such an amazing demo.

I was at a film festival, and saw a short film about AI or something. The film used just the music for the end credits! I told the director i appreciated the reference, and he was amazed someone recognised it.

When I watched the '.the .product', my perspective about the computers have shifted dramatically and permanently. I became an high performance programming (not in HPC sense) enthusiast, and decided that performance and optimization matters.

That path brought me to HPC, efficient and high performance programming and showed me how thinking about writing efficient code made a difference.

Yes, you can't arrive to demoscene level wizardy in every application/tool you write, but optimizing the obvious and then some changes things a lot.

Thinking about it again, possibly coming from C64 and early x86 hardware already primed me to "do more with less" mindset already, but '.the .product' get the things rolling.

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