What is the Demoscene? An interview
onthearts.com
onthearts.com
My 1997-era renderer did reflections, bump, color textures, etc all in 16 bit using x86 assembler rasterizers, no floating point, with 256 color palette - source can be found from this link: https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1260346800176877571
Another demo from the same era (1996), also includes source: https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1272530352070971397
Nearly 30 years later I am still doing 3D graphics, contributing to Threejs (which is run by mrdoob, another demo scene coder), glTF, VFX software, https://web3dsurvey.com and have run a computer-graphics company for the last ~20 years: https://threekit.com
When I started my own firm in 2005 I adopted a no-overtime policy in reaction to that. This was more feasible since I was creating and delivering software and this was more predictable and containable than doing VFX itself. This has loosened a bit as the company grew, we got funding, then got other divisions, etc.
I couldn't take the hours, honestly. The place I worked I was ended up sleeping under the desk and doing 20hr days to make crunches.
I think all of this is also completely unnecessary. Work-life balance is necessary if you want to have a family and enjoy it - that means you need weekends off, and you need standard business hours. Otherwise, it messes up daycare, evening children events and the split of chores between you and your significant other (which will lead to fights.)
I looked at your code and saw only .cpp files. I had to open your triangle renderer, and there it was - you'd inlined your x86. I don't think I ever inlined my assembler, even though I was using Borland C++ like you. I think I must have linked it in somehow?
Is your old code posted anywhere? I think many of us were working from the same example projects/tutorials. I wouldn't be surprised if the code is incredibly similar.
> I had to open your triangle renderer, and there it was - you'd inlined your x86.
Being able to inline asm was amazing. The code:
https://github.com/bhouston/3DMaskDemo1997/blob/master/src/N...
Being able to access C++ variables on the stack directly from assembler to read and to write to them was so nice. You get the speed benefits without adding significant complexity.
I did find one of my commercial releases on the Internet the other day because it was on a magazine cover disk in 1994 which saved it from obscurity :)
I would love to be able to properly decompile my old demos, but it would require a bit of work.
For phong rendering, I remember I interpolated the full vector along each line (with an "integer" square root table stored in memory, taking 512k or something), it was fun times :-)
I implemented real-time Phong rendering on 486SX (no FPU) with a chrome-like effect (see https://github.com/thbar/demomaking#obez-1995) and this still gives me chills.
I met great people back then, and had a ton of fun.
My only regret is that source code is lost, and decompiling properly is not easy!
The demo scene is a bunch of kids having fun and learning algorithms primarily. To tell them that they need to write unit tests is ridiculous. They will have time to learn about large scale architecture and unit tests in time - by why not try to have fun for a bit?
Shadertoy isn’t meant to be reusable/production code. It is meant to be a fun computer graphics algorithm place. A place to experiment and learn.
We can take the fun out of coding later - that is what paying jobs are for. Why not have some spaces for fun?
Booze Design - Edge of Disgrace
Specially in commercial gaming.
Even if it was fun I often felt it was useless because the skills I was acquiring were only applicable for game development and that was something I was not interested in.
It was quite a shock to me when I found myself working on a WebGL demo for Google² and all what I had learnt in the demoscene paid off (and has continued paying off ever since!³⁴).
1. https://ricardocabello.com/
Imagine how much better off our society would be if every adult was grounded in the fundamentals of political science, ethics, economics, and philosophy.
An educated electorate demands higher quality candidates. The populist demagogues of the last several decades wouldn't have stood a chance.
It is about coverage and opportunity in our lives.
The more skills one picks up, the greater the chance any one of them will make a big difference.
Here is a crazy example:
Paper tape. In the late 80's, I worked in some smaller shops using paper tape to drive their CNC machines. I learned all about it and can patch, the whole nine.
A few years ago a call for help found it's way to me and it turns out there are STILL people driving CNC machines off paper tape! I was able to fix the setup and get them running, edit a few programs and repair a damaged tape or few. Made a nice bit of extra cash.
Restating their (apparent) point more explicitly: there are no technical skills that have probability 0% of being used; there are many (most) technical skills that have probability less than 100% of being used. There are cost-benefit tradeoffs to consider, but assuming the cost is low enough, it's better (useful) to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
I believe my lego play informed my career in software development, but that might be a stretch.
I'd argue that this kind of language isn't even right. It's not only that you don't know when you need something, you don't even know when you use it. If we've learned one thing from the success of ML systems it's that the proper representation of knowledge is extremely complex and connected. Everything influences everything else. You can't learn "10%" of a language, or "10% of programming", as if there exists some chunk neatly separated from the rest.
It's much more likely everything you learned contributes to most of what you do, even if we're not actively aware of it. You can't learn x% of Mandarin by learning y% of the words, it's not even appropriate to separate anything into useful or useless. Almost everything you pick up just illuminates your mental model just a little bit more.
My (devops) team did the tooling, but we've worked very closely with QA, and while they didn't get the pages, both teams felt that they shared the responsibility of making the final product (well basically a cool tech demo) rock solid for the viewers. In 4.5 years there I've touched ca 600 projects, but I agree with you - it was still easier than doing the frontend work. Arguably less glory but definitely more life.
The first abstract scene (about 30secs in) is basically r08028 but less cool :-)
Thank you for these!
I remember your 3 Dreams of Black experiment when it came out, that was awesome work!
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos/c/TR8hmM3I...
My demos were my resume (CV) at the time. I remember Jez San of Argonaut (Starfox) contacting me and wanting me to come interview for a development position. I was 16 IIRC.
A year or so after that I became a professional game developer. In fact, the game I was working on was changed from 2D to 3D overnight and I pulled out my demo source and ported the whole 3D engine over in two weeks:
https://youtu.be/t2kdKB18c7I?t=330
Demos really force you to learn everything there is to know about how a modern computer system works, CPU, RAM, ROM, bus, video, etc. That knowledge will remain invaluable.
I mostly do web dev in C#, but any time I write a single line of code my brain is thinking in the background "how many opcodes will this be? what about this branch? am I making an extra copy of this variable for no reason?"
For C# specifically, if you want to scratch the itch, there is a way :) If you are using VS, you can install Disasmo extension and disassemble arbitrary methods with SHIFT+ALT+D (keep in mind it's ready-to-run-like codegen which does not have all optimizations).
You can also go further, and use `DOTNET_JitDisasm='methodName'` env variable - in this case you will see how method transitions through all compilation tiers (if it gets promoted past Tier 0). And last but not least, if you build your .NET binary with NativeAOT, you can just use standard disassembler, debugger or profiler you would use for C++ binaries.
Some demomakers are also active in the emulation scene.
But in the end, I guess all of that will die with "our" generation. We were born in that golden age and kids today can't live in our past (and that's fortunate!). So our art, emulators, scene will eventually pass away with us.
So don't wait, write that demo while you're still young enough to compete :-) (I did my last production at 49 :-) )
Greetz to Imphobia/ImpactStudios/Cascada/FrenchTouch !
I assume you mean Atari? Commodore owned Amiga
The Wikipedia entry on demoscene seems to specify that it's about impressive demos on old computers.
Where does it specify that? (and if it did, it would be wrong)
There's a reason why you've got the 4Kb, 64Kb competitions. We want limitations because overcoming them is part of the art.
Lastly I made an Apple ][ demo. I could have learned the shader stuff, load tons of geometry, etc. But I much prefer limitations because I know my peers will check my code and hopefully will be astonished by what I do. (yeah, gratification !!!)
Here's some examples picked randomly from the "featured" category.
- https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=66745#p
- https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=99910#p
That's what we all felt when it started. Just try and try again, you'll learn, you'll meet great people and in the end, you'll shine :-)
Up until the late 1990s it was not possible to playback full screen video on regular PC hardware, because of both CPU and storage limitations.
This meant that if you wanted smooth high resolution animations, you'd have to resort to programming and a lot of tricks.
As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice.
The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s.
This reduced the audience to those who could understand the effort that you went through. In many ways, that just never compares to the original demoscene feel.
It was an amazing time to be alive, but it will never come back, because technology has moved on. I wonder what underground scene kids these days will cherish as much later in life.
Constrained generative networks would be interesting too.
https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=64k&page=1
There's even a 32 byte demo category. What can someone do that's interesting in 32 bytes? Not a lot, but they still do it. 64K, 8k, and 4k compos are still alive and well on modern platforms and they are just as amazing as they used to be.
There are new productions for various platforms ranging from modern to retro and from full restricted intros (256 byte DOS intros, 4k Windows intros) to full blown demos all the time.
Actually, it died when people started making demos in C and horror C++.
No wait, the demoscene died when 3D cards made art/modeling the only valuable thing.
No wait, let me get this right. The demoscene died when mp3 music produced in DAWs replaced mods, and photoshop and wacoms replaced deluxe paint pixelart.
Hm... maybe it died when the internet made everthing available so nothing felt special anymore.
Or when the web and Flash became the place to get a quick fix of visual design.
Maybe it died when kids became more interested in esports and LoL than in coding.
I'm sure it died when Youtube meant you didn't even need the hardware or the download to watch a demo.
Maybe it was when the iPhone appstore meant the most popular device on earth couldn't run demos.
I don't know, I can't decide.
When we saw Commodore 64 demos for example, they often impressed even relatively non-technical people.
But today a demo that pushes the limits technically will often only look impressive to those who understand the technical limitations.
That has significantly changed the potential audience to a diminishing subset even if relatively technical people.
It was actually what put me off a bit -- I enjoyed the demoscene to learn new things and to experiment with computers in total freedom. I had no need for artificial limitations set out by competitions, and never really cared much for the gatherings of socially less developed boys who smelled pretty bad (even though I exactly matched that profile myself :).
I really liked the contrarian groups who faked a lot. In Nooon's "Stars" (1995) a 3D bee is rendered with a complete wing missing, to fake a high poly count. "Transgression 2" by MFX may also be a good example of what I am trying to convey here. Obviously it was not real-time ray tracing, but what was it? It puzzled me for weeks!
Not sure that was a factor. You could already earlier prerender things, just maybe not minutes of it, but for loops it always was a thing. Back then in the late 80ies/early 90ies, at least in the C64 scene, it was a huge topic sometimes and people stressed when especially spectacular effects where "realtime", so there will be no doubts, cause prerendering carried a huge stigma with it for a long time.
In fact, this was what held back the demoscene for a while, cause a lot of very stylish things just were not possible at least on C64 hardware without prerendering or at least doing the 3d calculations up front. The scene actually had to overcome their fixation on "realtime" effects before a lot of very artsy, stylish demos became possible, once people started focussing on what you see, not how you achieve it.
The latter part might not apply to stronger machines, though, admittedly. On the C64 any kind of long running animation is a feat in itself, even if you trade limited CPU for limited memory.
Edit: That is to say, I don't think the only value of the demoscene is to create something cool under technical limitations. I think it's to create something cool in a computational medium (the spirit lives on as procedural art, shader art, etc. as well).
Every method of producing a work (done under finite time, I guess :P) will give sometimes vastly different results. Hand drawing an animation will give something completely different under similar time constraints as video editing and completely different from procedural drawing.
To give some examples: you can easily render thousands of points, e.g. stars, make them twinkle, draw thousands of trees, and give them all detailed movement. That's very hard to do by hand. By hand you'll have better control of style, and details like paint texture, etc.. Animating characters (with genuine character) is trivial by hand but quite difficult procedurally (you have to resort to essentially manual animation in the end). There's the question of offline vs online rendering... if you're offline rendering you can go bonkers with millions of objects. I personally like being able to run it real time, I find it gives it a more intimate feeling, and is easier to reproduce (but am not against offline rendering if you find it suitable!).
Also very exciting to me is baking randomness, either with a fixed seed or changing seeds every time. You get a different piece every time you watch it! The possibilities are really vast, and mostly unexplored.
An interesting artist in this respect is Karl Sims [1]. As far as I know, he was not involved in the demoscene, but he sure did make some interesting things!
Say what you will about the current demoscene stylistically, it is to this day an underground, non-commercial movement (maybe countercultural? labels don't really matter, I'm just trying to gesture at something). People make stuff for the hell of it, with themselves as the target audience. It's hard to beat the sheer joy of that.
100% this. Add Generative AI to your list. I think AutoGPT is in the spirit of the demo scene.
> I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died.
It didn't die. Revision hosts hundreds of sceners every year. This year over 400 entries were submitted to the competition, including 40 full PC demos and over 40 tracked/oldschool/executable music entries. Even for small, local C64/Amiga parties here you have to race for tickets to these events.
We released a C64 intro outside a competition a couple of months ago, and within a couple of days it was buried in the inflow of new C64 releases on CSDB. The C64 scene is bigger now than when I got into it 18 years ago.
> The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s.
That didn't die either. Things don't die just because you stop pay attention to them. The notion of competing with Pixar is absurd; the terms of competition and markets are entirely different. Pixar makes movies for the mainstream to make money. Sceners make productions for sceners that may be more interesting to them than a Pixar production in an esoteric sense that the mainstream will not understand.
"The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it.
Edit: To go into the Pixar argument a bit more: In 1993 a demo such as Second Reality could impress "normies" as much as an MTV video clip could. Remember that back then video clips were often total utter crap, and some demos were buttery smooth 50fps animations with a distinctive feel that you could not find anywhere in popular culture.
In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.
The rest of the scene is very much appreciation for doing things within various technical constraints, and any appreciation of that requires more technical understanding. Even these days, many younger software engineers have trouble understanding what it takes to make and compete one of these constrained demos because the constraints themselves are virtually impossible to fathom for people who grew up smoking GB of RAM with poorly written Python code.
The idea of writing a 4kb demo for an ancient 8-bit computer that was dead in the market more than a decade before they were even born doesn't compute until you really start walking them through the fundamental CS concepts implied.
It didn't, though. It just took the scene a while to adapt to the reality that you can't learn how to push a GPU over the edge in a weekend any longer. As a result, making demos also became more accessible, and more directly related to game development (and related careers.)
The result is a scene that is so broad now, it's almost impossible to keep track of it all. It's no longer just Amiga, C64 and PC.
I interpreted you saying that it has died as a claim that it has died, not that it still thrives but—gasp—has evolved since the 90s.
> "The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it.
Presumably, that's about the extent of your involvement with the current demoscene as well. I am unable to comment on your feeling or how it disappeared. I think to some extent it simply boils down to teenagers growing up and losing interest, or not enjoying the direction of the scene. People have lamented the presumed imminent death of the demoscene for literal decades. It evolves and favored skill sets become obsolete: of course some people who were doing boot block demos for the Amiga 500 may feel alienated by the time the state of the art was 3D acceleration and shaders, just as someone doing C64 trackmos might have felt alienated once the Amiga 500 was the state of the art.
Fact remains that I can sit sweaty and drunk in a room crammed with 100 other drunk people in the middle of the summer and try to fix a fatal bug in the loader 20 minutes before deadline with two group mates standing around throwing out ideas, have an eureka moment just in time and then watch the competition results until three in the morning. I can ride on that feeling for weeks regardless of what your feeling is. If that's the demoscene being dead, I guess people weren't notified enough times despite it being a hot topic for such a long time.
The demoscene virus stuck, and I can really enjoy people doing unimaginable stuff with old and new hardware.
The way you describe the competition feeling also makes me remember similar fun at ICPC contests :)
The demoscene feeling that I have is probably a mix of nostalgia, and a sense of privilege of being part of a really weird subculture. But I also remember feeling out of touch even back then.
I was in the Demoscene (US) and wrote many demos and intros in the 80's and 90's. I don't write demos anymore, because the pressure to support my lifestyle means I write code for money now, but I do get the same feeling when I watch any of the many demos put out month after month by groups that were around back when I was coding demos, and new groups that have sprung up in the decades since. It still gives me the same wonderment when a C64 learns a new trick. It hasn't lost the excitement for me at all to view an impressive new thing. If anything it's gotten better with time and there are what seems like just as many demos coming out now as there were back in the 90s. I may even fly over to Europe someday to visit a demo party.
>In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.
I'm not sure what you define as art, but there are still plenty of demos coming out that push the C64 and Amiga past any limit people thought possible. PCs have evolved and basically have no real limits now with the latest Nvidia cards, but the 64k and lower compos are where it's at on the PC, it's still very impressive what can be done in a few KB. New tricks are still being discovered. New ways to do cool new things are still emerging. It's not necessarily "art" as much as it is clever programming, but maybe some people consider clever programming to be an art?
Take Through the Cracks by Still - it is not compressable, and everyone I show it to on the big projection wall agrees that it is unlike any video they've ever experienced.
It didn’t!
3DMark the benchmark by Futuremark is as the name suggests, made by ex Future Crew. The list goes on.
If you go around looking at where most demosceners from the past decade or two work today, you'll find the vast majority of them work at places like Unity, Unreal (Epic), etc.
A real time demo where every pixel can be deformed, giving rise to an ultra interactive world in less than 4GB memory.
In that period 3d accelerators were basically capable of running Quake and not much else. Traditional demo effects that relied on reading the backbuffer (even to just do some basic postprocessing) were either unavailable or had to have bespoke implementations per card. There were no shaders to speak of, and so on.
For me that really killed demoscene innovation for a while, and a lot of demos basically consisted of a bunch of alpha-blended layers for a while.
Nowadays, though, I'd say the scene is probably doing pretty well even though it's arguably even more niche than it used to be. Oh well.
Ahh the legendary glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE) era. The most underrated of demoscene styles!
The transition was definitely odd. What brought it around for me was when fr-08 was released and the broader scene realized what _could_ be done with procedural generation and whatnot.
4 kilobytes!
"Unreal ][ Main theme" is still on my main playlist on my phone, and I've yet to go through the thousands of .XM files I just grabbed off some FTP site back in the day. The MOD community is a related rabbit hole one could get lost in . . .
If you've never seen the Making Of video that was released a while back, someone has been kind enough to add English subs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S-2zGkr7vw
Second Reality is the single most amazing piece of art for me. Nothing else holds as much emotion as that demo. To see behind the curtain is like, I imagine, for someone else to watch Van Gogh actually painting.
It's interesting to rationalize it as an art form today. It sounds reasonable, but I don't think I or my friends thought of what we were doing as art, at the time. We were trying to impress each other with things that looked cool. To the extent that art was involved, yes, we needed music and graphics and fonts and creative designs, but we did these things out of necessity, without calling ourselves composers or graphic artists or type designers or art directors. Watching what others sent you and contributing your own stuff created a sense of belonging which I feel was really the primary motivator for my friends and me.
Regarding tools, there was one thing that was frowned upon in my circles: the use of demomaker software. These point and click apps allowed people to call themselves demo makers even though they did nothing technical. Boo!
If you want to try a tracker out yourself Renoise is great (much cheaper) option for PC/Mac/Linux. There are also several free trackers out there with varying levels of practicality (I only know Polyend and Renoise so I can't really suggest which free ones are good).
There's a bit of a learning curve but once you get the hang of the workflow it's tons of fun!
PS. Demoscene is by far the best thing to ever come out of computing, as a whole.
[1] Highlighted comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHFSrxlouh8&lc=UgxI33WIYq61V...
https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-logo-art/
https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-amiga-years...
etc. Very high quality books, great for a coffee table or a nostalgic read.
I have purchased an Amiga 500 to play with demos someday, if anyone has a favourite demo that will run on the A500 please let me know!
Ditto. Back in high school (early 90's) I had a friend who had an Amiga, this was rare for the US. I would go over to his house often and he would show me demos he downloaded off a BBS. I was always in awe of them. We also watched Demos release on PC as well. I later learned about the Demoscene parties/events in Europe and it made me wish I had grown up closer to that.
* Megademo by RSI (1989): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3119
* Mental Hangover by Scoopex (1990): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1472
* Enigma by Phenomena (1991): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=394
* Hardwired by Crionics & TSL (1991): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=981
* Jesus on E's by LSD (1992): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5265
* World of Commodore by Sanity (1992): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2938
* State of the Art by Spaceballs (1992): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=99
* Desert Dream by Kefrens (1993): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1483
* How to Skin A Cat by Melon Dezign (1993): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3539
https://www.demoparty.net/upcoming
You can bring your Amiga 500, it won't be alone.
The overall best classic A500 demo for me is probably Arte by Sanity.
I still use demoscene videos a lot in my DJ and VJ work. If you know you know but most ppl have never seen these works of art.
Here’s a 60 minute audio/video DJ set remixing demos with new music.
Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage
If you want to read about the warez scene, here's a pretty comprehensive book about it (you can download the pdf freely):
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/warez-the-infrastructure-and...
I think these days, Dwitter has a similar vibe. 140-character JavaScript demos: https://www.dwitter.net/
I have tried and failed to be any good in this competition, but I for sure enjoyed watching these demos and still get this flashback when I see one.
Oh dear, good old times when having a 3D animation and sound all running fluidly (on that old machines) from a small tiny program felt like magic.
I have respect for the guys that kept on creating them and making it part of the computer/internet history! Thank you all!
https://www.unesco.de/en/culture-and-nature/intangible-cultu...
Here is all of mine https://dweetabase.3d2k.com/?user=rep_movsd
Disclaimer: Now lets be real, Demoscene was always bigger in Europe compared to the US so while this is one of the largest demo parties in America, it still looks like this:
[0]:https://twitter.com/demosplash/status/1594182872944050176
If you are interested, it is occurring at Carnegie Mellon University at 5000 Forbes Ave on Nov 3-4.
If you have PC VR at home, here's how you can start the rabbit hole https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_f5a298f6-83e6-45...
Feel free to reach out to me for more, I'd love to show you around
Yours will probably be Milktracker, Modplug Tracker, Schism Tracker, and a bunch of royalty-free sample packs online.
Yeah your first module will suck. It's OK. They all do. Soon you'll be discovering open fifths. Then inversions. Then suspended chords. Then modes. Then panning tricks, portamentoes, playing with the all the effects and envelopes and all the cute tricks invented in trackers since I last used one.
I'm "Broam" on modarchive.org
The scene these days is much more welcoming than it ever was in the past. Just get in there and do something, anything :)
I always liked demoscene because they push the tech to its limit, for example kkrieger which is a DirectX game in 96K [3], which is rare to this day due to Wirth's law [2], considering most of the games today are bloated as hell.
Too bad there aren't demo groups in Hong Kong, or I may join when I was still a carefree teen back in 10 years ago when I was 14.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU
Looks like this version is in English, while the earlier link is in Hungarian, otherwise they appear to be the same film.
The whole thing started w/ cracktros in the 80s and through the artscene it eventually evolved into its own scene that was entirely disconnected from its roots in piracy.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv...
I attended in person. It was a fascinating intro to something I didn’t really understand existed.
EMF camp is something of a wonder in itself. If you can make it to the next one, go!
[0] https://www.emfcamp.org/ [1] https://youtu.be/e-qjLfnOrx8?feature=shared
Highly recommend watching his monthly reports[1].
He also streams on twitch[2] and all larger parties have fully embraced live streaming on a mainstream platform such as twitch these days, despite ads.
Also highly recommend going to Europe to attend one of the big parties. As the article says, the scene is and has always been mostly a European thing (post-BBS, post-buccaneer, after the split from piracy mid-end of the 90s) and much of the audience here seems very US-centric in their perception :)
Demos certainly fit most definitions of the hard to define "Art" (with a capital A), but at some level, I think art is anything you put even a little more of yourself into than you need to, and thinking back to some of my conversations with some people in the scene on IRC, you can tell demos more than meet that bar. In a way, demoparties were like a modern take on the French Salon.
Around the same time, I was learning how to play guitar, so I especially got into trackers. Just thinking in a different way about writing and playing music helped. Music is a combo of art and math, and trackers helped me understand this in a different way from my music theory teacher.
After this unexpected HN post today, I'll be queueing up some bleeps.
I never was and probably never will be a part of the demoscene, but it's inspired me for decades and I'm passing along that inspiration to people close to me.
What we currently have is a bunch of blogs which are hard to find.
What I gathered is that every line of code counts in a demo, and the hardware constraints were a good thing as you had to push the envelope of the hardware. Now people spin up bloated Electron apps on their machines which could be slimmed down substantially if more effort was put into reducing lines of code and all those wasted CPU cycles are embarrassing.
But people have beefy setups that can run Electron and a host of other apps simultaneously, so they don't care to put in the effort anymore.
Always code as if you're coding a demo is my mantra.
The Union Demo https://youtu.be/comSfq97R9s?si=BjaC_NyEpnkBsCTG
Wicked Polygons Screen - Synergy Megademo https://youtu.be/T7YZ3n35eNg?si=29zuqG9dCCnp52hk
FirST Love by Overlanders https://youtu.be/3QginSr9V7A?si=rY3KGclc26lX24k3
Scavenger - Wicked Polygons https://youtu.be/xi7fg7UvsbM?si=BBb1pU3pZqwnWs2P
https://youtu.be/vyeYjw3zjSc The world according to nordlicht
https://youtu.be/1hvFiv2hpYE Sea of color
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPkKiLturF8 Dark side of the spoon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yexNdSLEpIY What if demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZVgOtWiH2M Atari game tools (ST as well as STE)
Run as admin in windows land and it should start.
1. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...
http://www.freetoolsassociation.com/
Here's one on YouTube though:
Second Reality by Future Crew:
Pump by Iguana:
Stash by TBL, The Black Lotus:
https://codeguppy.com/code.html?javascript_is_cool
Just press Play.