Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms | Hacker News Reader

Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

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THIS (http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/kkrieger-chapter-1/scr...) Entire game (interactive demoscene) is only 96kb. It's all procedurally generated which is what demoscene is all about. Everything you see, sound, music, textures, models, is just code. No images or audio what-so-ever. Just algorithms that generate shapes within shapes, within shapes. Like fractals almost.

I was devastated to find the group's website is gone and the game's page no longer on the internet. For those of you who want to experience it I've got it on my server here: http://data.chrisnorstrom.com/hosting/kkrieger-beta.zip. They were probably the best group out there. Looks like they closed up show because their site theprodukt is closed for good.

I knew a really good Demoscene coder, and he introduced the culture to me. He worked on synthetic procedurally generated voices (which is really hard). But the problem is that the bar to entry is extremely high because it's all algorithms and the culture is all about fun, not profit. So the community stays small. Why spend months making lights and patterns react to music in a 64kb file when you can make a 200mb game or animated and sell it. The means do not justify the ends, thus most people will never know the awesomeness of demoscene.

A lot of the members of .theprodukkt joined Farbrausch[1]. You can still find the productions by that team, including .kkrieger on the Farbrausch site[2].

[1] http://www.farb-rausch.de/ [2] http://www.farb-rausch.de/prod.py?which=114

IIRC, .theprodukkt is/was Farbrausch's commercial "arm."'

You're right. I just did a quick search, and didn't double check the info.

Farbrausch is simply a demogroup...

http://www.49games.de/ was the 'commercial' arm of Farbrausch (most Farbrausch members worked there) and they got bought by the german game developing company Bigpoint: http://bigpoint.net/2011/09/bigpoint-takes-over-the-entire-d...

Here's Kebby (FR) talking a bit about the demoscene at MIT: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17875473

Oh thank you. I thought their stuff was lost forever. Ever since Sonique and its hundreds of skins and visualization plugins where taken off the internet a few years back I no longer trust anyone to archive anything. I literally download my favorite YouTube videos as well, as many disappear over time.

This should make you happy then: https://github.com/blog/1103-ten-years-of-farbrausch-product...

and the thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3843427

also a thread on Memon releasing the sources to Demopaja

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3847017

I used to be the coder of a small demoscene team in the early 2000's. I never had as much fun writing computer programs ever since then. It was creating awesome stuff just for the sake of awesomeness.

same here but mid 90`s oh the nostalgia. Kinda surprising, demogroups were kinda like small startups at least on the production side. biz side/product development/customer development/etc etc ... non existent, guess that`s why it was so fun.

Still great learning experience for a kid.

Actually this comparison to startups can be extended. In case of demogroups PR was very important, there were strong brands, you had to apply for the positions etc. That was fun&learning not only on the technical side but also about teamwork, coping with failure on the party etc.

At Iguana we even had a QA department!

But yeah it was nothing like a startup because there were no responsibilities or requirements, everyone just did whatever they wanted, when they wanted, how they wanted, and if it gelled into a demo, then great. It was all about exploring shared interests and having fun.

What do you think is stopping demos from taking off as a serious commercial art form? Just culture, or something more fundamental?

Interactive demo-like things have been taking off lately, but mostly under the label "games" (which sells more), even in the case where the game-ness is pretty minimal. Not sure if they're explicitly inspired by the demoscene or not, but interactive-procedural-graphics-and-sound stuff like Proteus feels very much like a demoscene production to me (http://www.visitproteus.com/). Main difference imo is more focus on the procedural interactivity from an experiential perspective, and less focus on technical virtuosity.

Indeed, many people went from the demoscene to the game industry. Case in point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedy_Entertainment

..and a lot of other northen european games companies.

http://www.4players.de/4sceners.php/dispbericht/-/5157/0/ind...

But strictly demos are non-interactive, right? That's the question I have: Is there a market for a pure-digital multimedia art form beside games?

market absolutely, look at the amount of scene stuff on the web.

I think your question is, will someone pay money for a pure off the wall demo - short answer is no.

long answer is they kinda have for a while, futuremark was the classic commercialized demo. difference tho is, it had a utility besides the eye candy.

Yes, there is, but the way to break in is to start with things incorporating programs in small ways within a larger piece, call it experimental, and slowly make the composition more computer-centric.

Some demos have interactive components I believe, though I'm having trouble digging up a prominent example at the moment. Not as games per se, but in the sense that the graphics/audio can change procedurally in response to keystrokes.

As far as non-interactive demo-style stuff, markets pop up occasionally for procedural/generative art, which is related, though again with less focus on compactness (except when necessary). There was a market for screensavers in the 90s, for example, and some had pretty involved procedural stuff going on. Today there are a handful of mobile apps doing generative graphics, e.g. http://superfiretruck.com/iteration/. I think you could probably sell a demoscene production or demo-pack on Android.

Our Heartquake back in '94 had a flyby sequence over a voxel landscape. The path was predesigned, but you could take control at any moment by pressing keys or the mouse. I thought more demos would incorporate such optional interactivity in more subtle ways and more types of effects (ours was kind of obvious), but it didn't happen.

There was a commercial demo released for the PS3 on PSN called Linger in Shadows(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linger_in_Shadows), sold for $3. Farbrausch also released a commercial PSN demo called .detuned. I'm surprised the demo scene hasn't released more productions for iOS or Android. It seems like impressive non-interactive or semi-interactive demos with no game play would do alright either ad supported or at the $0.99 price point. I'm not sure if the average person would really get the difference between a real time non-interactive demo and a video playing on their phone, though.

Funny thing, someone tried to submit a demo to appstore. It got insta-failed approval for the use of the word “demo” in the description, because don't allow “demo versions” of applications in the store. He tried to explain the nature of the application, and in the end still didn't get through approval, exactly because it didn't have any interactivity, so there was no perceived use for users.

So the issue is distribution, if you can't put it to friends device without jumping through hoops, it gains less interest. I haven't followed android-scene that much, but I believe there are at least some ports of demos available. There the hoops are in supporting different kind of devices.

But asking for money? Not in the spirit of scene, how are you gonna ‘show off’ your mad skills if you are gonna ask for money? :)

This is a very interesting question. I believe that demos didn't "take off" simply because most people don't find them interesting. If you ask me, the main reasons behind this are the inherent geekiness of this subculture (it's difficult to appreciate the craftsmanship behind demos for most people) as well as the fact that most of the active "sceners" are typically young people who don't necessarily have enough life experience or maturity yet to be able send a meaningful message with a lasting value that could capture the attention of a wider audience (this was definitely true for me). By the time they "grow up", they have jobs and families and other responsibilities and don't have time to produce demos.

I find this probably invalid, attractive though it may be. There are many "high art" forms that do not convey the massive effort put in to creating an image, yet it is this effort that makes the pieces desirable (lithography is one, but actually most art takes a lot more than the layperson realizes). Most examples of this came out of necessity but moved to an art form once the necessity was gone (though this was a very slow process). I think demos just haven't been around long enough for a larger artistic culture to build around them. Either art collectors will need to decide that demos are art, or the demo-scene itself needs to produce collectors. I think it's more likely that demos will become a small subculture within "programs as art", where art games will probably lead, since they are doing a better job of promotion and marketing outside their base.

The other thing demos are missing is an idea. Most media go through a phase where technique is paramount (in music, the virtuosos, in most visual art, loosely the "realists"), but the majority of fine art must address an important theme outside of the work itself to be interesting. Demos exist for themselves, they don't have any higher purpose. Games, in a small way, do, which may also account for their success so far.

Culture. In fact, the GP answered it. Demos are all about awesome for the sake of awesomeness.

Sell it, and it wouldn't be "for the sake of awesomeness" anymore. And it'd be less fun.

There've been a small number of paid demoscene projects at some points, such as Linger in Shadows by Plastic (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50170), but even they were simply paid for the project by Sony, they didn't market and commercialize the demo themselves.

I guess it's simply that for most demosceners, once you not just doing it for fun anymore, it isn't really much fun anymore.

I'd argue it's because they're universally rather dull.

On a technical level, demos are highly impressive and how they manage to overcome the limitations imposed by the scene to create the works that they do is ingenious, but it doesn't make the resulting product interesting from an artistic viewpoint.

For me at least, the glaring weakness is the lack of narrative - there's no stories being told, there's nothing that engages or challenges the viewer. They're akin to videos that show off the features of a game engine where they engender the "that's pretty" reaction, but little else.

To my mind, this is caused by two things - primarily, it's a side effect of the restrictions imposed by the artform. With the limitations of the scene in play, there simply might not exist the scope to create enough content for an engaging narrative structure to be based around and procedural generation only takes you so far when it comes to creating assets in a resource limited environment.

Secondly, I'd argue that the types of people who are primarily interested in creating narrative are going to gravitate to different creative areas - creating short films, or animations for example. As a result, the demoscene is likely to be made up of people who mostly interesting in the question of how pretty the output is, rather than how interesting it is. This is of course also related to the fact that people who 'grew up' in the scene are likely to have a relatively narrow view of what the scene looks like and are unlikely to buck that trend and break out into doing something completely different.

The above is naturally just my two euroyencent of course.

> how they manage to overcome the limitations imposed by the scene

It's pretty telling that the scene adapted to the increased hardware by imposing their own limitations instead of anything-goes. If we can't be wowed by what they do on limited hardware, we have to be wowed by what they can do under their own very harsh limitations.

I'm not sure what you are referring to. 4k/64k have been around for a long time, close to 20 years. Demos are generally "anything goes" and for anything else there are usually a "wild compo".

I remember demos on Ataris, Amigas, and early PCs, 286s, 386s. Back then there were no scene-imposed limitations, because the hardware was seriously limiting what you could do, and the awesomeness of demos lay in overcoming the crap hardware.

But when hardware stopped begin crap, when you started getting hardware accelerated graphics, when you could do mp3 playback in realtime, it got too easy to make something pretty, and less awesome.

If the demo scene had been about making pretty things, they would have just continued using the new hardware, but since the most important thing has been overcoming difficulties, making something pretty DESPITE the limitations, making something awesome, you know they value the challenge most.

And that is hard to communicate to regular people, because they can only value the prettiness of a demo, and that limits the popularity of it.

I always tought that the tiny hint of a narrative was why I've seen Debris[1] reach much more nerds than other demos, not its spectacularly small file size.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqu_IpkOYBg

Because people see them simply as computer animation with pre-recorded music. They don't understand the algorithmic beauty inside.

I don't think demos will ever have a wide mass-appeal, even while being one of the most demanding and beautiful of art-forms (in my opinion).

I'm skeptical about that. I think that the issue is that even algorithmic beauty could be considered just aesthetics and people except more than beauty from art, as has (post-)modernism demonstrated very clearly.

group name, handles, id numbers please!

in fact, there's plenty of active demosceners here on HN. -waves!-

hello :)

knos, you change handle too fast.

As fast as a ukulele loses its tuning!

It is harder and harder, and maybe it does not feel as relevant as before anymore, to preserve the pseudonymity the scene valued.

It's certainly something that always attracted me.

Blame Google+ ;-)

Ritz, 4k coder. But you probably knew that already.

Is it true what you said in the other thread, all the Dutch sceners are unemployed? :) Something in the drinking water at Bizarre, perhaps? :)

My releases: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=343 http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=291 http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=332 http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=333 (You might need one of those DOSbox tools to get sound or to run at all though. They were targeted at Win98/2k, Meuk completely stopped working with XP)

Woooooooaaaah! A demoscene link appears on HN! I'm really excited that you guys seem to be interested in this!

You guys should watch this movie! http://molemanfilm.com/about-moleman/about-moleman-2/

It's very good, and also on Youtube. It'll tell you all about the demoscene! you'll enjoy it!

-mkC/3LN: The clumsiest ever

Note: This post used to have a lot of redundancy inside of it, but that's gone now!

This was an awesome documentary, even though I am not currently writing anything for the scene I still like to watch what they do and I generally try and tune into streams of the parties. Fun times

Don't miss the BBS Documentary's Artscene episode. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ReS4Bp4IPY seems to be a copy of it.

This is a great collection of links. And it's extremely up-to-date - that last demo, Gaia Machina, just came out last week!

Wow. Just wow. 64kb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kx66_i3ue4

Somehow, to me anyway, it loses something if you just watch a video of it. If you have the hardware for it, you can download the binary from http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59107 and run it in real-time on your own machine, the way it was intended :)

F - Felix’s Workshop by Ctrl-Alt-Test the 2nd place 64K is also very very good, so much crammed into a small file http://thedemoscene.tumblr.com/post/20960247819/f-felixs-wor...