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Comment by Iwaan | Hacker News Reader

I was an intern at a game company last year. I showed the CEO some of the stuff that is going on in the demoscene. He got really worried and told me to not show that to any of his staff. He was afraid that it intimidates his highly paid coders and designers. I found that rather disturbing. How are you going to kill Hollywood if you are afraid of algorithms?

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What you can do within severe constraints can be very impressive.

Particular impressive results may not fit into severe constraints.

Do not confuse the two.

Even a small "that's great, but it needs to do..." can change 4KB into 4GB.

Any game coder worth his salt knows fractals. Many veterans from the demoscene ended up in the game industry at some point. In the 90s most wizkids dreamt of living off making games, and many demosceners made intros to cracked games.

Good game coders like Carmack have little to feel intimidated about.

Your point is good but saying that Carmack shouldn't feel intimidated is probably not helpful. ;)

As a coder I too feel intimidated by these impossible 4 KB Demos. It is also important to remind oneself that the optimizations to do this stuff are mostly meaningless for making a game. You are mostly constrained by time in a project, and shouldn't distract oneself in being cute with neat tricks.

The funny thing is that many game programmers I know grew up watching demos if not making them. Who hasn't seen at least one Future Crew demo?

s/intimidate/inspire/g

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