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Farb-Rausch Releases PC Demo Creation Software
RaD Man [ACiD] writes "Farb-Rausch, one of the best-known groups at the forefront of the PC demoscene, has just released Werkkzeug, a fully featured, freely downloadable PC demo creation tool used to make the visually stunning and award-winning demo The Popular Demo. Not only have they freely published the creation tools, but they've also released the original datafiles for The Popular Demo as well." We also recently featured a 96kb FPS demo from the same authors.
Computer demos have always led the way to the latest in graphics. Be it with commodore 64 (those were the days), Amigas, or the PC it will always be amazing to see what the next year's demos have to offer. I say that this will only spur on more creativity..good for them.
FuckTheFuckingFuckers.com - Post your th
I dont see why they would do this, although it is fun to play around with, they are basically throwing their money out the window, this is a great advantage to the average joe designer that likes to play. What do you think?
What's this about "The Popular Demo" being 64k? It's actually 8,854,016 bytes long.
I used to love sitting in front my my K6-2 333, smoking cones and watching demos. Favourites were Tribes and B-Hyper. If anyone has some links to demos that run under Linux or wine, feel free to post them.
God I miss the demo scene, even if I did kind of 'miss' it to begin with - I noticed them just after the scene died...
I smell a slashdotting, here are their listed mirrors: Werkkzeug ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/resources/demomaker/thepro dukkt/pno0002_werkkzeug1_v1200.zip&id=242925
ftp://ftp.pl.scene.org/pub/demos/resources/demomak er/theprodukkt/pno0002_werkkzeug1_v1200.zip&id=242 925
http://http.pl.scene.org/pub/demos/resources/demom aker/theprodukkt/pno0002_werkkzeug1_v1200.zip&id=2 42925
Datafile
ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/resources/demomaker/thepro dukkt/pno0003_the.popular.demo_datafile.zip&id=242 926
ftp://ftp.pl.scene.org/pub/demos/resources/demomak er/theprodukkt/pno0003_the.popular.demo_datafile.z ip&id=242926
http://http.pl.scene.org/pub/demos/resources/demom aker/theprodukkt/pno0003_the.popular.demo_datafile .zip&id=242926
Is "Poem for a horse", not "The Popular Demo". This 64K intro was shown at SIGGRAPH'03.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
The popular demo is not a 64kb demo, farb-rausch are good, but the popular demo is a 8Mb demo, as it can be seen if you just follow the link to pouet.net.
DON'T PANIC
Back in the old days, when groups like the Future Crew still ruled, the demo-scene was way more interesting. Making stunning effects is much more of a challenge when the hardware you're working on is limited. These guys used to create a 3D-engine from scratch in 64kb, as there was no DirectX. For me, the massive computing/graphics power we have today has taken away all the fun.
I haven't actually checked anything out from the demo scene since the commie 64 era. Do they still code this stuff in assembly? Or is it all done using OOP now?
Make sure you have DirectX 9. I usually dont keep up with this so I didnt know.
Bet this
I've just attended CommunicAsia 2004 in Singapore where Apple announced and demo'ed its answer to Adobe After Effects, called Motion. It is one incredible piece of software I tell you. Check out the Quicktime demos online at Apple's site. Anyway, my point here is that Far-brausch's tool has the exact same "real-time preview and update while everything is still running" technology that Apple was spending 90% of its time showing off of Motion. I'm also very impressed by the way Chaos solved the classic problem of layout problems in a graph-based media technology by using stacked operators. Everything snaps and stacks up nicely and you know how the data flows. I did something very similiar but far from the polished state that this tool has. It's called HyperNet, and it's done in Java, making heavy use of its built-in reflection mechanism.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
I just wanted to make the comparison that notepad.exe is 64.5k...
So, it is a demo for DirectX 9, ... it does not run on Mac OS X.
Actually the first 64k intro (as the small ones were/are usually called) created using this tool was The product (das produkt) released at The Party and ranked 1st in the intro competition.
A really mind-blowing piece of work considering it was made four years ago and fit into 64k, be sure to check it out.
Errr... not meaning to troll, but the Popular demo is around 8 meg - only in a Windows environment could it be called a 64k demo ;)
On topic, I've been a fan of Farb-Rausch for some time now - they seem to be one of the few PC groups that have that "wholly-rounded production" feel that was such a feature of the early PC scene and the old Amiga days. But then, I'm an anorak for this sort of thing - thinking of the days of Sanity, Anarchy et al. on the Amiga scene gives me a warm glow in my vitals.
Looking at the Breakpoint invitation on the Farb-Rausch site shows how far the scene has come from the days of glorified LAN parties with unlimited cider, diskthrowing and music competitions lasting several days.
Demopaja was released a couple years back, and is really the same thing with older fx. So this has been done before.
I really used to love all those demos. They were small, they were fast and they looked great. Basically they were the cutting edge. I used to hang out with 5 of my buddies and watch them on a 486 in my basement. At that time, the demos looked better than anything in any game. But going back and looking at them now is a little sad. It just makes me think of how the demo scene pretty much dried up.
Have any of you seen a demo that supports hardware acceleration? Maybe something that uses openGL? That would be sweet, a modern demo. I mean, a normal video games graphics beat the heck out of any of the old demos now. But the way I see it, at this point it wouldn't be too tough to make hardware accelerated demos that rivaled or surpassed movie graphics. That is, if anybody bothered making them.
If anybody's got links to show me I'm wrong and there are modern demos, PLEASE POST THEM NOW!!!
I'm a gnu world man.
radman from ACiD posting, demo's being released, all we need now is some boxing tutorials, door games, and a hex edited renegade chock full of ansi art.
one day i'll get my THEDRAW skills up to par, i swear it. 708/312 repruhzent.
I was stunned when I downloaded Farb-rausch's "Candytron" 64K demo.
:-)
It contains a 3d engine, procedural texture creation, realtime music synthesizer AND also a speech synthesizer! The music in some of their demos is actually accompanied by a (robotic) singer! You can even make out the words...
Farb-rausch rule, IMHO
orange juice (news site): http://www.ojuice.net">
pouet (demo archive with discussion): http://www.pouet.net
scene.org (pretty much all demos since 1993
those three have plenty of links to other sites too. nearly all platforms still have strong demo scenes active, from the Oric (no really!) through to the Atari Falcon (and ST/e)
you don't have to be a programmer to take part either, if you can pixel or weild a graphics tablet, knock up a catch chip choon or an entire mp3 album you'll fit right in.
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
some of us still are :)
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
On the MindCandy DVD, a collection of the best PC demos, the commentary mentions that when demos went hardware accelerated, the trend moved more towards style and combination of effects than clever coding. On a 486-50 a demo's code really had to be top-notch and use all sorts of clever tricks to achieve the seemingly impossible - plus the coders would write everything - including the music playback and graphics routines. On a 2Ghz PIV with a GeForce and with the ability to tap into either the OpenGL or DirectX API for graphics (and a third-party music player), it becomes all about style and combination (and procedural effects if size dictates).
:)
Farbrausch's tool is just another step in this evolution. Kudos to them - it just means more good 64ks
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Real demo coding was done in pure assembly on retro machines like the Atari ST, Amiga and the 8 bitters. It consisted of extremely skillfull coders that did the impossible on those machines. (overscan anyone? what about sync scrolling?)
For more info, check:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demo_scene
PC demo coding has always been subject to the limitation of the unlimited limitations of the PC format. It's just not real, it doesn't feel right and has never felt right.
Any real demo scener knows that.
Period.
Hey, looks like they prefer writing their tools in pure assembly too :)
Yes - you're right - I'm not serious about bringing the government anti-trust watchdogs in on this, but the move to release such a tool certainly is a smart way in staying *AT* the front.
;-)
If you're in the lead and make others use your tools to build their demos with, then you're at the advantage in you being able to always use a 'newer' more feature rich tool that will only be released AFTER you release you next latest and greatest demo...
If there was serious money in demos, M$ would probably follow THAT particular road as well. So it looks like Farb-Rausch has learnt from "the masters" in the field of keeping the competition at bay...
In 2002 a group named exceed released a true 64KB demo (ok, it's 65536 bytes, close enough) called "Heaven 7" that was absolutely amazing for its time. You can check out their website here.
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
... this: VDOWall.
... yet.
It's quite the same idea, but not as sophisticated
Anyone recall TRSI DEMO MAKER for Amiga or the numerous "demo/doc-makers" for C64? This is again the same type of tool for lamers who want to be "DemoCoders" by just clicking a few buttons.
:-) )
I've lost the count of all "Demos" I swapped in the old days thay just turned out to be another variant of the Pre-sets in TRSI DemoMaker. Even worse, I found an old VHS-copy of a movie where *I* had made an intro before the film, with a self drawn logo, crappy scrollertext and everything, all done on C64 with a crappy Demo-maker. (But Admit, I was way ahead of time with using Intros in copied movies
64kb demo in an 8 meg download thats impressive
The old 8 bit systems like the spectrum really showed what could be done in 64k I tried disassembling one once first thing it did was copy code to the old specky print buffer delete this loader code move everything down a bit and then proceeded to unfold itself up the memory incredible. pretty good to watch too as the primitive hardware started doing things which just seemed impossible.
It was demo's like that which got me hooked. Wish I could remember who did it all i can remember is they were Polish and the demo had full screen width lines in 100's of colours ( the specky was 8 colours + bright) and had a logo that had a kind of glassy effect in the middle of the screen.
I dont think I have seen anything since that has impressed or inspired me so much.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Who's the idiot that modded my post Offtopic? I'm bringing up similiarities between a flagship commercial product of Apple and this free tool, and talking about its cool technology, how is that Offtopic?
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
ROTFL.
I used to think that too... technology keeps rushing by, and you slowly lose your contact. Some people then give up and start whining how much the past was better, and other people don't. And catch up.
Just for the record, the sound system used in the Farbrausch 64k demos is done in 95% hand-optimized assembler, is only 4.5K in size in its newest incarnation and needs less than 10% CPU on a recent PC for synthesizing a complete song in realtime.
And honestly, that FELT right when I did it.
kb^fr
I like how someone finally came up with a way to make demos that look fantastic and are actually Slashdot resistant~!
/. proof. Even a blank page gets PINGED. )
(you'll note I did not say Slashdot proof. Nothing is
That aside, I felt sad the day I ran the dynamic lighting/shadows 96k demo. Destroyed the GeForce 5200's in the lab...
The scene itself isn't really interested in making stuff with the .werkkzeug, most comments we got so far were more like "Thanks for releasing, I'll have a look at it, let's see what I can learn from it for doing my own stuff".
;)
There have always been the '1337 selfmade and the l4me demomaker demos, so I don't think we endanger the scene at all. But perhaps some "outsiders" fiddle around with the tool and get interested, that'd be a cool goal
kb^fr
Interesting ad, should I subscribe?
When there was no 3d hardware available and operating systems were open (for examples: Dos, Atari TOS, Amiga WB), demos had a reason to exist: they stressed the available hardware, doing things no one knew they could be done. Demos usually wrote to the bare metal, bypassing any operating system libraries (if they were any).
For example, no one knew that Amiga could do 60-FPS sprite scaling, until demos did it (and the chance of having a good conversion of Outrun was totally missed).
But what is the reason for a demo today ? a demo is limited by the O/S architecture (no direct hardware access) and by what the local graphics/multimedia API offers. Demos are no longer a demonstration of the programming abilities of their creators; at their best, demos show off the abilities of the video card they run under (of the lack of abilities).
Demos are an indication that we have reached an age that technology in no longer important, and creativity is more important.
till i make the offtopicmoderator troll uid!
own up moderator, which one of you felt to do negative moderation?
that's really cool- no polygons, just raytracing
the style reminds me of Bullfrog for some reason
Read Pynchon.
Honestly, that sounds like a maintainability nightmare, but as the sound it spits out continues to improve, I can only assume it's still being worked on :-)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
I mean I just picked up Unreal Tournament 2004 a couple weeks ago. Total, it weighs in at SIX CDs. Looking on my drive, the textures alone are nearly 3GB uncompressed. And against that stands 64k demos, which really have pretty cool 3d when you get down to it.
Now I'm not oging to go on about bloat or any of that shit,I know full and well why UT is huge when the FR stuff isn't. However the FR demos are still cool in their own right. It isn't easy making shit that small. Their mathematical texture generation adn tiny sound engine are programming works of art.
That they have 3d hardware to make it possible doesn't diminish their acomplishments. Programming isn't just about making a bare CPU do cool things, it's about pushing a whole system, complete with advanced subprocessors to the maximum.
Now they are doing only once kind of maxing, diskspace. One might note that there are other areas that suffer, memory usage in particular, but it is still an impressive feat. They are showing what can be done by focusing on the on disk optimisation.
Also the artistic aspect is not to be discounted. It isn't easy to design pleasing visuals and synch them to music. FR is on par with FC when it comes to demos that appeal to the senses. Far too many demos from the FC era were just slideshows of algorithm implementation. The FR demons, by and large, are quite artistic. An accomplishment even given no space constraints, more so given their small size.
Benchmark Result
--------------------
7719 pop.stones
at 1024 x 768
Thats from the populour demo, what did you guys get? Just wondering since my GFX card is kinda old.
-Agret
Stuff that matters.
COME ON Two words. COME, that's one word, followed by a totally seperate word ON. Two words. You see that? That's how you write the phrase "Come on".
It looks really nice, but I wonder if they could port this to OpenGL? This project seems like an ideal candidate for open sourcing... =)
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Dude, the scene has been 'dying' for the past 10 years at least - yet somehow we still manage to put out quite a number of productions every year. Odd, that. ;)
Regards,
thorsten / purple & soopadoopa - still quite alive.
Amiga demos were always better. Atari demo coders only used Atari because they couldn't wrap their head around the Amiga chipset.
Just how it goes. Whenever some new technology comes out, curmudgeons will bitch about how much it sucks and how it was better in the past. Same for things like demos. People love to carry on about how much the new demo scene blow and/or isn't "real" because it uses modern technology/hardware acceleration.
I think it more or less comes down to jealousy. The current FR demos are just impressive, any way you cut it. You can go on and on about the sacrafices they made to make it happen, it is still a huge feat. People like the grandparent poster will never be satisfied, since basically they are pissed that someone else is better than them.
It's not something unique to computers, however. Whenever something new comes out, there is always a bunch of people to declare how it sucks. Whenever someone else pushes the limit of that new thing, the same group declares how that isn't anything and how hard it used to be.
You see it all the time on Slashdot. Any time there is a story about new hardware, there are a good bunch of people that carry on about how it's not necessary and how THEY are perfectly happy on their 486s and so on. What it really comes down to is they are jealous that a new toy has come out that they can't or won't afford. They may not admit this ot themselves, but that is usually the root of it.
Fortunately, the demoscene endures, despite critics. It has changed from it's beginnings, but for the better I think. No longer is it so much a slideshow of who can implement the coolest algorithm, it's more an artform of who can produce the coolest audio/visual presentation.
Of course groups likes FR show that there still IS room for pushing the technical limits. Best of all, they usually manage to do it AND be artistic at the same time.
Just for the record, the sound system used in the Farbrausch 64k demos is done in 95% hand-optimized assembler, is only 4.5K in size in its newest incarnation and needs less than 10% CPU on a recent PC for synthesizing a complete song in realtime.
How do you compose your songs? MIDI?
I haven't found yet a song composing tool that gives me the same feeling that Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker did. I know about Modplug Tracker, but it seems kind of kludgy.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
... color trip, i.e. trip as in drug trip. werkzeug means tool. where "werk" ist "work" or "craft" and "zeug" is "stuff" or "equipment".
IAAL
Love the demos, the music is always the thing that blows me away on the FB ones.
;o)
Is there a VSTi version of your softsynth? and if so, where can I get my grubby mitts on a copy
I am NaN
here's another way to see those old demos without having to jump through all the compatibility hoops...
If you have winamp 5 and a reasonable broadband connection, pop open the media library window, go to the internet TV section, and look for any of the Demoscene channels, or Yodel TV - basically, for anyone who's not seen Winamp TV yet, it's pretty much shoutcast-for-video.. and the demoscene channels, well, as you might guess, stream video of demos. Good stuff.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
ah, the old flamewars. -sigh- i miss those :)
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
All the Demos seem to be Windows based, using DX9 and so on. (OK so a couple of 'NIX demo links are floating on the thread to, but ...)
Is anyone doing OS X demos of the same kind? Otherwise I'm not going to see any demos but get to read people saying how good they are. You teases.
Things change. I wrote my first effect in '87, my last demo in '96, and I can see the value in the evolution that the scene has gone through. Hardware exploits, technological tricks and techniques, are a thing of the past; clever coding and artistic talent are still king.
Jare / Iguana
I still remember being amazed by Second Reality running on my 386 (which, due to having most of it's memory on the 8Mhz ISA bus, ran DOOM at less than 5fps).
Of course, if you're looking for sheer amazement, try Smash Designs' Second Reality 64, a recreation of Second Reality for the Commodore 64. Complete with fake PC bootup sequence.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
To answer all the "real demos are coded on bare metal using raw assembly." and "r33l 3l33+ d3m0z @r3 13$$ Th4n 64k!!!111" flames: Demo music tracks were being composed in external editors since the Amiga. Anyone who was into the 'scene in the early 90's will remember Scream Tracker, since it allowed you to not only edit music for your own demos, but you could listen to other favorites too. There were even some kits floating around the BBS's that allowed you to 'plug in' S3M playback into your own work.
This is really just "Scream Tracker for Graphics" (or "Shockwave for Demos" for the n00bs). Makes sense to me since most 3d engines use virtually the same pipeline; this just pushes the creativity away from the bits that are the same from demo to demo.
Yep, it's MIDI. The synth itself accepts a raw MIDI data stream, and so I wrapped it into a VSTi plugin for using it with whatever sequencing software I wanted to, which is Logic (this great but discontinued program, f**kingz to Apple ;). To play back the file inside the demo, I use a heavily encoded midi file format which is optimized for maximum compression ratio and is including the required sound banks.
If you want to know more, have a look at the articles section of my home page, where I've written a bit about the inner workings.
kb^fr
If you want to know more, have a look at the articles section of my home page, where I've written a bit about the inner workings.
Interesting stuff. I don't quite agree with your criticisms of modules, but you're far more knowledgeable than me, so I won't insist ;-).
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
Funny title, but this is a good PC demo review site.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I haven't really watched any demos since, well, Future Crew's prolific demo oh so many years ago. Can anyone give me a rundown of the demos that are worth watching since then (not excluding The Popular Demo)?
Actually, it was Assembly 93 and the demo was "Second Reality". No "II". :)
I believe it was created by the guys at .theprodukkt. Heck, the front page link even goes to www.theprodukkt.com. How can the mods not notice this stuff?
Yeah, theprodukkt have released things with the "fr" imprint, but notice that they only mention Farb-Rausch in the past tense on the current page, and that the linked Farb-Rausch page is just a collection of links, not really a page at all.
Wasn't this the reason for Macromedia Flash? It was all these functions and easy to make stuff from the Demoscene of the '80s. Sounds like another case of "wow, it's new so it must be cool" syndrome. This thing will become another COTS product.
OpenGL, Display postcript and a CPU with vector processor. Should make for a nice, compact eye candy.
What all these people saying how the demoscene is dead and not like "the good old days" don't appreciate is how KICK ASS scene parties are. Breakpoint 2003 and 2004 were absolute mayhem and total (drunken) geek euphoria surrounded by thousands of computers... Although, I must admit, the on-stage drunken cross-nationality gay blowjob did push the boundaries of even my levels taste :-)
Sunflower - Energia
Satori - Incyber
Haujobb - Elements
Black Maiden - Interceptor
Kewlers - Variform
Kewlers - Significant Deformation of the Cranium
these and more can be found on http://www.monostep.org
see subject.
I wonder how many of the demo and other assembly programmers from the old 65xx scene ended up in the virus authoring scene of the 90s? It's pretty clear from the badly-coded worms that few real programmers are participating in that realm.
I know I learned assembly, patching interrupt vectors, and self-modifying code from writing game intros and "trainers" for C= BBSes.
Pretty much everybody in the C64 assembly programming scene used the "copy your bootstrap into the tape/disk buffer, then shift the rest of your data to fit", as well as the well-documented technique of running your main loop out of "page 0" to take advantage of the faster execution time.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I did google it, and I came up with a lot of irrelevant stuff. Maybe you should google it before you flame people. Even after modifying the search terms, I still found a lot of demos written years ago. In fact a good deal of the demos I saw were written for dead systems (c64, amiga, etc...). That's why I posted, and while a few assholes fired back sarcastic responses, I got some useful links too.
Sometimes asking actual people is the best way.
I'm a gnu world man.
If U use a demo tool, U R A LAMER!
Maybe you could take a look at http://awards.scene.org/ too
i'm really impressed to see jare and kb posting here!!! first i must say that i was super excited to see this tool and i spent about 50 hours in it immediately after it was available. lamer or not, i used to code a little bit of 16bit asm back in the day, tp7, etc. i'm too busy to spend 10^25 hours learning how to create a 4k audio synthesis engine. it's unnecessary. i fully intend to use this software to make cool stuff, and i won't be submitting it to a demo compo. in any event, werkkzeug is so buggy and undocumented that i doubt anyone (myself included) could produce anything on par with FR's intros, partly because kb's special midi CC/sysex functions are not released (xm's won't cut it for 64k here). the spline editor is very difficult to use, procedural texture maps are difficult to make if you are really trying to simulate a complex design or something that is life-like. blah blah blah.. anyway, it's an amazing piece of software. if it had basic mouse interaction built in this would have absolutely ENORMOUS commercial viability. i think sometimes you crazy euro-asm-nuts are too wrapped up in your own world to see how valuable this technology could be to people. (take a look at what komplex is up to now.) Sonic/ACiD aka in_tense/chill/rr
Just try Scene Event or Assembly, there are still Demo Sceners around.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][