Slashdot Mirror
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.
What's this about "The Popular Demo" being 64k? It's actually 8,854,016 bytes long.
What do you mean? The scene isn't dead, it is still active albeit not quite what it used to be. Everybody always considers a project dead when the masses leave. However from my experience this COULD be one of the best times for development, no distractions.
FuckTheFuckingFuckers.com - Post your th
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
There's a bunch of Unix demos here. Some with source.
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
Make sure you have DirectX 9. I usually dont keep up with this so I didnt know.
Bet this
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.
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.
Why not, er, follow the links in the story?
Ehh. Almost all (PC-)demos have been hw-accelerated for years, using either directX or openGL. Just check http://www.pouet.net/ and download anything made in last 5 years.
Ehm ... you seem to have missed out since before 1997 (where have you been the last 8 years? ;-))
...
opengl, directx, even demos that have versions for linux and windows (since wired'98 'Hard Rox' by skall)
try http://scene.org
Gongo / Green ^ openUDs
No, it's not. Demopaja is "only" (not to say anything against it, it's one of the coolest tools even for producing videos ;) a timeline editor for external plugin DLLs, so to say a tool that demosceners can use to concentrate on coding their own effects while leaving the dirty direction work to the artists. .werkkzeug on the other hand is a complete, closed content development system which does not support linking your own code (because we never needed that, Chaos always implemented what the others wanted) but includes everything from texture generation, mesh generation/editing, timeline editing, post-processing effects and a few other things.
;)
So you can't even compare both tools, as they've got radically different uses within the same context.
Oh, and in fact the only thing that we claim that hasn't done before is the completely nondestructive modular texture and model editing. We know we haven't invented texture generation itself or demomakers, don't worry. Damn, I used those tools back on the C64 when I was 14, so...
kb / farbrausch
Yeah, but "the.popular.demo" is actually 8.3MB (the story is wrong), not 64KB. So I'm much more impressed with Notepad, honestly, in utility per byte (even though it does just create a window with a common Windows control straight out of a system DLL).
actually amiga still kicks PC ass sometimes... i recall Silkcut (amiga demo) by The Black Lotus at breakpoint this year, that still beated the shit out of every pc entry honestly! :)
"In 2002 a group named exceed released a true 64KB demo (ok, it's 65536 bytes, close enough)"
That is 64KB -- octets 0 to 65535 inclusive
Of course we could, but there are SO many more important things for us to do ;)
Honestly, OSS also exists under Windows, and since MS are giving out their compiler suite for free (as in beer) everyone can get the project and even work at it. So you want an OpenGL version? It's up to you then. Apart from the pixel shader stuff that should be quite easy to do actually.
kb^farbrausch
nope, apart from the softsynth and a few inner loops of the texture generator it's all C++.. without exception/RTTI bloat tho and only a few templates when it was really the best solution ;)
The trick is not to include tons of megabytes of external libs when you can eg. load a JPG file with two WinAPI calls instead of using libjpg. The only libraries used are for deconding the sound files, and that's libvorbis, mimifmod and my softsynth/midiplayer, the latter two optimized for size like hell.
kb^fr
Our demos and tools (and I think I can speak for the majority of the scene here) are mostly written in C++ (with simple, lean OOP mixed with imperative style whenever objects don't make sense) plus a few time-critical routines in assembler (most notably our software synthesizer and parts of the texture generator).
Doing everything in Assembly is overkill most of the time, demos nowadays are pretty much GPU limited, the only exceptions are the things mentioned above.
kb^fr
Old DOS demos also work well in Dosbox. Even the Gravis only ones I've tried work fine with the emulated Ultrasound driver.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Our (Farbrausch) demos are all Windows+DirectX, but there are a few other ones for the Mac. Just have a look at
.. and you'll find some demos. MacOS isn't too well liked in the demoscene yet, tho this seems to change - we had a Mac Demo competition at this year's Breakpoint party with a stunning three entries (which is three more than at all other parties I've ever been to) :)
http://mac.scene.org/
kb^fr
Releasing the tool is nice but if you want people to get involved, releasing the tool's source is better.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
Farb-Rausch is the name of the group that wrote The Product. They've taken "theprodukkt" as their domain name, etc, because that has been their best known and most successful demo.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.