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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.
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'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 think he got the wrong link.
The one the author mentioned is a demo of the same crew.
Check out the legendary 64K demo @ The Product.de
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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.
some of us still are :)
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
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.
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
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.