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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...
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 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.
Hey, looks like they prefer writing their tools in pure assembly too :)
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
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
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
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.
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.
"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
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.
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
from the days of glorified LAN parties
;-)
LAN parties? Surely you mean _copy_ parties. There were no LANs in the _real_ good old days. Hard disks were scarce, too. And bandwidth was measured by how many floppies would fit in a envelope.
Oh yeah, and we had to walk uphill both ways.
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.
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.
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.