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.
:-)
Probably a result of it being zip compressed.
Bet this
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 just wanted to make the comparison that notepad.exe is 64.5k...
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.
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 they would do this?
... alex ;-)) act, but in the past big demo groups have released even their source code for next generations of sceners to learn from (ofcourse ripping is a fact :-().
...)
...) Thus allowing to show something spectacular in such a small sized package.
:-)), it still will be difficult for most groups to reach their level ;-)
Maybe for simple reasons, maybe just as simple as the 'new' scene spirit of sharing as opposed to the original hacker culture. More of a 'hippy commune' (hi Statix, ehm
In fact, there are a few other demo-authoring tools out there already. (Demopaja, smouse,
What makes this one so unique is that it allows you to make REALLY small demos, as opposed to the multi deca-mega-byte demos. It allows you to create small demos called intros. (all fitting in 64k).
The big trick is to GENERATE your data from parameters as opposed to loading the data from a file. (jpg, tga, gif, xm, mod, mp3, 3ds, iwo,
As for the commercial value of this: The other mentioned demo creation tools are also commercialised (at least some) as VJ tools for a videowall or related devices. This is not the case for this tool. Maybe shortsighted of me, but I do not see the commercial value of this product besides the obvious one: get the competition to pay for reaching your level of competence, but even still, then this is only scene related.
And as everyone knows: it is not the tools that make you good (but it helps), so I fear that if it is the intention of Farbraush to level the competitionfield (because it is all too easy for them to win competitions
Gongo / Green ^ openUDS
- ftp.scene.org
- ftp.nl.scene.org
- ftp.pl.scene.org
- http.pl.scene.org
And, by the way, "the.popular.demo" is 8.2MB, not 64KB as stated in the article. (Rather a difference, so expect a long download time.)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
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
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.