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Demoscene: 64k Intros At Revision Demoparty
An anonymous reader writes "Last week-end at Revision demoparty, demosceners have pushed further the limits of what can be done in a single 64kb executable file. Using extensive procedural techniques and compression, Gaia Machina (video capture) and F — Felix's Workshop (video capture) are realtime animations, featuring high quality rendering, sound, 3D models, and textures."
Get off my lawn!
Demoscene? Demoparty? 64kb executable?
Ya, i wish there was a website that you could like, search for the meaning of stuff and maybe websites about it and crap.
Be seeing you...
...you're not part of the intended audience. Admittedly, there's a lot of necessary hardware support to get these kinds of results, but still... full A/V in a space less than the banner image of most websites. Makes you wonder what could be done with similar techniques and, say, a megabyte of space.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I think I know why North American readers may never heard of it. (USA and Canada represent well over two-thirds of the population of industrialized anglophone countries.) From the article:
in Saarbrücken, Germany
For some reason they never have demo parties like this in North America. Why is that?
I'm Canadian, and I know of the demoscene and all the related terminology the GP doesn't. While I never had the opportunity to attend a party, I loved watching what some of these groups put out. The Amiga era was a few years before my time; I got into it in the mid-90's when names like Renaissance, Future Crew and Triton were the big guns.
There are caps of some of the big name demos from back in the day available on YouTube, with Future Crew's probably being the most popular. I still remember the awe I experienced when I first saw Triton's (later Starbreeze Studios) Into the Shadows demo. I purchased their subsequent game, Enclave, because of that demo (and they were the guys who wrote FastTracker 2).
For those who don't know what the big deal is, way back when PC hardware was pretty crappy these groups were putting out some of the most demanding and advanced programs, stuff that put a lot of what the game companies were pushing to shame. The aforementioned Into the Shadows demo was released in 1995. This is long before 3D accelerators and hardware floating-point math were standard. It really was impressive at the time, and it was being done by groups of kids.
Hello, I'm meaty. I coded the synth for Gaia Machina. There were some Americans there. he was saying to me that you're all up for it, but spending months/years working on it isn't an american thing. We spent 3 years rewriting our engine since "ephemera" which pretty much maxed out our last engine. I'm British, the rest of the group is Swedish. There ARE American groups who do stuff. And Canadian - Northern Dragons kick ass. We may even visit an american party with a release just to kick your backsides and get you to do some fucking work :-) There's loads of tracker musicians in America, but you never hear music done in tracker that took more than 2 days to write! You guys have the talent, you have the place, just pull your fingers out and get working!
PS. Linux port of gaia machina is coming. It already compiles ok. We need to check it first.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
During the nineties, I've done a lot of scene-related assembly code (mostly graphics and infrastructure - extenders, memory managers, etc), so I'm well aware of the limitations imposed and the usual workarounds. Most sourcecode I've seen is an ugly mess, even if it works. There are some true clever and elegant algorithms in the lower categories (128/256b and 4k), but what I've learned since then is that computer processing power is cheap, but software lasts. One of my favourite demos of all time is Heaven7, mostly because it implements a realtime raytracer than runs smoothly on a P200. But probably many of the optimizations that allowed it to run smoothly in such a limited processor aren't valid for a P3. Or a P4 (handcode optimization for any of the P4 lines is a _nightmare_). So, if it was a maintained application, the highly optimized algorithms would probably have to be rewritten, to take advantage of the latest features, and keeping "pushing the boundaries".
As an example (and more in line with the nineties), a lot of effort was put into highly optimized bresenham line algorithms, because traditional implementations implied a div operation per pixel, and integer division was awfuly slow (like 40 cycles on a 486). So, even if bresenham's requires extra instructions, it would still be a lot faster. Well, on a pentium, not only the div instruction took 1 clock cycle (like most of the other instructions), some instructions could be paired for execution (the processor had 2 execution pipes), so the bresenham implementation is usually a lot slower than using the div instruction. If you had to write maintainable software, would you worry about implementation details that could double your development time, but be obsolete on the next processor to be released? I guess not.
Demos are a kind of development on its own. They require no user interaction, no external data pulling (other than already packaged resources), have no error checking whatsoever and usually are buggy as hell - slightly different hardware may give you completely different results, or just don't run at all. So, that's why I don't like to call scene coders "real programmers". They are more of a class of "code artists", and yes, they should deserve more merit than "regular" coders, not only because their algorithmic skills, but also because of their creative way of implementing them.