[HN Gopher] Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Th...
___________________________________________________________________
Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands
Author : Vinnl
Score : 810 points
Date : 2023-07-05 08:32 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net)
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is great to hear. Demoscene is one of the most influential
| things I have came across my entire life, and changed how I code
| forever.
|
| I remember watching Farbrausch's "fr-08 .the .produkt" [0] when
| it came out and telling myself "If a computer can do this with
| 64KB of data, at this speed, my programs should be able to do the
| same, or at least shall be close". I was forever poisoned at this
| point, and this simple sentence shaped my whole academic life and
| career.
|
| [0]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221
|
| P.S.: Rewatching it, again, for the _n_ th time. Hats off to
| chaos, fiver2, kb, doj, ryg & yoda.
|
| P.P.S: I show people YouTube version of Elevated
| (https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938), and ask them to
| guess the binary size rendering this thing in real time. The
| answer blows everyone's mind, every time.
| scoot wrote:
| The YouTube video in question: https://youtu.be/eGdUDGo2Gxw
|
| The title says 4kb, but I assume it's 4KB, which is impressive
| but not mind blowing for a procedurally generated landscape.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Considering you have the music, lighting, texture changes and
| everything else, it's still indeed impressive for a
| procedurally generated landscape.
|
| It might not be the most impressive demo tech-wise, but it's
| one of the best executed ones, and it matters.
|
| Also it's the second most loved prod in pouet.net, which
| means something.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| When I download it, it's indeed 4KB not 4kb. I still think
| it's really impressive for the entire demo though. It's not
| just a procedurally generated landscape, it's the camera and
| scene changes, it's the lighting, the spotlights and music.
| pavlov wrote:
| Since you're a stickler for capitalization, do note that the
| SI prefix for kilo is a lowercase "k". And if you're talking
| about 2^10, the recommended prefix is "Ki".
|
| So it's either 4kB (4000 bytes) or 4KiB (4096 bytes).
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I think some people use kb for kilobits and KB for
| kilobytes, which is maybe a bad convention, taken from kb/s
|
| why throughput is bits and storage is bytes I might never
| understand, probably has something to do with baud
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _If a computer can do this with 64KB of data_
|
| If you like that kind of "compression", I hope you know Linus
| "lft" Akesson's "A Mind Is Born": 256 bytes.
|
| https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/
| bayindirh wrote:
| I know this. It's also very impressive, and coded on a C64
| IIRC (checked the page, yes).
|
| This demo is more on the side of "do magic and observe
| output", rather than "let's make something looking normal in
| an impossible way" (i.e: elevated) or "let's make something
| impossible possible" (i.e. 8088 MPH [0]).
|
| All three kinds are equally impressive in my book, yet I
| prefer the latter ones more.
|
| My main takeaway from Demoscene is not "compression", but the
| possibility of writing code which performs very well, and
| what I found is, it's not very hard to do at the end of the
| day. You just have to be mindful about what you're doing, and
| how that thing called computer works under the hood.
|
| [0]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65371
| mdp2021 wrote:
| It is at the same time "knowing your instrument quite well"
| and "be able to produce quality [at structural level]" and
| "be able to produce quality [at final output level]".
| tremon wrote:
| _My main takeaway from Demoscene is not "compression"_
|
| Compression is still a big part of it, just not in the
| "take the original data, minimize it and reproduce it
| later" sense of the word. The procedural generation
| employed by these demos is still a form of compression: the
| highly-specialized decompressor needs only a few bytes of
| information to create the intended effect (texture or
| shape).
|
| If anything, it shows how much compression can be achieved
| if the decompressor can be tuned to the data domain, as
| opposed to general-purpose compression algorithms.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| It is not just a matter of information science in terms
| of "how can one concisely describe the object - that
| would be the strict informational content", but also
| clever procedural method to generate an output starting
| from the specifications of a machine.
|
| In the case of the Farbrausch procedural generation, a
| chaining of parametrized modules creates the textures
| etc. - as those who have played with their generation
| system, ".werkkzeug", know directly ( .werkkzeug1, 2004:
| https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12511 ; .werkkzeug4,
| 2019? : https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=91144 )
|
| In the case of flt's "A mind is born", several efficiency
| techniques are used - overlapping of palette and SID
| registers etc., but especially notable could be that the
| melody is generated by a sequence-after-seed process
| (Linear-Feedback Shift Register), where the seed is
| chosen so that a good melody is returned ( full
| explanation of the code:
| https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ )
| immibis wrote:
| > My main takeaway from Demoscene is not "compression", but
| the possibility of writing code which performs very well
|
| This 100%. It's not exclusive to demoscene, but demoscene
| is certainly yet another inspiration to write lean apps.
| (The performance of Electron is another :) )
|
| I'll never ever be able to work for an AAA game company
| because I couldn't stomach dumping 100GB of raw texture
| data onto someone's hard drive.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Why waste clock cycles decompressing those textures
| instead, especially considering the rise of DirectStorage
| and similar technologies?
| immibis wrote:
| Why waste clock cycles and storage and bandwidth carrying
| around 100GB of textures that you don't need most of the
| time?
| [deleted]
| noduerme wrote:
| "compression" is sort of a weird way of describing it,
| though, when the primary goal is to make something extremely
| small (not to take something extant and compress it).
|
| Not a knock on demos at all! (the originals handed around on
| floppy disks also inspired me to become a coder in the early
| 90s). Just saying that it's different to try to make the most
| amazing thing you can in a wide open 4k than it is to start
| with something 16k and try to reduce it.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Will Wright Discusses the Demoscene:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7iuFVmTJus
|
| >You can take any piece of content in the game, and imagine
| an algorithmic solution to it. Or also, you know, a way
| that the player could customize that object of thing.
|
| >There's this group in Europe called the Demoscene that
| make these very elaborate demos for a computer that fit
| into very tiny little memory blocks, you know like 64K of
| memory, and you run the thing, and in fact it
| algorithmically generates about 100 megabytes worth of
| data, you know these rich 3D environment, generated music,
| generated wave files, generated animation.
|
| >And they're developing techniques to generate, you know,
| huge amounts of interesting data, with very very simple,
| elegant, compression algorithms.
|
| >And this is a skill that game developers used to have,
| back in the 8-bit days. That was the only ways to do a game
| like Karateka(?), was to find all these little tips and
| tricks to compress things and generate them
| algorithmically.
|
| >But since the CD-ROM came out, and very cheap hard drives,
| storage is cheap, so basically we've lost that skill set,
| and now we attack all those problems with brute force. I
| think we've lost something by dropping that skill set.
|
| The Future of Content -- Will Wright's Spore Demo at GDC
| 3/11/2005: What I learned about content from the Sims.
| ...and why it's driven me to procedural methods. ...And
| what I now plan to do with them. Talk by Will Wright, Game
| Developers Conference, 3/11/2005.
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-
| wri...
|
| >Algorithmic compression.
|
| >Games consist of a mix of code and data. Computers use
| code to compress data. The ratio of code to data has
| changed over time.
|
| >Games used to be mostly code and very little content, so
| compression was important.
|
| >CDROM is the medium that was the death knell for the
| algorithm.
|
| >Myst was a very elaborate and beautiful slide show, with a
| vast amount of data. It looked like they had a great time
| building this world. Building the world is a fun game in
| itself.
|
| >At the other end of the spectrum from CDROMs: The Demo
| Scene. Algorithmic compression of graphics and music.
|
| Will Wright GDC 2005 Spore (The Future of Content)
| Remastered: 6:18
|
| https://youtu.be/ofA6YWVTURU?t=378
| rideontime wrote:
| CD-ROM didn't make Myst a no-brainer, as Rand Miller
| discusses in this excellent Ars Technica piece:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX5B6cD4_4
|
| More info in the extended cut starting at this timestamp:
| https://youtu.be/5qxg0ykOcgM?t=3465
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _a weird way of describing it_
|
| Hence the bunny quotes. Not really <<mak[ing] something
| extremely small>>, the idea is to _pack_ as much wonder
| value as achievable in as as little resources as possible.
|
| You can use 'compress', as long as the need to interpret as
| needed is held - the term is legitimate for the idea of
| e.g. "pressing together" what would normally be the content
| of a wardrobe in a suitcase.
| exitb wrote:
| That thumbnail for Elevated is an order of magnitude bigger
| than the demo.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| For me, it was Second Reality from FutureCrew. Highly recommend
| it. Great soundtrack, awesome scenes for the time.
| dicroce wrote:
| Second Reality by Future Crew, Timeless by Tran, so many good
| ones from this era.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The pre-GPU era and retro computer competitions like Amiga
| has many jewels.
|
| The GPU powered demos are impressive in a different way.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| RSI Megademo. Lovely.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Second Reality will always be peak demoscene for me.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That one seemed really widely distributed, iirc we got our
| copy off of a CD from a computer magazine at the time. Really
| cool, and it ran on most people's PCs. I wouldn't be
| surprised if that was the first time seeing 3D rendering on
| PC, after Wolfenstein anyway. Actually, Wolfenstein was 1992,
| Second Reality was 1993; Wolfenstein had just the 3d-looking
| environments, Second Reality had 3D models / polygons and the
| like.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Not just the 3D but the other effects were pretty
| impressive too with second reality. It looked like an Amiga
| demo but ran on a plain old VGA graphics hardware which
| didn't have any of the dedicated graphics effects (sprites,
| zooming, color bars, etc.) that Amiga machines were capable
| of creating in hardware.
| smokel wrote:
| Prepare to be amazed and watch "Copper" by
| Surprise!Productions (1992) [1]. It has hardware zooming,
| vertical and horizontal copper bars, and even a
| horizontal wobble all on a regular VGA card (although not
| many cards or emulators support it)!
|
| One interesting VGA hardware effect in this context which
| I have not seen in any demo, is to change the character
| width from 8 to 9 pixels _during_ a horizontal scanline.
| The trick is to use RDTSC to estimate the pixel position,
| with which you can create a nice wobble effect in text
| mode. Obviously, this requires a Pentium or higher, and
| at the time this became possible, text mode was rather
| outdated.
|
| [1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2048
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| Worth mentioning that the members of Future Crew later
| founded Remedy, makers of Alan Wake, Max Payne, and Control.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| And I think they created Futuremark (company behind
| 3Dmark), and some other companies.
| filoleg wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea, but am not entirely surprised.
|
| Anecdotally, my Pentium 3 machine (forgot what GPU it had,
| sadly) back in 2004 was struggling with most modern (for
| the time period) games that had even a hint of graphical
| fidelity. Max Payne 2, on the other hand, looked
| mindblowing and ran like butter.
| bitwize wrote:
| So many great game studios were founded by demosceners:
| Rockstar North, EA Dice, Starbreeze Studios to name a
| few.
| tensor wrote:
| It was also hugely influential to me. I think seeing what is
| possible with extreme achievements like this can really be
| motivating. It's probably what spurred me to learn C and
| assembly during high school.
| bitwize wrote:
| Even John Carmack these days says the goal of a programmer is
| to deliver value, not write the tightest leanest code possible.
| If the fastest, cheapest way to deliver value is with Electron,
| you fucking use Electron.
|
| Demoscene stuff is fun, and cool, but it's a hobby. It doesn't
| reflect how software is developed and deployed in the real
| world.
| bayindirh wrote:
| You might be holding my comments wrong.
|
| You're right, when developing a product, the goal is to
| deliver the product and value, however a programmer who likes
| their job doesn't develop products all the time, they also
| improve themselves.
|
| What I found is, studying "The Machine" and its details, and
| trying to write exceptional code, improves the "daily,
| mundane" code, too. Because you know what to do, and how to
| do it better.
|
| In other words, if Demoscene is F1 racing, and you have the
| chops to design vehicles which can compete there, the
| technology you develop trickles down to your road-going
| designs, and improve them, too.
|
| While I was writing my Ph.D. code, knowing the peculiarities
| of the machine allowed me to write very efficient and fast
| code in the first go, and the code can saturate the machine
| it's running on extremely well. To put in context, I was able
| to evaluate 1.7 million adaptive Gaussian integrations per
| second, per (3rd generation Intel i7) core. That code scales
| almost linearly until memory controller chokes because of the
| traffic (incidentally this happens after I saturate all the
| cores).
|
| This code has no special optimizations. A single, naive,
| multithreaded implementation which I spent half a day
| designing it, that's all. There are all kinds of
| optimizations I can do to speed this a bit further, but since
| it's fast enough, I didn't bother.
|
| At the end of the day, I'm an HPC sysadmin and developer. I
| inhale hardware and exhale performance. While there's a value
| to be delivered, it's extreme speed in my case. Because that
| speed saves days in research time, not milliseconds.
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| fr-08 sits in a prized place in my storage for two decades.
| It's one of the most incredible demos ever.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Put that 64kb exe file into a zip file, and it becomes 62
| kilobytes...
|
| Clearly there was a little more space they could have eeked
| out!
| rideontime wrote:
| Just enough space to fit some zip-decompression code? (I have
| no idea how much space that would actually take tbh)
| Warputin wrote:
| Yeah I think that's the reason it didn't happen ;) not
| saying it's impossible to make in less than 2kb, but it
| would have to be around 1kb to make it really worthwhile,
| so they could squeeze in more content.
| londons_explore wrote:
| They already have a compressor/packer - so this 2kb
| represents space 'left on the table' by that packer
| (either due to the algorithm being bad, or the packer's
| decompressor being big).
|
| Considering ZIP normally uses deflate, which is LZ77 +
| huffman. LZ77 is super simple and can be implemented in
| ~30 bytes of code. Huffman tables are fairly simple, but
| I can't easily visualize some assembly instructions to
| implement them, however arithmetic coding in all cases
| exceeds huffman's performance, and can be implemented in
| about 60 bytes of code. Total = 90 bytes to save 2
| kilobytes. Seems worth it.
|
| Note that both these decompressors will be awfully slow,
| but for just 64 kilobytes of input data I don't think
| that'll be an issue.
| dharmab wrote:
| I often repeat to myself "Chrono Trigger fit into 8M. Chrono
| Trigger is a better piece of software than anything I have ever
| made. Why should my code need any more?"
| aquova wrote:
| You may need to cut back, Chrono Trigger was a 4M game, your
| code needs to fit in half the space that you thought :p
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| It's old and it still blows me away.
|
| I've seen movie CG that looks way way shittier, that's ten
| years newer.
| dasl wrote:
| elevated youtube link :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| It isn't quite as classic(?) as some of the others, but I
| remember being blown away by Exceed's Heaven7. The fact that you
| could do all that raytracing in real-time just amazed me.
|
| https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5
|
| (I have to admit I probably turned the text off though...)
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Great news! Best art thing to ever spontaneously appear, if only
| it were a thing in South Africa in the 90s :/
| smokel wrote:
| Perhaps it was? This list on Pouet shows a few demo groups and
| releases from South Africa:
|
| https://www.pouet.net/lists.php?which=221
| skrebbel wrote:
| Denthor, author of a famous series of democoding tutorials from
| the late nineties [0] was from South Africa
|
| [0] http://www.textfiles.com/programming/astrainer.txt
|
| (key quote:) [ There they sit, the
| preschooler class encircling their mentor, the
| substitute teacher. "Now class, today we will talk about
| what you want to be when you grow up. Isn't that
| fun?" The teacher looks around and spots the child,
| silent, apart from the others and deep in thought.
| "Jonny, why don't you start?" she encourages him.
| Jonny looks around, confused, his train of thought
| disrupted. He collects himself, and stares at the teacher
| with a steady eye. "I want to code demos," he says,
| his words becoming stronger and more confidant as he
| speaks. "I want to write something that will change
| peoples perception of reality. I want them to walk
| away from the computer dazed, unsure of their footing
| and eyesight. I want to write something that will
| reach out of the screen and grab them, making
| heartbeats and breathing slow to almost a halt. I want
| to write something that, when it is finished, they
| are reluctant to leave, knowing that nothing they
| experience that day will be quite as real, as
| insightful, as good. I want to write demos." Silence.
| The class and the teacher stare at Jonny, stunned. It
| is the teachers turn to be confused. Jonny blushes,
| feeling that something more is required. "Either that
| or I want to be a fireman."
| ]
| sersi wrote:
| First thing I did was search for Denthor in the comments.
| I'll always remember going online the first time in 1996 and
| stumbling on Denthor's tutorials, Fravia's site. Both of
| those were hugely influential for me. I never ended up
| getting involved in the demoscene, just played around but it
| was a lot of fun. (I did however use fravia's tutorials to
| crack some game I didn't want to pay for, I remember spending
| a week figuring it out and maybe 30 minutes playing it once I
| cracked it :))
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Yep! There were also some fledgling groups but it never
| amounted to much, the demoparties that were attempted were
| very small and it basically never hit critical mass like it
| did in Europe.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Not just the Demoscene! Also the Twentse Krentewegge, the best
| sweet bread of the world.
|
| My mom (krentewegge) and myself (demoscene) are equally thrilled.
| smokel wrote:
| The Twentse Demoscene was awesome, but very small. As far as I
| knew, I was the "only coder in the village" :)
|
| I remember going to copy parties from The Raven (1992?),
| cycling 10 km with ~100 floppy discs, wondering whether some
| bit would shake off whenever I hit a bump in the road.
|
| I still get goosebumps when I think of the time when some guy
| from a nearby city demoed his own Adlib player and 60fps flat
| shading 3d renderer!
|
| Meeting people in person to share code (or to keep it secret),
| reading paper magazines (Dr Dobbs) buying books on holidays (PC
| Intern anyone?, Ferraro, Foley), ah those were the days :)
| pan69 wrote:
| > PC Intern anyone?, Ferraro
|
| Still on my bookshelf. Also Messmer (The Indispensable PC
| Hardware Book) and ofcourse the Abrash books.
|
| The late 80s & early 90s where a great time growing up in The
| Netherlands if you were a computer/pc nerd. :)
| jansan wrote:
| > the best sweet bread of the world
|
| Yeah, right, let's just ignore panettone exists for a moment.
| skrebbel wrote:
| This is basically the FT2 vs IT debate all over again.
| (FastTracker is better though)
| skrebbel wrote:
| (and Krentewegge)
| creamyhorror wrote:
| Every tracker is a good tracker. Now go make a game in ZZT.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| They compete in different leagues, panettone is a seasonal
| sweet bread, krentenwegge is a daily sweet bread
| mdp2021 wrote:
| So, where should one eat the best _krentenwegge_ in the
| World, presumably in (which place in) the Netherlands?
|
| I have good information that the best _panettone_ could be
| at the Pasticceria Roletti, in San Giorgio Canavese, in
| northern Piedmont.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Any bakery in Twente
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| I've yet to find any non-engineer creatives in America who are
| familiar with the MindCandy DVD releases. I saw the first volume
| playing in a bar in SF once as background visuals, but no one
| around knew its significance.
|
| Cracktros and their music are also worth preserving. Razor and
| such. There are many vintage ones for DOS, Windows, Amiga, Mac,
| and probably others. I'm sure they're difficult to find and some
| maybe lost.
| kome wrote:
| this is so cool i can't even!!! when the hakken as a traditional
| dance?
| djxfade wrote:
| For real though, Gabber and its culture should definetly get
| recognized as cultural heritage. To this day what it spawned
| has a tremendous influence in the rave scene, and Hardcore is
| still relatively huge. I attended Thunderdome last year for its
| 30 year anniversary. It was incredible
| smokel wrote:
| You might like Gabberhammer by JCO, which is at the exact
| intersection of both subcultures.
|
| https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=15102
| lucakiebel wrote:
| I guess the site is hugged to death, http://archive.today/Z5RHj
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| This means that as an art form, its dead. Which seems about
| right.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| "The scene is dead" meme has been around for quite a while.
|
| So much that now, it is most often used sarcastically, like
| when a new group releases something cool.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I joined the scene in 1997 and in 1998 I wrote my first "Is
| the scene dead?" diskmag article.
| Findecanor wrote:
| There are dozens of high-quality demos released every year.
|
| The state of the art has also been progressing. Some of the
| things coded on the C64 these days are things that I found too
| difficult to do on the Amiga back in the '90s when I was
| active.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I'm aware. It is also a fact that the average age of the
| participants is rising. The foundation of the subculture and
| its cultural cachet was always the warez scene where it
| originated, revolving around tight-knit groups of young dudes
| that participated in a forbidden pleasure and formed tribes
| that competed with each other.
|
| That energy is dead and gone. Once something hangs in a
| museum, its still art, but it is no longer alive, no longer
| evolving and becoming.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Except that we are still alive and kicking and dreaming and
| (when possible) producing, and the museum is outside far
| away and out of mind.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Too bad you're downvoted. I was a pretty active member of
| the scene back then (Imphobia group) but nowadays,
| everyone's getting older. I'd say it's a fact.
|
| But don't underestimate the energy of nostalgia. It's still
| there and, AFAIC, the scene and I : until death us do part
| !
| spitfire wrote:
| So when the hell is Imphobia #13 coming out? Been waiting
| a while here.
| NorSoulx wrote:
| Wonderful memories being part of the C64/Amiga Demoscene in the
| 1980s, an era of creativity, camaraderie, and global connections.
|
| This marked the genesis of my coding journey, igniting a lifelong
| passion for programming that endures still, spanning several
| decades in the tech landscape.
|
| A highlight, to this day, involved creating and releasing our
| Amiga Demo-Creator in May 1987:
|
| https://coding-and-computers.blogspot.com/2022/05/first-amig...
| daneel_w wrote:
| For me it was also a strong sense and feeling of pioneering -
| new demos/intros with new records, new effects, new hardware,
| new disks in the mail, new releases on the BBSes, new "feuds"
| to read about in the diskmags. A very warm and pleasant memory
| of my childhood and adolescence. There are few chances like it
| in life.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| So does that mean we're officially old school?
| NKosmatos wrote:
| IMHO, demo coders should be on the same level as other artists.
| In the same way that a painter uses a canvas, brushes and colors,
| or a sculptor uses a block of marble/wood and chisels, the same
| is true for a coder who uses a programming language and some
| computer hardware in order to create something pleasing to our
| senses without fulfilling an immediate practical need (i.e. art).
|
| So many demos, groups, parties and people to mention, so head
| over to any of these sites:
|
| https://www.scene.org/
|
| https://www.pouet.net/
|
| https://demozoo.org/
|
| https://www.hornet.org/
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| We took down the site, it seems.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Loved being part of the demo scene in the 80s and 90s. Learned so
| much, still proud of what we squeezed out of 8/16 bit computers.
|
| Luckily never got caught ;-)
| mzerod wrote:
| Aww yiss. Nederkunst.
|
| Thats amazing and also kinda wtf because drunken parties are the
| norm, so cultural alcoholism is a bonus.
| MegaSec wrote:
| Seems like it's been hugged.
| ramses0 wrote:
| DVD releases of demoscene "stuff": http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
|
| Well-cared-for in that they captured from original hardware, took
| scanlines, refresh rate, etc into consideration.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| World news and some aspects of where humanity is headed can be
| really overwhelming and depressing sometimes. But one thing that
| keeps amazing me about it is how we pretty much use everything
| under the sun to express ourselves, our ideas, create art. No
| matter hour obscure and niche, we find a way to turn it into
| beauty.
| ddingus wrote:
| Excellent! I love the scene and feel it being seen this way is
| appropriate.
| velosol wrote:
| Thinking about demos brought me right back to probably one of the
| first things I downloaded, the 'controllable' Mars demo [1,2]. I
| zoomed around that landscape in the way a child can pour hours
| into what anyone older would view as painfully repetitive.
|
| Based on the YT comments it's been done at shadertoy too:
| https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdsGWH
|
| [1]: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=4662 [2]:
| https://youtu.be/_zSjpIyMt0k
| imiric wrote:
| Well deserved! Demos are a marvel of art and engineering, and
| their authors are wizards, AFAIC.
|
| I've always been amazed at the sheer skill and creativity of the
| programmers in this subculture, to the point where I consider
| them to be in an entirely different league from the "regular"
| programmer building web, desktop, mobile and enterprise apps
| using some high-level language, of which I'm humbly a part of.
| Demo programmers can seemingly control electrons at their will,
| and mostly do so for fun and pleasure, whereas we work with
| layers and layers of abstractions and mostly for compensation.
| I'm not saying that the world doesn't need both, just that one is
| more aligned to that child-like curiosity and wonder at making
| lights blink, taken to an extreme level, which is IMO a purer
| reason to love computers.
| p0nce wrote:
| Er, we once win a "scene award" with a demo. You are right
| there was plenty of talented programmers there (and the level
| has only gone up), but this is also an _art_ scene and to be
| able to work so long for free on something that won't make any
| money (and that you can only present at a single event) in the
| end you need to either have a job developing 3D software,
| and/or be independently affluent. I was happy to leave the
| scene quickly as I feel it wasn't very respectful, when you
| release something you can see your "competitors" send harsh
| comments and tell you your thing sucks, unlike any other scene
| (?). This doesn't make sense, when people are in music they
| don't go around telling other people their music suck. Also,
| demoscene is pure greenfield, you can learn more working in
| maintenance programming.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Fwiw I loved the adinpsz demos, sad to hear you left on such
| a sour note.
| p0nce wrote:
| Because I'm a sour individual :) did reuse demoscene
| teachings in homemade post-processing (CPU! thanks to all
| the in-talk about raytracers being fast on CPU, and well
| drivers).
| whizzter wrote:
| I'm not gonna say you're wrong in your experiences, because
| there's much damnning about how people have behaved, but it
| needs to be taken in stride and things have changed a bit.
|
| The demoscene always did sit in a weird intersection between
| technology and art, and the roots and association with piracy
| (that often in the beginning in large parts were teenage
| ganglike groups) did add a distinct "harshly" competitive
| edge you don't see in other art perhaps with the exception of
| hiphop.
|
| However, 2 factors is changing things out to a mellower
| experience, one is that people have grown older and there's
| probably a realization for many who still participate about
| our mortality as people literally start to die off and few
| fresh faces appear.
|
| The other is that the workload to make code that could be
| impressive has risen and with hardware getting faster without
| changing much the pure rendering quality of what pre-made
| engines like Unity and Unreal can accomplish (or tools like
| Notch, whilst being demoscene rooted still is a commercial
| product today). SDF's gave the scene productions an edge in
| achieving cool stuff for a bunch of years (still beneficial
| for size) but usage is spreading quickly in games today. This
| might be part of why many seem to have taken "refuge" in
| working on retro-demos since squeezing cool stuff out of old
| machines isn't directly comparable to what people working
| full time on games,etc can achieve.
|
| As for what you can learn, yes, it's plenty of greenfield
| programming but "maintenance programming" gets boring quite
| quickly as well unless you work for a hyperscaler and/or a
| startup.
| de6u99er wrote:
| That's awesome news!
| nojvek wrote:
| Anyone into webgl/3d programming would have been mind blown by
| demoscene.
|
| I had read about perlin noise but never truly appreciated it
| until I saw some of the demoscene demos.
|
| Everything - the music, the landscape, trees, cameras, buildings
| - all procedurally generated. Code is maximally reused.
|
| Made me think, perhaps the brain is also doing that. Just storing
| symbols and rough descriptions, enough to recognize it again and
| reason/imagine the world. But high compressed lossy model of the
| world. Perhaps the brain is just a few gigabytes of memory to
| restore someone's consciousness. May be less.
|
| demoscene does that to you.
| AbhiAmbad wrote:
| great to hear this :)
| [deleted]
| marinbala wrote:
| Since th Art of Coding site is experiencing some downtime right
| now. Here is the official announcement on the Dutch side (in
| English):
| https://www.immaterieelerfgoed.nl/en/215e-bijschrijving-in-i...
|
| I couldn't find it on unesco.nl because everything is in Dutch.
| bitwize wrote:
| A former boss of mine said that he aspired to build the "Sagrada
| Familia of software", referring to the intricately beautiful
| basilica whose architect didn't live to see the completion of:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
|
| He meant that he wanted to build something that took time and
| care, but it would last and amaze all who saw it with its beauty
| and impressive construction.
|
| I showed him 8088MPH, which took seven years to write:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
|
| He said "OK, that's the Sagrada Familia of software."
|
| Thinking on the _Matrix_ sequels which, I know, do not exist, I
| came to a stunning realization: The Machines have a demoscene.
| Neo encounters a pair of programs who are trying to smuggle their
| daughter, Sati, into the Matrix. The Oracle told Neo that every
| program in the Matrix has a purpose, but Sati does not and that
| 's why she is at risk of deletion. Her parents created her simply
| to experience the joy of loving her.
|
| Sati is a demo. Like any demo she exists simply to delight her
| creators and anyone who observes her. We even get to see a
| demoeffect of hers: the colorful sunrise she creates for Neo to
| enjoy, wherever he may be. This demonstrates that the Machines
| have developed art, empathy, and love, quite possibly due to
| Neo's influence.
| rsiqueira wrote:
| An evolution of the demoscene has emerged in the form of a social
| network where 140 characters of JavaScript code are used to
| create incredibly impressive and compact demos. Check out
| Dwitter: https://www.dwitter.net/top/all
| anthk wrote:
| Not even close. With 140 chars of JS you are tied to a whole
| browser which it's almost an OS.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Which is no different from being tied to a particular
| computer. Why do you think it's not analogous?
| layer8 wrote:
| Because the browser is on top of the computer. Show me a
| browser implemented in hardware (not on top of a general-
| purpose computer) and I might change my mind.
| immibis wrote:
| The more generalized aim here is not "run code with the
| lowest overhead" but rather "do cool stuff within
| surprisingly strict limitations." It's the same concept
| whether you're trying to write 256 bytes of 6502
| assembly, or 140 bytes of Javascript.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Modern computers are VMs all the way down. x86 is also
| not implemented in hardware. The x86 machine is actually
| a VM running on top of the microarchitecture.
|
| Also, browsers are no less general purpose computers than
| physical computers are. There's nothing you can compute
| in one that you can't compute on the other.
| [deleted]
| WilliamBerglund wrote:
| My favourite demo of all time
| https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56112
|
| It features programming in multiple languages: cobol, fortran,
| lua, pascal, ruby, vala, ada, d, java, objc, scheme, visualbasic,
| asm, javascript, ocaml, python, shell
|
| Big shame no videos of it are up on the internet anymore, I've
| looked quite hard, but nothing. The code is available here
| however: https://launchpad.net/binaryofbabel/+download
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| I would have expected them to at least be on archive.net's
| software area. Given that they are now cultural heritage we
| should do better to preserve them, especially the videos that
| could inspire the next generation of hackers.
| ddingus wrote:
| Someone need to capture this one...
| waihtis wrote:
| Finland also did the same thing in 2020:
| https://www.gamesindustry.biz/finland-recognises-the-demosce...
| Vinnl wrote:
| The article mentions Germany and Poland as well, and the
| potential for a joint international application.
| glonq wrote:
| Those Finns are incredible. I'd like to think that I might have
| been a great programmer if only I lived in a place where there
| is no sun for half the year! /s
| waihtis wrote:
| it does naturally encourage you to sit on the computer...
| lbj wrote:
| Funny, to my mind it's much harder to build a beautiful
| performant demo than keep a website afloat...
| daneel_w wrote:
| This is fantastic news, especially for an ex-scener like myself.
| marinbala wrote:
| Congratulations. This is great news. I hope that the website
| recovers fromt he onslaught of traffic.
|
| I've loved the demoscene on the Amiga and Atari ST sonce the
| 1980s and have started attending demoparties sonce last year. I
| have great respect for the efforts of the folks ar Art of Coding
| and their friends in the different countries. To achieve this
| sort of UNESCO legitimation is an amazing achievement that takes
| a lot of serious work and persuasion.
|
| My most sincere thanks and admiration to the Art of Coding folks
| and to DigitalKultur.
| davidw wrote:
| > To achieve this sort of UNESCO legitimation is an amazing
| achievement that takes a lot of serious work and persuasion.
|
| What does it actually achieve, concretely? I get listing a
| historical building to preserve and maybe drive some tourism,
| but these sorts of intangible things... what is the real world
| result?
| m00dy wrote:
| cool, GLSL is lyrics then.
| wiz21c wrote:
| you're late to the party... Assembler is the 5h!t !!!
| TwentyPosts wrote:
| Meanwhile, I am still trying to figure out how to really get
| started with making my first demos. I can write a basic shader
| with ShaderToy, I can write a raymarching algorithm and do a few
| cute tricks with it...and now what? How do I turn this into a
| "proper" demo?
|
| Even just guidelines on the entire compilation step would be
| appreciated, or knowledge on how some fairly standard examples of
| demos were compiled, and which tools were used.
| immibis wrote:
| You don't have to do a size-limited demo. You can focus on
| writing some kind of cool animation and/or music that is only
| or mostly code (as opposed to a video file or huge animation
| tables) and that's your first demo.
|
| Some demos I liked watching are tens of megabytes, e.g.
| https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=57446 . I'm not sure why
| that still counts as a demo, but I suppose as long as the the
| sequence of things is mostly driven by code, then it does.
| Perhaps it's like 500kB of custom stuff glued onto a 42MB off-
| the-shelf game engine like Unity, which I think should be
| totally okay to count as a demo. Obviously this won't be
| competing in any size category.
| AndriyKunitsyn wrote:
| I used https://github.com/naavis/4k-Intro-Template/ to get
| started.
|
| The main ingredient of the secret sauce is a special
| compressing linker, called crinkler.
| TwentyPosts wrote:
| Ah, that Linux user feeling. Feels like a lot of people in
| the scene use Windows, which still surprises me considering
| how tech-y it all is.
| smokel wrote:
| The demoscene was also not so much into "open source".
|
| Code was often kept secret, to add to the mysticism of the
| amazing algorithms (which often turned out to be very
| clever tricks, and not academic breakthroughs), or to
| simply hide the fact that the code was a terrible mess.
|
| With regards to Linux -- Avoozl and I wrote a 4k intro for
| it in 1999 [1]. It was quite a lot of effort, with custom
| ELF headers to shave off a few bytes. There were but few
| people willing to run the thing as root though. (This was a
| requirement for svgalib, and us demosceners couldn't
| understand why unix sysadmins took offence with that :)
|
| [1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1318
| whizzter wrote:
| haha, wow svgalib is really ages ago :D
| mav88 wrote:
| Hah - I remember this prod. Super Grover ftw! I had done
| some svgalib work so I had no problem running it as root.
| In those days I had a Cirrus Logic or a Matrox dual head.
| smokel wrote:
| Even though I think the intro is quite impressive, the
| screenshot is fake -- there is no Grover to be seen in
| the entire intro. Somehow we got away with that, because
| it is quite hard to get the thing working nowadays :)
|
| If anyone manages to turn it into a YouTube video, I
| will, ehm, applaud them for it!
| blackle wrote:
| Self-plug, but demoscene on linux is very possible. I got
| into the scene around 2015 and submitted my first entry to
| an IRL demoparty in 2018. All of my prods are linux and
| open source.
|
| Most are 4k exegfx, which means they are still images, but
| "scalemark" is an animated 4k intro with music.
|
| https://suricrasia.online/demoscene/
| skrebbel wrote:
| Windows used to be the only platform where even half baked
| graphics code could be assumed to run properly most places,
| due to its position as the primary OS for gaming. All the
| graphics cards had drivers, direct3d came bundled in etc.
| It was just easier.
|
| Dont forget that most democoders want to _make_ stuff.
| Something like Visual Studio, which you can (pirate and)
| install, and then you type code and press a button with a
| play icon and see the code run, that's super nice and it's
| had that UX for 20 years or so.
|
| Compared to Linux at the time, which drew the kinds of
| people who enjoyed building up their perfect Gentoo from
| scratch and setting up their Vim just right, and making
| automake detect dependencies on all the distros. To your
| average demoscener, all that stuff gets in the way of
| getting graphics on the screen.
|
| These days the difference is pretty much gone though, so
| it's just momentum. You can install Ubuntu and a random IDE
| and code some opengl in an SDL window and things will Just
| Work just like they would on Windows. And I assume even
| Linux these days has a way to deal with dependencies that's
| as easy for devs as Windows's "just add the DLLs you need
| to the zip file".
| stOneskull wrote:
| lots of things were before windows. c64 and amiga were
| legendary.
| whizzter wrote:
| Agreed, those were the roots. But this thread is a bit
| about tooling/distribution on win vs linux and the C64
| and Amiga is more like Windows than Linux in that sense.
| If prods would've been open-sourced or compile for
| yourself you'd lose control of packaging and stuff like
| track-ordering for disk-loading would've been impossible
| to control properly.
| stOneskull wrote:
| yeah i get you. to me it seemed they left amiga for
| windows. hardly much linux really. but i think it depends
| on what you were looking at.
| whizzter wrote:
| Not to mention that it's only recently that Blender has
| become bearable, even if 3dsMAX,etc is ancient those
| kinds of tools were often used in the past and Linux was
| a kind of no-starter.
|
| Also since intros were size-limited you kinda needed
| control of your pipeline to achieve the smallest size of
| the _binary_. For a 4k intro different compilers could
| produce different sized binaries, the .exe compressor
| crinkler mentioned above does some "function-order-
| randomization" to improve compression by a few bytes by
| having the correct ordering of data/functions so just
| running a slightly different version and/or not long
| enough could fail to produce something below 4k.
| anthk wrote:
| Actual demosceners would use PovRay, not 3DSMAX or they
| choose Borland IDE's over a turd like Visual C++.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It was just easier_
|
| I got out of the demo scene after the Commodore 64, but
| isn't the whole point that it's supposed to be hard, not
| easy? That's what makes it amazing.
| skrebbel wrote:
| No. There's a huge difference between "hard to put a
| hugely detailed 3d landscape into 4kb" and "hard to get a
| pixel on the screen because the damn dependencies can't
| be found and why do I have to edit a Makefile at all,
| can't it just compile everything and then run it?".
|
| At the risk of sounding dismissive, Linux was for the
| kinds people who enjoyed configuring stuff, digging
| through man pages, editing textfiles and then recompiling
| their kernels. It was for people who loved tuning their
| system 100% perfectly to their needs. Not for people who
| just wanted to code cool computer art.
|
| Actually I think most democoders, even the insanely good
| ones, have very little patience. The attractive thing
| about coding graphics is the dopamine cycle is short.
| It's code, run, woa cool!, code, run, woa cool!.
| ginko wrote:
| So what does this mean in practice? Financial supports for
| demoscene events?
| skrebbel wrote:
| I once asked the people behind this effort and my understanding
| is that they don't really know either.
|
| It's just internet points I guess, except not with points and
| not on the internet.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| It probably helps whenever you deal with officials. Doing
| graphical things with computer (computer games?) vs.
| participating in something recognized by UNESCO as cultural
| heritage. That should open some doors, if you are planning to
| do an event or course around it.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Yeah but which officials? The demoscene doesn't really need
| permission for anything. That's almost a cultural value.
|
| I organized a few demoparties back in the day and it's
| really just, rent a place where loud music is ok, get
| people to come. Lots to plan and arrange ofc, but nothing
| that needs permission or money from bobos.
|
| Maybe the bigger parties like Revision can use this to get
| permits etc but I think all things considered it won't have
| a major impact on anything tangible. It's just cool,
| recognition.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Well first, kudos to you, to just organize it. That's the
| spirit, I know.
|
| "Yeah but which officials?"
|
| School rectors for example. Local mayors. The types who
| can give access to big rooms, you can rent for free, if
| what you do is considered "cultural".
|
| (but yes, there is the danger of doing it all very tame
| then)
| pengaru wrote:
| It doesn't hurt to have something like UNESCO
| legitimizing the medium. I've attended a few demo parties
| (US), some were hosted at unis, all were organized by
| youths, and it's _never_ been trivial to get permission
| to use the facilities. Especially when the intent is
| inviting dozens to hundreds of total strangers for a
| long-weekend sleepover _ostensibly_ to program for two-
| three days straight.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| It would likely help them get funding much more easily than
| earlier.
| michelb wrote:
| No, it just means recognition and helps with awareness. Any
| support needs to come from the community.
| bayindirh wrote:
| There's some information: http://demoscene-the-art-of-
| coding.net/2023/02/03/unesco-sta...
| amelius wrote:
| It means demos are now protected by law and thus a lot of
| limitations and bureaucracy around the development of new
| demos.
|
| Just kidding, I have no idea :)
| spitfire wrote:
| No, it's means it's only a demo if it comes from The Uusimaa
| region of Finland, otherwise it's just sparkling graphical
| effects.
| somenits wrote:
| It's just recognition by a UN body. If you'll indulge some
| cynicism, all it really means is that a bunch of people spent
| your tax money (which funds the UN through member-state
| contributions) to sit around (and expense a bunch of pointless
| travel) pontificating on what's worthy of recognition.
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