Is there still a demo scene?

[Spindel]

I made a post in the Mars rover thread about how much you can get out of computer hardware if you try to push. 

 

In that thread I also linked to this Amiga demo that fit into a 880 kb floppy and ran on an A500. 

 

As I see it today most computers have so much performance and we rarely see software that pushes the hardware to the limit, it's rather the opposite a lot of software is really poorly optimized just because the coders can be lazy with all the spare capacity (meaning that if a piece of software is pushing the hardware to it's limits it usually isn't to produce fantastic results, it's just really poorly optimized and don't utilize the hardware really that well). 

 

Another more recent demo scene product is .kkrieger from 2004. It's a FPS game that takes up 96 kb disk space. This was made possible by procedurally* generated everything (if I remember it correctly it took some 300-400 MB of ram when loaded when I tried it back in the day).

 

Is there any modern day demo scene with cool things pushing the capabilities of computer hardware?

 

 

*procedural generation does not mean, unlike what a lot of people on the internet seem to think, that stuff is randomly generated. What it means is that you do not store the assets (like textures and geometry) themselves but you store the instructions (procedure) on how to create the assets and thus reduce storage space needed (.kkrieger was basically just a file of 96 kb of math).

 

 

[Kilrah]

.kkrieger was awesome, so was debris and elevated.

 

...but it's kinda cheating, it's 96kb of math and calls... to the 1GB graphics driver and 15GB operating system.

 

Nothing like directly driving the hardware like back in the days.

[Moonzy]

4 minutes ago, Spindel said:

Is there any modern day demo scene with cool things pushing the capabilities of computer hardware?

does 3DMark Timespy/Port Royal count?

[Radium_Angel]

6 minutes ago, Spindel said:

Is there any modern day demo scene with cool things pushing the capabilities of computer hardware?

I recall the original demo scene, back when there was a bunch of hardware choices (Amiga, Apple, Atari, TRS-80) and people were showing off what their platform of choice could do that was better than all the rest, butnow that we are basically all x86, there really isn't any point sadly.

[Kilrah]

10 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

does 3DMark Timespy/Port Royal count?

Definitely not. Demos were about pushing the hardware in order to get the best possible looking result artistically, 3Dmark pushes the hardware just to push the hardware and looks horribly crude for what it uses...

[Moonzy]

5 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

3Dmark pushes the hardware just to push the hardware and looks horribly crude for what it uses...

hmm really? i think it looks great

but then again I'm not a graphical artist so what do i know?

 

you also have to remember that it's real time rendered, so you cant compare it to blender renders etc

[Spindel]

17 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

does 3DMark Timespy/Port Royal count?

Those fall in to my "pushing hardware, but not to get the most spectacular result" category. 

With the computer power those programs use you should to be able ro produce more spectacular results.

[Spindel]

3 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

hmm really? i think it looks great

but then again I'm not a graphical artist so what do i know?

 

you also have to remember that it's real time rendered, so you cant compare it to blender renders etc

Yes and the video I posted in OP was originally run in real time on an Amiga, we are talking about an Motorola 68000 @ 7,09 MHz (spaceballs demo was by a Norwegian group so they used the PAL 7,09 MHz version not the souped up NTSC Amiga @ 7,16 MHz)! 

 

I'm not talking about prerendered stuff, the demo scene was about producing stuff in real time. 

[Spindel]

24 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I recall the original demo scene, back when there was a bunch of hardware choices (Amiga, Apple, Atari, TRS-80) and people were showing off what their platform of choice could do that was better than all the rest, butnow that we are basically all x86, there really isn't any point sadly.

But in reality both Amiga and Atari ran Motorola 68000, so did Apple. 

 

EDIT:// Of course Amiga had its co-processors (blitter) and the like

[WereCatf]

6 minutes ago, Spindel said:

With the computer power those programs use you should to be able ro produce more spectacular results.

That's not how visual fidelity works; it's not a linear thing, it's a curve. At the start of the curve, it's easy to improve the fidelity even with very small improvements to hardware, but it gets harder and harder to improve fidelity and so you need to throw more and more hardware at it and, eventually, you'll hit a point where you simply can't improve fidelity in a way that the human eye can tell the difference, even if there were still technically things to improve upon from the software's view of point.

 

With the above in mind, just saying "should to abe able ro produce more spectacular results", while comparing the hardware needed for decade-old demos is ignorant.

[Kilrah]

The point is that 3Dmark focusses on stressing every bit of your GPU's hardware for the purpose of it, not to actually get nice visual output out of it.

When you run a test you'll see low res textures, a ton of aliasing, half the image blurred and fog all over the place that make something that runs at 30fps with 450W power use yet isn't visually pleasing, but uses effects that stress every block of the GPU. Any modern game will look and run way better with the same hardware.

[Spindel]

42 minutes ago, DriftMan said:

Well, the videos you see online (the professionally edited ones) use LOTS of power, but it's usually to make the job faster

 

You can watch a movie from the past years, all that CGI is really hard to do with regular hardware

 

But the reason why it's not bad (not at all) to have exxxxxxxxtra performance is to make the work better for programmers, I don't know if you are aware but the development of a videogame is faster now than 20 years ago, with better results (visually, and mechanically)

 

Maybe The Witcher 3 for the Switch is the example you are looking for? These triple A games ported to a low powered handheld console, or LowSpecGamer videos pushing the software to run on crappy hardware

 

There is no use in spending years on a software to run extremely good in a piece of hardware, if it's intended to be run in thousands of hardware combinations

 

38 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

That's not how visual fidelity works; it's not a linear thing, it's a curve. At the start of the curve, it's easy to improve the fidelity even with very small improvements to hardware, but it gets harder and harder to improve fidelity and so you need to throw more and more hardware at it and, eventually, you'll hit a point where you simply can't improve fidelity in a way that the human eye can tell the difference, even if there were still technically things to improve upon from the software's view of point.

 

With the above in mind, just saying "should to abe able ro produce more spectacular results", while comparing the hardware needed for decade-old demos is ignorant.

But as .kkrieger I mentioned, it didn't look spectacular (didn't look bad either) compared to other games of its time, what was spectacular with it was it only using 96 kb of storage space on disk and that was what made it spectacular as a demo.

 

The demo scene wasn't only about spectacular visuals on limited hardware, it was just all round spectacular use of the hardware.

 

Game developers have no interest in pushing the hardware in general (there are exceptions) and bringing up the ability to port Witcher 3 to the switch talks more to how much optimization headroom that game hade than on how much it pushed the hardware from the beginning.   

 

EDIT:// Heck even just making a cool 3d demo not using the GPU at all would be something to behold in the hands of people that are like minded to the ones in the old demo scene. 

[Moonzy]

2 minutes ago, Spindel said:

Heck even just making a cool 3d demo not using the GPU at all would be something to behold in the hands of people that are like minded to the ones in the old demo scene. 

does this count then?

https://www.pcgamesn.com/snes-ray-tracing

[Spindel]

Just now, Moonzy said:

does this count then?

https://www.pcgamesn.com/snes-ray-tracing

yes! 

 

Even if I had in minde using modern PCs  

[LogicalDrm]

To answer title question, yes there is. But it's dropped more down as subculture in space where games are made more with pre-made tools than coded by hand. The scene itself still has fans, mainly in Europe.

[Mark Kaine]

On 2/23/2021 at 3:53 PM, DriftMan said:

This doesn't happen anymore because there is no need to, a dev's time is worth more than few MB or GB

 

On 2/23/2021 at 3:53 PM, DriftMan said:

Are you into software development?

 

On 2/23/2021 at 3:53 PM, DriftMan said:

Are you a software developer

I don't think you understood the subject - most devs just have no creativity whatsoever - they need a 'creative director' or something to tell them what to do - that's the main 'problem' here why there is no "big" demo scene at least. 

 

So 'no time' is just a tiny part of the problem... 

 

 

As for the question - I think often mods for games go into this direction at least - spectacular results and improvements (think skyrim, or so called 'potato mods') 

 

Basically these guys do what the devs should have done but 'had no time' or didn't even think about it. 

 

Check this out for example - even if the original devs did a 'D00M colab' it wouldn't even be close to be this awesome...! 

 

 

one of the most fun I ever had with a mod or game, it changes basically everything (not my video btw) 

[Kisai]

On 2/23/2021 at 5:01 AM, Spindel said:

I made a post in the Mars rover thread about how much you can get out of computer hardware if you try to push. 

 

In that thread I also linked to this Amiga demo that fit into a 880 kb floppy and ran on an A500. 

 

As I see it today most computers have so much performance and we rarely see software that pushes the hardware to the limit, it's rather the opposite a lot of software is really poorly optimized just because the coders can be lazy with all the spare capacity (meaning that if a piece of software is pushing the hardware to it's limits it usually isn't to produce fantastic results, it's just really poorly optimized and don't utilize the hardware really that well). 

 

 

http://www.pouet.net/ Stuff old and new

https://hornet.org/ PC demos up to 1998

https://demozoo.org/ More New stuff

 

What you don't really see a lot of is "new stuff on new hardware" , a lot of new hardware is more locked down (such as consoles and phones)

 

https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5wgp7/who-killed-the-american-demoscene-synchrony-demoparty

 

Quote

Montfort also pointed to the strength of the gaming industry in the US as a possible reason for Americans’ relative lack of interest in the demoscene, albeit for different reasons. As Montfort pointed out, the demoscene is all about exploring the quirks specific to a certain type of hardware, whether that’s a C64, an Amiga, or an IBM PC. Game developers, in contrast, seek to smooth over all the differences between hardware platforms so that people can play a game regardless of whether it’s on a console or a PC.

 

“Game developers want to make one game that runs anywhere,” Montfort said. “The demoscene is about engaging with the specificities of specific computing platforms and doing something that experts thought couldn’t be done on that platform.”

 

So, the demo scene still exists, it's just largely not an American thing. Demo's were a consequence of trying to make do with what was available, and what's available now is rather consistent (x64 Windows 10 PC's), only the scale is different.

 

Like compare the absolutely worst computers being sold today (chromebooks and android phones) to the highest desktops with i9's and 3090 Ampere GPU's , and there is the potential for some interesting stuff to be built, but the gap in performance is still only going to have you target the lowest end device that people could reasonably have, and that demo may not work if the OS changes.

 

Then there is the malware aspect. People are a lot less willing to download things from the internet that they have no reason to download. Demos were once synonymous with piracy, and the demos were usually ads for BBS systems that no longer exist.

 

[Spindel]

6 minutes ago, Kisai said:

.... Demos were once synonymous with piracy, and the demos were usually ads for BBS systems that no longer exist.

 

Are you telling me that the awesome loading screen graphics and music by Skid Row and Farlight wasn’t part of the original release?!

 

I’M SHOCKED I TELL YOU, SHOCKED!

[Spindel]

39 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

 

 

I don't think you understood the subject - most devs just have no creativity whatsoever - they need a 'creative director' or something to tell them what to do - that's the main 'problem' here why there is no "big" demo scene at least. 

 

So 'no time' is just a tiny part of the problem... 

 

 

As for the question - I think often mods for games go into this direction at least - spectacular results and improvements (think skyrim, or so called 'potato mods') 

 

Basically these guys do what the devs should have done but 'had no time' or didn't even think about it. 

 

Check this out for example - even if the original devs did a 'D00M colab' it wouldn't even be close to be this awesome...! 

 

 

one of the most fun I ever had with a mod or game, it changes basically everything (not my video btw) 

I can agree to some degree that the mod scene has some similarities to the demo scene. Biggest difference, as I see it is that (the most ambitious mods) more push a specific game engine/piece of software to its limits not the hardware so to say.

 

There are to few developers out there like 90ies John Carmack (thinking about what he did to make Quake work and killing Cyrix in the process).

[igormp]

On 2/23/2021 at 10:01 AM, Spindel said:

Is there any modern day demo scene with cool things pushing the capabilities of computer hardware?

 

Sure, it's not what it used to be, but there are still competitions around, such as Revision and TRSAC (you can find many others on https://www.demoparty.net/)

 

Here are some cool recent demos that I've seen:

 

On 2/23/2021 at 11:53 AM, DriftMan said:

This doesn't happen anymore because there is no need to, a dev's time is worth more than few MB or GB

Even more if you have to hire dozens of them for a project

That has NOTHING to do with what the OP said. The demoscene is more of a hobby where people try to do nice stuff with constrained requirements. 

 

On 2/23/2021 at 11:53 AM, DriftMan said:

Are you into software development? Sounds like you don't understand the complexity of it,

Are you? Sounds like you're not into the whole culture and are just getting started in a compsci course or something like that.

 

On 2/23/2021 at 11:53 AM, DriftMan said:

now do that with more realistic models and in 4K

That's exactly what the current day demoscene tries to do, have a look at the things I linked above.

[igormp]

5 minutes ago, DriftMan said:

Yeah, and there are lots of demoscene still, although there are fewer and fewer low powered hardware, basically embedded hardware at this point

But it doesn't need to be solely on embedded stuff or old devices, there are many that just limit by the final executable size, as shown in my previous examples.

 

6 minutes ago, DriftMan said:

Double degree in Computer Engineering and Embedded Systems, Sir. What about you?

Also a CompEng currently working on edge ml

6 minutes ago, DriftMan said:

That comment sound a bit rude, I hope it wasn't personal harassment lol

Yours did sound like an ad hominem to the OP, so I replied in the same manner. Sorry in advance if it was all a bad misunderstanding.

 

8 minutes ago, DriftMan said:

And I pointed that although there is an art for it, there is no need to compress stuff anymore to that extent, building software with the sole purpose of minimizing the storage space required is something that was dropped a long time ago

Sure there's no need for it, but people simply like it, just like people who work on emulators on their free time and whatnot.

OP's question has basically asking if the hobbyists who did stuff in the demo scene are still alive, nothing more and not related to actual software development in companies or serious projects.

[tikker]

On 2/23/2021 at 2:01 PM, Spindel said:

Another more recent demo scene product is .kkrieger from 2004. It's a FPS game that takes up 96 kb disk space. This was made possible by procedurally* generated everything (if I remember it correctly it took some 300-400 MB of ram when loaded when I tried it back in the day).

 

Is there any modern day demo scene with cool things pushing the capabilities of computer hardware?

You are asking two different questions here. Making something a tiny file size is not pushing hardware to its limits, but rather well done optimization. Both are cool though There have been game jams every now and then that aimed for tiny games in terms of actual size. One I remember is Java4k, a challenge to make something that is under 4096 bytes, as that resulted in Minecraft4k which was fun to see happen.

 

Don't really follow the demo scene aside from enjoying the <insert engine of choice> demo reels really, but I feel DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal have to be modern day examples. Not exactly demos, but those games slay on anything. Even your vegetable garden can run them.

[Spindel]

10 minutes ago, DriftMan said:

Nah, it was just that I felt like the OP was being unfair comparing something totally possible and praised in the era, but IMO "too hard" to accomplish something as amazing now

(with this comment ->)

And I was pointing out (asking about how much about software development he knows, if I had to use ELI5 text or a bit more in-depth explanations to not sound condescendant) that with all the power of today's hardware, to make such amazing demoscenes or software needs a lot lot lot lot of effort, as you could probably do a simple 144p demoscene but for today's standard 4K is... Well I couldn't imagine how long would it take to code something like that.

 

For example, I think one of the most amazing projects right now in terms of maximizing the hardware lifespan is Puppy Linux, but there are less and less low powered devices while people want more and more features every year, as both eras (back then vs now) are totally different IMHO they are just too concerned about FOSS development than actually demoscenes.

 

Now that I've read my post again, I think I haven't expressed myself properly, not a big fan of big posts as I tend to repeat myself a lot when writing in English.

 

But yeah, those hobbyists are still alive, just doing other stuff like the nostalgic emulators and modding we are so fond of. I tend to dive into ESP32 development from time to time as I've studied the embedded systems degree, I think there are more fields right now so it's a bit spread, with less people in animation but way more in dozens of different new fields

 

Edit: specially sorry towards @Spindel if my post looked like harassment, I think we might have understood each other posts

No worries 

[Spindel]

4 minutes ago, tikker said:

You are asking two different questions here. Making something a tiny file size is not pushing hardware to its limits, but rather well done optimization. Both are cool though There have been game jams every now and then that aimed for tiny games in terms of actual size. One I remember is Java4k, a challenge to make something that is under 4096 bytes, as that resulted in Minecraft4k which was fun to see happen.

 

Don't really follow the demo scene aside from enjoying the <insert engine of choice> demo reels really, but I feel DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal have to be modern day examples. Not exactly demos, but those games slay on anything. Even your vegetable garden can run them.

Fair comment.

 

But insane optimization (and cheating to get results looking/sounding more impressive than the really are  ) and pushing the hardware to its limits where kind of the same thing initially.
 

I’m fully aware that, as I said in a previous post, that in example .kkrieger wasn’t blowing people away in the visual or audio department at the time. The impressive thing with that demo was that it this what it did and you could have 14 copies of it on a single floppy. 
 

[Spindel]

1 minute ago, DriftMan said:

 

 

I honestly think the demoscene it's doomed, it won't disappear but however it will be quite limited, I believe most of the devs just switched to other fields to use their skills in something more practical

 

To expandera on this:

The best coders of the (probably) most active period of the demo scene (80ies - 90ies) got real jobs (in many cases because of their involvment in the demo scene) and no one really stepped in and filled their shoes. 
 

The thing is I compleatley lost touch with it in early 2000s and was just pondering of there is anything cool going on today.