Are Demoscenes still a thing?

[whm1974]

So I watched a video on YouTube about the Playable Demo kkrieger and how it is only 96k in size. The Demogroup had to create new Tools to do this, which is why they almost didn't meet the deadline.

 

Is the The Demoscene still a thing? For some reason these sort of activities was far more common in Europe then the US. I did see a few Demos in person when I was still in HS. They were done on a Atari 800XL of all things...

 

I just think that Demos are neat in that they push the Limits on what be done in terms of hardware and skillset.

[LogicalDrm]

Its still around. Big parties held yearly across the Europe, and some in US/CA and Latin America too. Ofc it has been all remote during the pandemic. And bit before that too, now that internet and cloud are big enough to carry bigger files around. And ofc it has been evolving. From teh oldschool art to game deveploment, animation and stuff like that.

[whm1974]

7 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

Its still around. Big parties held yearly across the Europe, and some in US/CA and Latin America too. Ofc it has been all remote during the pandemic. And bit before that too, now that internet and cloud are big enough to carry bigger files around. And ofc it has been evolving. From teh oldschool art to game deveploment, animation and stuff like that.

Thanks. Who started the Demoscene to begin with? And why is it far more common over in Europe then the US? Did the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST/TT Platforms that did this? And older 8 bit Home Computers?

 

 

[LogicalDrm]

5 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

Thanks. Who started the Demoscene to begin with? And why is it far more common over in Europe then the US? Did the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST/TT Platforms that did this? And older 8 bit Home Computers?

I bet you find some documentarie answering those questions. I've known about whole thing only for about 15 years. I know that it started from shareware scene. Or by pirates, sharing their cracked copies and bousting by having intro with groups name.

[whm1974]

22 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

I bet you find some documentarie answering those questions. I've known about whole thing only for about 15 years. I know that it started from shareware scene. Or by pirates, sharing their cracked copies and bousting by having intro with groups name.

Like I said, I only seen in person a few Demos on older platforms. Mostly 8-bit Home Computers. Don't even remember the last time I watched one in action.

 

That had to be on MS-DOS with an Older Pentium, 16MB Memory and Matrox Card.

[Biohazard777]

21 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

Like I said, I only seen in person a few Demos on older platforms. Mostly 8-bit Home Computers. Don't even remember the last time I watched one in action.

 

That had to be on MS-DOS with an Older Pentium, 16MB Memory and Matrox Card.

JS1K  (1024 bytes of pure JS, self contained, no external libraries) was a new-ish demo scene, ran from 2010 to 2019. I think it stopped because of the pandemic, or maybe the maintainer Peter got bored of it heh.

Anyhow, the site is still up if you want to check some of the demos out in your browser:

https://js1k.com/2019-x/demos

As for demo scenes in general, I think as time goes by we will hear less and less about them... but I have a feeling it will be a long time (if ever) before they fully stop existing.

[Craftyawesome]

4 hours ago, whm1974 said:

Like I said, I only seen in person a few Demos on older platforms. Mostly 8-bit Home Computers. Don't even remember the last time I watched one in action.

 

That had to be on MS-DOS with an Older Pentium, 16MB Memory and Matrox Card.

Demos can also be very impressive with modern hardware https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type[0]=4k&platform[0]=Windows&page=1&order=views

[Kronoton]

17 hours ago, whm1974 said:

Who started the Demoscene to begin with?

 

Kids cracking copy protected games and spreading them at school started putting their names/tags onto them, which lead to small animations being played when starting the games (aka "Intro") and finally those would get so big that there was no space for the cracked games anymore.

 

Problem is that once the scene moved beyond C64/Amiga (the pure 68000+1MB kind) demos changed more and more from pushing the HW to prerendered art and a playback routine hence most modern demos being rather boring.

[Spindel]

Haha I made almost exactly this thread a couple of months back

 

 

 

I still remember the Wagner music intro to Farlight cracked games on Amiga or the music and bouncing balls on Skid Row cracked games  

 

EDIT:// BTW look up some old Triton demos, Triton is the group that became Digital Illusions, now known as DICE

[whm1974]

49 minutes ago, Kronoton said:

Kids cracking copy protected games and spreading them at school started putting their names/tags onto them, which lead to small animations being played when starting the games (aka "Intro") and finally those would get so big that there was no space for the cracked games anymore.

 

Problem is that once the scene moved beyond C64/Amiga (the pure 68000+1MB kind) demos changed more and more from pushing the HW to prerendered art and a playback routine hence most modern demos being rather boring.

I wonder if there is an active Demoscene with Raspberry Pi SBCs? There are Groups that give those things away to Schoolkids you know.

[Kronoton]

2 hours ago, whm1974 said:

I wonder if there is an active Demoscene with Raspberry Pi SBCs?

 

Even the very 1st version so powerful that it can just play back any prerendered content at full speed and in FullHD.

 

-> Pointless

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, Kronoton said:

 

Even the very 1st version so powerful that it can just play back any prerendered content at full speed and in FullHD.

 

-> Pointless

Its almost like you don't understand there being difference between realtime rendering and prerendering. My understanding of demoscene is that most of the compos are done with executable files, with realtime rendering on the hardware they are executed on. Meaning that you can replicate results if you have at minimum same hardware that was used to test/compete on.

 

Also, its almost like you are here to hate because you think game deveploment, software deveploment and other such can't benefit from there being people who push and invent thing because its fun?

[Kronoton]

1 minute ago, LogicalDrm said:

My understanding of demoscene is that most of the compos are done with executable files, with realtime rendering on the hardware they are executed on.

 

Then your understanding is wrong (or just incomplete). Yep demos on 8 and 16Bit systems were done that way as they could get better graphics this way compared to playing an ultra lowres video with the limted bandwidth and memory.

 

"demos" on HW released in the from the late 90s to till today rarely work that way. Lot's of stuff is predone often to the point where it is just a video. Sure there are exceptions but given that demos aren't interactive the incentive is small as noone would be able to tell the difference by just watching.

 

Demos on the old HW also get rarer as it is by now near impossible to come up with a party trick that hasn't been done a dozen times before. And yep that was the biggest reason why simple "I cracked this" messages grew into spectacular  demos back in the days.

[LogicalDrm]

6 minutes ago, Kronoton said:

 

Then your understanding is wrong (or just incomplete). Yep demos on 8 and 16Bit systems were done that way as they could get better graphics this way compared to playing an ultra lowres video with the limted bandwidth and memory.

 

"demos" on HW released in the from the late 90s to till today rarely work that way. Lot's of stuff is predone often to the point where it is just a video. Sure there are exceptions but given that demos aren't interactive the incentive is small as noone would be able to tell the difference by just watching.

 

Demos on the old HW also get rarer as it is by now near impossible to come up with a party trick that hasn't been done a dozen times before. And yep that was the biggest reason why simple "I cracked this" messages grew into spectacular  demos back in the days.

Hmm... My understanding of coding is indeed non-existent. Still, from what I've seen, its more than just playing video. So either I'm clueless, or you are pessimistic and salty.

[Spindel]

7 minutes ago, Kronoton said:

 

Then your understanding is wrong (or just incomplete). Yep demos on 8 and 16Bit systems were done that way as they could get better graphics this way compared to playing an ultra lowres video with the limted bandwidth and memory.

 

"demos" on HW released in the from the late 90s to till today rarely work that way. Lot's of stuff is predone often to the point where it is just a video. Sure there are exceptions but given that demos aren't interactive the incentive is small as noone would be able to tell the difference by just watching.

 

Demos on the old HW also get rarer as it is by now near impossible to come up with a party trick that hasn't been done a dozen times before. And yep that was the biggest reason why simple "I cracked this" messages grew into spectacular  demos back in the days.

kkrieger likes to have a word with you on what pushing the hardware means.

 

And yes as an FPS it wasn’t that exciting even with early 2004s standards (wasn’t bad either). Just showing what can be done with procedual generation while keeping storage space down is to push the limits.

[Kronoton]

7 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

My understanding of coding is indeed non-existent.

 

"Coding" is just one part of the demo, you need to music and gfx. Also once it gets bigger you need an artistic concept.

 

When the target systems has very low resources good coding is the key to everything else, once you get to everything being "giga" it's barely needed at all and the other part move into the center of attention with just some minor code needed to play back the assets.

 

@Spindel 

 

There is always the exception that proves the rul

Edited September 1, 2021 by Kronoton

[Craftyawesome]

14 hours ago, Kronoton said:

"demos" on HW released in the from the late 90s to till today rarely work that way. Lot's of stuff is predone often to the point where it is just a video. Sure there are exceptions but given that demos aren't interactive the incentive is small as noone would be able to tell the difference by just watching.

They definitely aren't just using videos, demos are way too long and high resolution for that. A good chunk of demo readme files will suggest a then-recent GPU. You can also just check your GPU utilization to see it being used.

 

As for other things that can be precomputed, they would probably just use whatever is smaller. I would assume that the majority of the time it would be smaller to use code to generate things, though.

15 hours ago, Kronoton said:

When the target systems has very low resources good coding is the key to everything else, once you get to everything being "giga" it's barely needed at all and the other part move into the center of attention with just some minor code needed to play back the assets.

I think you are probably underselling the difficulty. Assets are big compared to demos. You would want to write code to generate what you want after launching.

[8tg]

On 9/1/2021 at 11:52 AM, LogicalDrm said:

Its almost like you don't understand there being difference between realtime rendering and prerendering. My understanding of demoscene is that most of the compos are done with executable files, with realtime rendering on the hardware they are executed on. Meaning that you can replicate results if you have at minimum same hardware that was used to test/compete on.

 

Also, its almost like you are here to hate because you think game deveploment, software deveploment and other such can't benefit from there being people who push and invent thing because its fun?

This

The concept is, for example the demo scene proved it possible to play a pretty clean song on a C64 without it sounding like a C64, pushing above and beyond the normal capabilities of the SID chip:

 

 

The C64 can’t exactly play an MP3 file, it can barely make music to begin with, it’s meant to make 4 different wave style sounds across 3 voices. This guy managed to get it to play a Prodigy song with what sounds like way more than 3 individual voices and way more than 4 waveforms.

 

Thats what the concept is. To compare this to a raspberry pi…

Can you make a pi play a native DSD64 audio track? Can you push above what the hardware is really capable of to get it to do more or at least appear as if the system is doing way more?

This is what a CGA graphics based IBM PC can show normally:

4 colors in different modes.

Heres what the 8088mph demo showed CGA can do:

This is like making your raspberry pi play cyberpunk 2077

[cacoe]

1 hour ago, 8tg said:

This is like making your raspberry pi play cyberpunk 2077

No need to go to that extreme, it's like making your Xbox One X run Cyberpunk 2077

[Spindel]

8-bit Guy recently posted an presentation he did about demos. 
 

It’s interesting of you want to know more about the basics surrounding demos in general.