The demo scene was so formative. Like many others of a certain age in the 3D industry, I was first a demo scene coder, because what else was one to do if you were good at math and computer science but still stuck in high school?
My 1997-era renderer did reflections, bump, color textures, etc all in 16 bit using x86 assembler rasterizers, no floating point, with 256 color palette - source can be found from this link: https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1260346800176877571
Nearly 30 years later I am still doing 3D graphics, contributing to Threejs (which is run by mrdoob, another demo scene coder), glTF, VFX software, https://web3dsurvey.com and have run a computer-graphics company for the last ~20 years: https://threekit.com
I was doing the same as you. Gouraud shading, texture-mapping, phong-shading.
I looked at your code and saw only .cpp files. I had to open your triangle renderer, and there it was - you'd inlined your x86. I don't think I ever inlined my assembler, even though I was using Borland C++ like you. I think I must have linked it in somehow?
> I was doing the same as you. Gouraud shading, texture-mapping, phong-shading.
Is your old code posted anywhere? I think many of us were working from the same example projects/tutorials. I wouldn't be surprised if the code is incredibly similar.
> I had to open your triangle renderer, and there it was - you'd inlined your x86.
Being able to access C++ variables on the stack directly from assembler to read and to write to them was so nice. You get the speed benefits without adding significant complexity.
As someone born a bit after these demos, any tips for how to make this sort of thing? My C/C++/ASM skills are pitiful but I'd love to sharpen them, and this seems like a perfect way to do so
It was horrible to work for a VFX firm in terms of work-life balance, but the pay was okay. I quit after 3 years. One crunch time lasted 27 days in a row many of which many were 10hrs per day. And then I didn't even get credit on the final film even though what I did was critical for it.
When I started my own firm in 2005 I adopted a no-overtime policy in reaction to that. This was more feasible since I was creating and delivering software and this was more predictable and containable than doing VFX itself. This has loosened a bit as the company grew, we got funding, then got other divisions, etc.
There's something interestingly poisonous about the demoscene mentality. Write small, hacky, throwaway, non-reusable code, hand minified beyond readability. Unit tests aren't relevant. You can see this mentality infect WebGL systems and places like Shadertoy. There's a tension between "software engineering" (whatever you want to call it) and demoscene hackers.
The demo scene is a bunch of kids having fun and learning algorithms primarily. To tell them that they need to write unit tests is ridiculous. They will have time to learn about large scale architecture and unit tests in time - by why not try to have fun for a bit?
Shadertoy isn’t meant to be reusable/production code. It is meant to be a fun computer graphics algorithm place. A place to experiment and learn.
We can take the fun out of coding later - that is what paying jobs are for. Why not have some spaces for fun?
Software 'engineers' see the demoscene as an annoying reminder that code can also be crafted like art, unconstrained from corporate concepts like 'design patterns' and 'clean code'.
Even if it was fun I often felt it was useless because the skills I was acquiring were only applicable for game development and that was something I was not interested in.
It was quite a shock to me when I found myself working on a WebGL demo for Google² and all what I had learnt in the demoscene paid off (and has continued paying off ever since!³⁴).
Getting older, one of the most important things I've learned is that no technical skill is useless. Especially since you never know where you end up. I've had so many things at university where I was absolutely sure that I'd never need them. And for like 90% of them I was right. But the remaining 10% were incredible boosters to my career and I never would have thought they could have such a huge a impact.
Being a techie also means that you aquire meta skills like being able to figure out and troubleshoot random tech very fast, no matter how trivial or complex. Where most people would never bother to dig deep enough or quite really fast, techies can deep wide and deep, over a long period if need be.
>And for like 90% of them I was right. But the remaining 10%
I'd argue that this kind of language isn't even right. It's not only that you don't know when you need something, you don't even know when you use it. If we've learned one thing from the success of ML systems it's that the proper representation of knowledge is extremely complex and connected. Everything influences everything else. You can't learn "10%" of a language, or "10% of programming", as if there exists some chunk neatly separated from the rest.
It's much more likely everything you learned contributes to most of what you do, even if we're not actively aware of it. You can't learn x% of Mandarin by learning y% of the words, it's not even appropriate to separate anything into useful or useless. Almost everything you pick up just illuminates your mental model just a little bit more.
My demos were my resume (CV) at the time. I remember Jez San of Argonaut (Starfox) contacting me and wanting me to come interview for a development position. I was 16 IIRC.
A year or so after that I became a professional game developer. In fact, the game I was working on was changed from 2D to 3D overnight and I pulled out my demo source and ported the whole 3D engine over in two weeks:
Demos really force you to learn everything there is to know about how a modern computer system works, CPU, RAM, ROM, bus, video, etc. That knowledge will remain invaluable.
I mostly do web dev in C#, but any time I write a single line of code my brain is thinking in the background "how many opcodes will this be? what about this branch? am I making an extra copy of this variable for no reason?"
Copying variables has only superficial values nowadays - the compiler will track variable lifetimes and allocate registers or spill them to stack as appropriate.
For C# specifically, if you want to scratch the itch, there is a way :)
If you are using VS, you can install Disasmo extension and disassemble arbitrary methods with SHIFT+ALT+D (keep in mind it's ready-to-run-like codegen which does not have all optimizations).
You can also go further, and use `DOTNET_JitDisasm='methodName'` env variable - in this case you will see how method transitions through all compilation tiers (if it gets promoted past Tier 0). And last but not least, if you build your .NET binary with NativeAOT, you can just use standard disassembler, debugger or profiler you would use for C++ binaries.
This brings back the memories of my first ever "high profile" job[1][2]. 2012, I was a wannabe gamedev at the time (even made a couple mediocre demos), but actually a pretty decent backend dev, so they somehow hired me to do the backend/devops. WebGL was a hot new thing at the time, and we were running into a lot of compatibility problems on various consumer GPUs. So I've helped get the 3D/frontend guys set up Sentry, so they could actually see and fix all the problems. Even though all my code ended up being "invisible", I like to think I had a hand in making the beautiful graphics happen.
I was a wannabe gamedev also, was obsessed with learning 3D concepts, optimizing code, learning assembly language, and so on. After getting nowhere with game companies (You think FAANG is selective?? Try late-90's game companies), my first job ended up being writing GPU drivers for a major graphics card company. Lucked out, I got to work with gaming technology but without the soul-crushing burnout and 80 hour week death marches.
Ha, for some reason my company (actually zscaler) is blocking your ricardocabello.com site because of "Copyright infringement". I'll check it out on my personal laptop.
I remember your 3 Dreams of Black experiment when it came out, that was awesome work!
Yes, the whole problem area of GPU programming, not just for 3d or VR but also 2D pixel-perfect rendering on GPU (which is going to be needed as screen resolutions, color depths and frame rates increase, leading to more overhead if rendering on the CPU) is ripe for the application of demoscene-like techniques.
I remember my father telling me (tongue in cheek) "sure, 3d realtime polygons are nice, but when will it earn money?". And many years later, I'm still coding both for fun and money (and usefulness).
In case you wonder, the scene is not dead. It certainly is not what it was anymore, but there are still many people trying to push the limits on old computers.
Some demomakers are also active in the emulation scene.
But in the end, I guess all of that will die with "our" generation. We were born in that golden age and kids today can't live in our past (and that's fortunate!). So our art, emulators, scene will eventually pass away with us.
So don't wait, write that demo while you're still young enough to compete :-) (I did my last production at 49 :-) )
Greetz to Imphobia/ImpactStudios/Cascada/FrenchTouch !
If by "all of that" you mean people caring about Commodore vs Amiga pissing matches, maybe. But the Demoscene is much more, and that's not tied to your generation. There's demos targeting platforms that have only now existed for a few years.
I suspect you're aware, but leaving this for the hackernews crowd that might not be: Shadertoy was in fact made by sceners for sceners. Inigo Quilez is iq/Rgba[1] who released it as a tool for the scene to use[2] back in 2009
It’s definitely not dead. Some great demos have been released in recent years in JavaScript / WebGL, e.g. using visual tools like cables.
https://cables.gl/
Maybe it will live on with the advent of fantasy consoles/computers. PICO-8 and similar systems provide the same kind of time and space limitations as the old systems, which still encourages a certain amount of creativity and ingenuity.
Not just fantasy consoles -- there are modern retro-specced computers out there like the ZX Spectrum Next, the Commander X16, and the Agon Light that are worth messing around with. Also, there is a demoscene for modern machines; it's just that the challenges are different: produce the most dazzling effects with the least amount of code.
For what it's worth, I'm on the younger side of things and the demo scene is something I still greatly admire. It's an integral part of so many technologies we use today, and although I may not be good enough to participate, it's one of the first things I mention when talking about how pirating ended up producing some positive things for society. :)
I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died.
Up until the late 1990s it was not possible to playback full screen video on regular PC hardware, because of both CPU and storage limitations.
This meant that if you wanted smooth high resolution animations, you'd have to resort to programming and a lot of tricks.
As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice.
The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s.
This reduced the audience to those who could understand the effort that you went through. In many ways, that just never compares to the original demoscene feel.
It was an amazing time to be alive, but it will never come back, because technology has moved on. I wonder what underground scene kids these days will cherish as much later in life.
> I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died.
It didn't die. Revision hosts hundreds of sceners every year. This year over 400 entries were submitted to the competition, including 40 full PC demos and over 40 tracked/oldschool/executable music entries. Even for small, local C64/Amiga parties here you have to race for tickets to these events.
We released a C64 intro outside a competition a couple of months ago, and within a couple of days it was buried in the inflow of new C64 releases on CSDB. The C64 scene is bigger now than when I got into it 18 years ago.
> The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s.
That didn't die either. Things don't die just because you stop pay attention to them. The notion of competing with Pixar is absurd; the terms of competition and markets are entirely different. Pixar makes movies for the mainstream to make money. Sceners make productions for sceners that may be more interesting to them than a Pixar production in an esoteric sense that the mainstream will not understand.
No need to be so harsh. You seem to be misinterpreting and misunderstanding my comment. I get it that there are still people who are trying to keep the spirit alive, and I wish them all the most of fun, but as I try to explain it is no longer the same for most of us who were there in the 80s and 90s.
"The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it.
Edit: To go into the Pixar argument a bit more: In 1993 a demo such as Second Reality could impress "normies" as much as an MTV video clip could. Remember that back then video clips were often total utter crap, and some demos were buttery smooth 50fps animations with a distinctive feel that you could not find anywhere in popular culture.
In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.
I was into demoscene back when i in middle school in the late 90s and people were claiming even then that the demoscene is dead. Turns out this never happend and it is alive to this day[0].
There are new productions for various platforms ranging from modern to retro and from full restricted intros (256 byte DOS intros, 4k Windows intros) to full blown demos all the time.
The demoscene died when the PC became too powerful for hardware tricks to compete.
Actually, it died when people started making demos in C and horror C++.
No wait, the demoscene died when 3D cards made art/modeling the only valuable thing.
No wait, let me get this right. The demoscene died when mp3 music produced in DAWs replaced mods, and photoshop and wacoms replaced deluxe paint pixelart.
Hm... maybe it died when the internet made everthing available so nothing felt special anymore.
Or when the web and Flash became the place to get a quick fix of visual design.
Maybe it died when kids became more interested in esports and LoL than in coding.
I'm sure it died when Youtube meant you didn't even need the hardware or the download to watch a demo.
Maybe it was when the iPhone appstore meant the most popular device on earth couldn't run demos.
> As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice.
Not sure that was a factor. You could already earlier prerender things, just maybe not minutes of it, but for loops it always was a thing. Back then in the late 80ies/early 90ies, at least in the C64 scene, it was a huge topic sometimes and people stressed when especially spectacular effects where "realtime", so there will be no doubts, cause prerendering carried a huge stigma with it for a long time.
In fact, this was what held back the demoscene for a while, cause a lot of very stylish things just were not possible at least on C64 hardware without prerendering or at least doing the 3d calculations up front. The scene actually had to overcome their fixation on "realtime" effects before a lot of very artsy, stylish demos became possible, once people started focussing on what you see, not how you achieve it.
The latter part might not apply to stronger machines, though, admittedly. On the C64 any kind of long running animation is a feat in itself, even if you trade limited CPU for limited memory.
Procedural art has a different quality to it though :)
Edit: That is to say, I don't think the only value of the demoscene is to create something cool under technical limitations. I think it's to create something cool in a computational medium (the spirit lives on as procedural art, shader art, etc. as well).
Every method of producing a work (done under finite time, I guess :P) will give sometimes vastly different results. Hand drawing an animation will give something completely different under similar time constraints as video editing and completely different from procedural drawing.
To give some examples: you can easily render thousands of points, e.g. stars, make them twinkle, draw thousands of trees, and give them all detailed movement. That's very hard to do by hand. By hand you'll have better control of style, and details like paint texture, etc.. Animating characters (with genuine character) is trivial by hand but quite difficult procedurally (you have to resort to essentially manual animation in the end). There's the question of offline vs online rendering... if you're offline rendering you can go bonkers with millions of objects. I personally like being able to run it real time, I find it gives it a more intimate feeling, and is easier to reproduce (but am not against offline rendering if you find it suitable!).
Also very exciting to me is baking randomness, either with a fixed seed or changing seeds every time. You get a different piece every time you watch it! The possibilities are really vast, and mostly unexplored.
This is a very interesting addition to the discussion. The digital art world and the demoscene sometimes briefly met, but I assume that most of the time its members look down on eachother.
An interesting artist in this respect is Karl Sims [1]. As far as I know, he was not involved in the demoscene, but he sure did make some interesting things!
For what it's worth, YouTube's compression renders many videos of demos into a mushed up mess, especially things like 10,000 item point clouds that still look crisp with each point individually rendered by the program but on YouTube comes out as a vibrating smudge.
The demoscene has always been about real-time graphics. It never sought to compete with video animations. Many demosceners were, at heart, game developers who valued and appreciated real-time code, often considering animations to be "lame".
I totally agree that this was the opinion of many demosceners. However, my point is that this would seldom be the opinion of the general public. The demoscene grew organically, and trying to define what it should be about seemed a bit silly. The artificial limits, such as 64K or 4K intros sure were fun to compete with, but they make little or no sense to the uninitiated, and were pretty much arbitrary.
It was actually what put me off a bit -- I enjoyed the demoscene to learn new things and to experiment with computers in total freedom. I had no need for artificial limitations set out by competitions, and never really cared much for the gatherings of socially less developed boys who smelled pretty bad (even though I exactly matched that profile myself :).
I really liked the contrarian groups who faked a lot. In Nooon's "Stars" (1995) a 3D bee is rendered with a complete wing missing, to fake a high poly count.
"Transgression 2" by MFX may also be a good example of what I am trying to convey here. Obviously it was not real-time ray tracing, but what was it? It puzzled me for weeks!
I was never part of it. But it seems like it is still fairly popular. The constraints are artificial now, but other than just creating work, those constraints shape what is produced in a way that is still pleasing. Other constrained stuff like tiny wasm game competitions are fun too. I'm hoping demoscene on microcontrollers becomes a thing. Though you'd have to be selective. Many of them absolutely demolish the capabilities of an amiga1000.
Constrained generative networks would be interesting too.
As an outsider myself this was my assumption for why the demoscene is not the same as it once was, the hardware constraints are no the same as in the 90s. That being said I kind of look at the demo reels for new versions of Unreal Engine as a sort of modern incarnation of pushing the limits.
In germany a lot of it was because of the success of Crytek with Crysis at the time. The first cryengine was mostly build by demoscene enthusiasts :) They gobbled up a lot of demoscene people and from Crytek they got scattered around the globe.
Not just crytek! Yager also had founding demosceners I believe? There's more in Germany for sure.
3DMark the benchmark by Futuremark is as the name suggests, made by ex Future Crew. The list goes on.
If you go around looking at where most demosceners from the past decade or two work today, you'll find the vast majority of them work at places like Unity, Unreal (Epic), etc.
Can it be not expanded to the current hardware? Making it do what other people think is impossible, investigating undefined behavior in hardware, which would be more given the behemoth size.
A real time demo where every pixel can be deformed, giving rise to an ultra interactive world in less than 4GB memory.
The real competition on modern hardware is the 64K and lower competitions. Doing something interesting in 64K or even 4K is how you really show off programming skills on modern hardware.
Nice little interview that touches on a number of the magical parts of the scene and the many elements and major sites. This guy only started in 1997? All good, but feel like that's just a bit 'after' the golden, significant era. There was definitely a change as PC/windows development happened ...right around then I'd say. But maybe that's just my take on it. Feel like references to some classic demos should be late 80s/early 90s for the sheer impact and that it was a much much more active scene then. Future Crew "Second Reality" forever. ;)
I was part of the PC demoscene in that era (1997-2002) and it definitely was a super productive and exciting time. The transition to Windows wasn't necessarily a big deal, but the impact of 3d acceleration definitely was.
In that period 3d accelerators were basically capable of running Quake and not much else. Traditional demo effects that relied on reading the backbuffer (even to just do some basic postprocessing) were either unavailable or had to have bespoke implementations per card. There were no shaders to speak of, and so on.
For me that really killed demoscene innovation for a while, and a lot of demos basically consisted of a bunch of alpha-blended layers for a while.
Nowadays, though, I'd say the scene is probably doing pretty well even though it's arguably even more niche than it used to be. Oh well.
Same here. I came in on the back end of having to write your own engine from scratch (not just 3D, but general graphics.) MOV AX, 13h; INT 10h will forever be burned into my memory.
The transition was definitely odd. What brought it around for me was when fr-08 was released and the broader scene realized what _could_ be done with procedural generation and whatnot.
Second Reality is the single most amazing piece of art for me. Nothing else holds as much emotion as that demo. To see behind the curtain is like, I imagine, for someone else to watch Van Gogh actually painting.
It's funny, that link was grey before I clicked on it. If you can find a copy, you might like to pick up MindCandy (http://www.mindcandydvd.com/), but of course they can all be found on YouTube these days.
"Unreal ][ Main theme" is still on my main playlist on my phone, and I've yet to go through the thousands of .XM files I just grabbed off some FTP site back in the day. The MOD community is a related rabbit hole one could get lost in . . .
There are a handful of things I can point to that likely inspired my career in computers... Second Reality was one of them. (Probably Leisure Suit Larry behind that. :)
I was introduced to the scene at 15 and was active in it until about 17. Too young to travel to proper demo parties, but old enough to contribute code and music, and to enjoy the demo disks that came in the mail after a swap party.
It's interesting to rationalize it as an art form today. It sounds reasonable, but I don't think I or my friends thought of what we were doing as art, at the time. We were trying to impress each other with things that looked cool. To the extent that art was involved, yes, we needed music and graphics and fonts and creative designs, but we did these things out of necessity, without calling ourselves composers or graphic artists or type designers or art directors. Watching what others sent you and contributing your own stuff created a sense of belonging which I feel was really the primary motivator for my friends and me.
Regarding tools, there was one thing that was frowned upon in my circles: the use of demomaker software. These point and click apps allowed people to call themselves demo makers even though they did nothing technical. Boo!
If you like the music from demoscene, much of it was written on a tracker sequencer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker. I've been playing with Polyend's hardware tracker recently and I love it.
If you want to try a tracker out yourself Renoise is great (much cheaper) option for PC/Mac/Linux. There are also several free trackers out there with varying levels of practicality (I only know Polyend and Renoise so I can't really suggest which free ones are good).
There's a bit of a learning curve but once you get the hang of the workflow it's tons of fun!
Readit News
My 1997-era renderer did reflections, bump, color textures, etc all in 16 bit using x86 assembler rasterizers, no floating point, with 256 color palette - source can be found from this link: https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1260346800176877571
Another demo from the same era (1996), also includes source: https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1272530352070971397
Nearly 30 years later I am still doing 3D graphics, contributing to Threejs (which is run by mrdoob, another demo scene coder), glTF, VFX software, https://web3dsurvey.com and have run a computer-graphics company for the last ~20 years: https://threekit.com
I implemented real-time Phong rendering on 486SX (no FPU) with a chrome-like effect (see https://github.com/thbar/demomaking#obez-1995) and this still gives me chills.
I met great people back then, and had a ton of fun.
My only regret is that source code is lost, and decompiling properly is not easy!
I looked at your code and saw only .cpp files. I had to open your triangle renderer, and there it was - you'd inlined your x86. I don't think I ever inlined my assembler, even though I was using Borland C++ like you. I think I must have linked it in somehow?
Is your old code posted anywhere? I think many of us were working from the same example projects/tutorials. I wouldn't be surprised if the code is incredibly similar.
> I had to open your triangle renderer, and there it was - you'd inlined your x86.
Being able to inline asm was amazing. The code:
https://github.com/bhouston/3DMaskDemo1997/blob/master/src/N...
Being able to access C++ variables on the stack directly from assembler to read and to write to them was so nice. You get the speed benefits without adding significant complexity.
When I started my own firm in 2005 I adopted a no-overtime policy in reaction to that. This was more feasible since I was creating and delivering software and this was more predictable and containable than doing VFX itself. This has loosened a bit as the company grew, we got funding, then got other divisions, etc.
The demo scene is a bunch of kids having fun and learning algorithms primarily. To tell them that they need to write unit tests is ridiculous. They will have time to learn about large scale architecture and unit tests in time - by why not try to have fun for a bit?
Shadertoy isn’t meant to be reusable/production code. It is meant to be a fun computer graphics algorithm place. A place to experiment and learn.
We can take the fun out of coding later - that is what paying jobs are for. Why not have some spaces for fun?
Booze Design - Edge of Disgrace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLIUkBa_mA0
Specially in commercial gaming.
Even if it was fun I often felt it was useless because the skills I was acquiring were only applicable for game development and that was something I was not interested in.
It was quite a shock to me when I found myself working on a WebGL demo for Google² and all what I had learnt in the demoscene paid off (and has continued paying off ever since!³⁴).
1. https://ricardocabello.com/
2. https://experiments.withgoogle.com/3-dreams-of-black
3. https://threejs.org/
4. https://m.pouet.net/lists.php?which=153
I'd argue that this kind of language isn't even right. It's not only that you don't know when you need something, you don't even know when you use it. If we've learned one thing from the success of ML systems it's that the proper representation of knowledge is extremely complex and connected. Everything influences everything else. You can't learn "10%" of a language, or "10% of programming", as if there exists some chunk neatly separated from the rest.
It's much more likely everything you learned contributes to most of what you do, even if we're not actively aware of it. You can't learn x% of Mandarin by learning y% of the words, it's not even appropriate to separate anything into useful or useless. Almost everything you pick up just illuminates your mental model just a little bit more.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos/c/TR8hmM3I...
My demos were my resume (CV) at the time. I remember Jez San of Argonaut (Starfox) contacting me and wanting me to come interview for a development position. I was 16 IIRC.
A year or so after that I became a professional game developer. In fact, the game I was working on was changed from 2D to 3D overnight and I pulled out my demo source and ported the whole 3D engine over in two weeks:
https://youtu.be/t2kdKB18c7I?t=330
Demos really force you to learn everything there is to know about how a modern computer system works, CPU, RAM, ROM, bus, video, etc. That knowledge will remain invaluable.
I mostly do web dev in C#, but any time I write a single line of code my brain is thinking in the background "how many opcodes will this be? what about this branch? am I making an extra copy of this variable for no reason?"
For C# specifically, if you want to scratch the itch, there is a way :) If you are using VS, you can install Disasmo extension and disassemble arbitrary methods with SHIFT+ALT+D (keep in mind it's ready-to-run-like codegen which does not have all optimizations).
You can also go further, and use `DOTNET_JitDisasm='methodName'` env variable - in this case you will see how method transitions through all compilation tiers (if it gets promoted past Tier 0). And last but not least, if you build your .NET binary with NativeAOT, you can just use standard disassembler, debugger or profiler you would use for C++ binaries.
[1]: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/find-your-way-to-oz
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NBc5aYtz_0
I remember your 3 Dreams of Black experiment when it came out, that was awesome work!
Thank you for these!
1. https://demozoo.org/productions/4870/
Some demomakers are also active in the emulation scene.
But in the end, I guess all of that will die with "our" generation. We were born in that golden age and kids today can't live in our past (and that's fortunate!). So our art, emulators, scene will eventually pass away with us.
So don't wait, write that demo while you're still young enough to compete :-) (I did my last production at 49 :-) )
Greetz to Imphobia/ImpactStudios/Cascada/FrenchTouch !
Here's some examples picked randomly from the "featured" category.
- https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=66745#p
- https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=99910#p
- https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=115136#p
- https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=108652#p
I assume you mean Atari? Commodore owned Amiga
https://www.shadertoy.com/
1. https://www.pouet.net/user.php?who=4063
2. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54180
The Wikipedia entry on demoscene seems to specify that it's about impressive demos on old computers.
That's what we all felt when it started. Just try and try again, you'll learn, you'll meet great people and in the end, you'll shine :-)
Deleted Comment
Up until the late 1990s it was not possible to playback full screen video on regular PC hardware, because of both CPU and storage limitations.
This meant that if you wanted smooth high resolution animations, you'd have to resort to programming and a lot of tricks.
As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice.
The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s.
This reduced the audience to those who could understand the effort that you went through. In many ways, that just never compares to the original demoscene feel.
It was an amazing time to be alive, but it will never come back, because technology has moved on. I wonder what underground scene kids these days will cherish as much later in life.
> I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died.
It didn't die. Revision hosts hundreds of sceners every year. This year over 400 entries were submitted to the competition, including 40 full PC demos and over 40 tracked/oldschool/executable music entries. Even for small, local C64/Amiga parties here you have to race for tickets to these events.
We released a C64 intro outside a competition a couple of months ago, and within a couple of days it was buried in the inflow of new C64 releases on CSDB. The C64 scene is bigger now than when I got into it 18 years ago.
> The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s.
That didn't die either. Things don't die just because you stop pay attention to them. The notion of competing with Pixar is absurd; the terms of competition and markets are entirely different. Pixar makes movies for the mainstream to make money. Sceners make productions for sceners that may be more interesting to them than a Pixar production in an esoteric sense that the mainstream will not understand.
"The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it.
Edit: To go into the Pixar argument a bit more: In 1993 a demo such as Second Reality could impress "normies" as much as an MTV video clip could. Remember that back then video clips were often total utter crap, and some demos were buttery smooth 50fps animations with a distinctive feel that you could not find anywhere in popular culture.
In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.
There are new productions for various platforms ranging from modern to retro and from full restricted intros (256 byte DOS intros, 4k Windows intros) to full blown demos all the time.
[0] https://www.pouet.net/index.php
Actually, it died when people started making demos in C and horror C++.
No wait, the demoscene died when 3D cards made art/modeling the only valuable thing.
No wait, let me get this right. The demoscene died when mp3 music produced in DAWs replaced mods, and photoshop and wacoms replaced deluxe paint pixelart.
Hm... maybe it died when the internet made everthing available so nothing felt special anymore.
Or when the web and Flash became the place to get a quick fix of visual design.
Maybe it died when kids became more interested in esports and LoL than in coding.
I'm sure it died when Youtube meant you didn't even need the hardware or the download to watch a demo.
Maybe it was when the iPhone appstore meant the most popular device on earth couldn't run demos.
I don't know, I can't decide.
Not sure that was a factor. You could already earlier prerender things, just maybe not minutes of it, but for loops it always was a thing. Back then in the late 80ies/early 90ies, at least in the C64 scene, it was a huge topic sometimes and people stressed when especially spectacular effects where "realtime", so there will be no doubts, cause prerendering carried a huge stigma with it for a long time.
In fact, this was what held back the demoscene for a while, cause a lot of very stylish things just were not possible at least on C64 hardware without prerendering or at least doing the 3d calculations up front. The scene actually had to overcome their fixation on "realtime" effects before a lot of very artsy, stylish demos became possible, once people started focussing on what you see, not how you achieve it.
The latter part might not apply to stronger machines, though, admittedly. On the C64 any kind of long running animation is a feat in itself, even if you trade limited CPU for limited memory.
Edit: That is to say, I don't think the only value of the demoscene is to create something cool under technical limitations. I think it's to create something cool in a computational medium (the spirit lives on as procedural art, shader art, etc. as well).
Every method of producing a work (done under finite time, I guess :P) will give sometimes vastly different results. Hand drawing an animation will give something completely different under similar time constraints as video editing and completely different from procedural drawing.
To give some examples: you can easily render thousands of points, e.g. stars, make them twinkle, draw thousands of trees, and give them all detailed movement. That's very hard to do by hand. By hand you'll have better control of style, and details like paint texture, etc.. Animating characters (with genuine character) is trivial by hand but quite difficult procedurally (you have to resort to essentially manual animation in the end). There's the question of offline vs online rendering... if you're offline rendering you can go bonkers with millions of objects. I personally like being able to run it real time, I find it gives it a more intimate feeling, and is easier to reproduce (but am not against offline rendering if you find it suitable!).
Also very exciting to me is baking randomness, either with a fixed seed or changing seeds every time. You get a different piece every time you watch it! The possibilities are really vast, and mostly unexplored.
An interesting artist in this respect is Karl Sims [1]. As far as I know, he was not involved in the demoscene, but he sure did make some interesting things!
[1] https://www.karlsims.com/
100% this. Add Generative AI to your list. I think AutoGPT is in the spirit of the demo scene.
When we saw Commodore 64 demos for example, they often impressed even relatively non-technical people.
But today a demo that pushes the limits technically will often only look impressive to those who understand the technical limitations.
That has significantly changed the potential audience to a diminishing subset even if relatively technical people.
It was actually what put me off a bit -- I enjoyed the demoscene to learn new things and to experiment with computers in total freedom. I had no need for artificial limitations set out by competitions, and never really cared much for the gatherings of socially less developed boys who smelled pretty bad (even though I exactly matched that profile myself :).
I really liked the contrarian groups who faked a lot. In Nooon's "Stars" (1995) a 3D bee is rendered with a complete wing missing, to fake a high poly count. "Transgression 2" by MFX may also be a good example of what I am trying to convey here. Obviously it was not real-time ray tracing, but what was it? It puzzled me for weeks!
Constrained generative networks would be interesting too.
3DMark the benchmark by Futuremark is as the name suggests, made by ex Future Crew. The list goes on.
If you go around looking at where most demosceners from the past decade or two work today, you'll find the vast majority of them work at places like Unity, Unreal (Epic), etc.
A real time demo where every pixel can be deformed, giving rise to an ultra interactive world in less than 4GB memory.
It didn’t!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes
In that period 3d accelerators were basically capable of running Quake and not much else. Traditional demo effects that relied on reading the backbuffer (even to just do some basic postprocessing) were either unavailable or had to have bespoke implementations per card. There were no shaders to speak of, and so on.
For me that really killed demoscene innovation for a while, and a lot of demos basically consisted of a bunch of alpha-blended layers for a while.
Nowadays, though, I'd say the scene is probably doing pretty well even though it's arguably even more niche than it used to be. Oh well.
Ahh the legendary glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE) era. The most underrated of demoscene styles!
The transition was definitely odd. What brought it around for me was when fr-08 was released and the broader scene realized what _could_ be done with procedural generation and whatnot.
If you've never seen the Making Of video that was released a while back, someone has been kind enough to add English subs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S-2zGkr7vw
Second Reality is the single most amazing piece of art for me. Nothing else holds as much emotion as that demo. To see behind the curtain is like, I imagine, for someone else to watch Van Gogh actually painting.
"Unreal ][ Main theme" is still on my main playlist on my phone, and I've yet to go through the thousands of .XM files I just grabbed off some FTP site back in the day. The MOD community is a related rabbit hole one could get lost in . . .
4 kilobytes!
It's interesting to rationalize it as an art form today. It sounds reasonable, but I don't think I or my friends thought of what we were doing as art, at the time. We were trying to impress each other with things that looked cool. To the extent that art was involved, yes, we needed music and graphics and fonts and creative designs, but we did these things out of necessity, without calling ourselves composers or graphic artists or type designers or art directors. Watching what others sent you and contributing your own stuff created a sense of belonging which I feel was really the primary motivator for my friends and me.
Regarding tools, there was one thing that was frowned upon in my circles: the use of demomaker software. These point and click apps allowed people to call themselves demo makers even though they did nothing technical. Boo!
If you want to try a tracker out yourself Renoise is great (much cheaper) option for PC/Mac/Linux. There are also several free trackers out there with varying levels of practicality (I only know Polyend and Renoise so I can't really suggest which free ones are good).
There's a bit of a learning curve but once you get the hang of the workflow it's tons of fun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/
https://deepsid.chordian.net/
https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-logo-art/
https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-amiga-years...
etc. Very high quality books, great for a coffee table or a nostalgic read.