pouët.net

It is soon upon us!

The blurb from the website:

The Alternative Party 2008 - 24.-26. October at Cable Factory, Helsinki - is a festival of digital culture and a demoparty which gathers together creative people of all kinds: visualists, musicians, designers, programmers, researchers, passionate enthusiasts and people like you and me. This year we go back to the very birth of computers: the Victorian era with steam engines, Charles Babbage and the industrial revolution - to the age of steampunk.

http://www.altparty.org

Be there. We will.

Altparty 2009 was _huge_.. Easily the 3rd biggest demoparty on the planet, and with some really kick-ass content.. Too bad the compos sucked, and the main focus seemed to not be in demos, but in arty crap for people who can't actually be creative with their computers.

dunno, but at least this year it was massive :)

kinda sad that demoscene-related organizing failed badly, especially when it was great opportunity to spread demoscene to the masses. now it didn't feel like demoparty much, but instead computer / electronic music festival imho.

I agree. though lots of the failing blame can be put on people who didn't deliver demos to altparty (me included) as well.

Let's blame NVScene!

Let's force the Altparty orgs to give us all VCS2600 demokits next time!

(seriously, a 2nd gen plastic VCS and a cartridge that interfaces to USB would be neat :)

The demo compo was so poorly organized I didn't even bother to watch it completely. Other than that I had good time drinking beers with friends there.

I have to admit we went home before the democompo started, which I've never done at a party before, but it doesn't make sense to stay if you're so tired you can't watch it anyway...

Aside from the delays and other compo screwups it was a great party. Probably the best I've been to. The music guests rocked (and the sound system, visuals, lights and such did them justice). The overall atmosphere was also better than at most parties, even though it suffered when people started to get really frustrated about the FogScreen mess etc.

I'd roughly agree with what DiamonDie said - keeping in mind that I missed a lot of the party.

In my opinion (and judging from the feedback I got from random people), ALT '08 was probably the most non-scener -friendly demoparty yet. It was nice that the second screen (near Soihtu) was used to show random demos when appropriate... or was it just invaded? :) I somewhat agree with shadez in that the demoscene related content could've been organized better - and here I mean that there should've been more things going on. Delays, technical problems etc. suck, but that won't really blow the party... even though the ~2h delay in Saturday's schedule sucked hard.

In any case, a great party, mostly well organized, and did a better job at showing non-sceners what we're about than any other party so far. *cough* Icons... next year... */cough* :) I hope the ALT organizers will keep their ambition going & growing for next year. This still was their biggest event so far (right?), so I'd say this was a huge challenge for their organization etc. Good job & thanks.

i don't think having a non-scener-friendly party is anything to cheer for if the party at the same time is not scener-friendly.

I'd imagine it taking some serious effort to organise a demo competition as badly as it was done here.

It also takes some serious effort to organize other things as well as they were done at Altparty. After the disaster that was Assembly a few months ago, easily the worst party ever, it was delightening to visit Altparty which was on a whole another level.

About the compo's, I'd generally agree, but I did speak to one of the organisers at the after-party sauna. He said that some stuff they wanted like a separate infoscreen to tell the audience what demo was running was vetoed by the fire safety people.

Also they did pre-test the entries before the competition started but when they came to run these for real, stuff like the videomixer stopped working, and all the other equipment screwups happened at that time too.

I'm not representing any official viewpoint, just relaying some information. It is also interesting that there was a vote the morning after whether to continue running the competition entries realtime, or go for prerecording. The audience vote was substantially in favour of continuing with the traditional realtime method, so at least some people did not mind about the compo's?

So many things to say about Altparty..

First off, the party really didnt feel like a demoscene party. The setup of the hall (stage, mixing area, computers, exhibition area) made it feel more like "concert with some shit in the back". And thats probably ok for some, but I wanted to go to a demoparty, not an art exhibition event and not a concert, so on friday I already felt a bit sad by the fact that my party feeling was totally lacking.

The alcohol ban inside the party place itself (and the lack of the promised bar - not the organizers fault) didnt help at all, not that I need to drink but most socializing took place in a different part of the building all together. This was ok - but it made the whole event feel like a regular bar night as the distance to the stage was too long. The total lack of information when things started getting delayed on saturday led to me missing all the compos, the only other option would have been to sit in front of the stage the whole evening, which just doesnt happen when everyone else is in the bar (another effect of the alcohol ban). It really wouldnt have been that hard to say "ok, we are delayed, we will reschedule 1.5 hours so come back and check then" and to have that info on a slide at all times (yes, I know the organizers were probably working as fast as they could and wanted to start at once when they got it running, but things doesnt work like that. People give up when there is no info, will leave and thus miss the compos).

So then, the only compo I actually was able to see was the demo compo, and well - the fact that we actually went home before it ended says a lot, as it is the first time I have ever done that at a party. At that time it felt like I was attending a bar night with an horrible after party, so the decision to see the demos at home instead of on a bigscreen was a bit too easy to make.

All in all I cant help being left with the impression that the organizers went in too deep. It felt like they had spent more time thinking up cool features than how to actually organize the features. Especially everything that was going on on stage.

For this not to be a total bashing post, yes there were good things about the organizing. There were never any huge lines, the security did their job well, the audio system, the effects on stage and all those things worked fine. It was just lacking that little extra, mostly shown as huge delays when things had to be tested (fog screen), fetched (dj turntables), organized (the whole prize giving delay was joke) etc.

wow spam alert..

Also, when i write information i meant slides on the bigscreen and announcements over the speakers between the compos.. Waiting for the fog screen compo and instead seeing some guy suddenly starting to talk about skynet with no introduction was just too fucked up.. Sure, it might have been the next post on the time table, but by that time noone knew what was going on anymore..

I would think the people who participated in the vote were exactly those people who don't mind stuff like this happening. The ones who mind were probably home :-)

Altparty has pretty much always had serious issues with regard to what demoparties are for; mainly letting creative sceners compete in demo- and other competitions. I found it somewhat hilarious (in a bad way) that, for example, during the CSS graphics compo the stage had 10 guys setting up audio equipment, blocking everyone's view to the big screen. I'm sure this was done to avoid delays in the gig that was coming next, but considering that gfx compos usually last 15 minutes i think that delay could've been tolerable.

Another thing: Some big parties have already ages ago gone for showing recorded entries to facilitate a smoother compo. I find this a good trend especially if you're going to have a combined compo with possibly half a dozen platforms and OS's.

I'd suggest anyone organizing a democompo at a party to take the time to talk to people who're responsible for the compos at BP, ASM, Stream etc. to get some insight on how a compo is organized properly.

Also anyone ever thinking about organizing a party should visit BP at least twice :-)

Leia pretty much said what I was thinking about the party. It didn't really feel like a demoparty, but I had pretty good time nevertheless. Only things I got really annoyed about was the delays without any information at all when to expect something to happen and the strict no alcohol inside policy (which luckily was only on friday...). The only reason I even saw the democompo was that I managed to check inside the hall for the last time just when the compo was starting even though I had decided to go home if still nothing was happening inside :)

The delay and low quality of the democompo just killed my partyfeeling, so I left home right after the compo.

Paying 25e euros is a bit too much pay for drinking beer in the basement or outside in the cold :p

ok guys, so -why- was the democompo so bad? was it the entries? was something organised bad? somehow you all seem to assume we were all there. as an organiser of another also-quite-multiplatform demoparty, i'm genuinely interested.

at least 2 points comes to my mind:

a) huge delays without informing properly when could the compos actually start (noone wants to wait 2 hours, especially when you cannot drink inside :)
b) the compo machine (graphics card) was not very good and at least one entry I know wasn't submitted to the compo due to this fact (either it didn't run or ran like crap)

The demo compo was so bad because every little technical detail that could fuck up fucked up..

Keeping in mind that I went home after the first 6 entries or so.. What I saw was:

1) The demo compo started x hours late because of delays from earlier..
2) The entries that was competing in the rss feed compo didnt work because the compo machine didnt seem to have internet
3) nothing ran on first try, so there was a 5 minute delay (or so) between every entry...
4) the video mixer broke down
5) the quality of the entries wasnt top notch, so when things finally ran you were still bored..

Well.. thats how i experienced it.. Dunno what happened afterwards..

I think the mixed approach with demoparty, concert and "art festival" was really a good idea. This adds a new dimension to the good old party feeling although the steampunk shit does not interest me at all.

Too bad the compo performance sucked. If you are going to show the multiplatform entries in realtime you have to be much better prepared! The organizers didn't even managed to properly show the prerecorded mp4 of our Atari STe demo that we had submitted in advance in order to avoid any screw up...

oh, and what teel said. we actually only saw the first 6 entries because the compo happened to start while we were in the hall saying bye to people when we had given up and were supposed to leave..

While i wasn't at Altparty, I must say I resent that statement.

skrebbel: but dont get me wrong, the demo compo wasnt what ruined the party for me, that happened way before that. it was just the famous last drop.. i wouldnt have had any problems with the demo compo if everything else had run somewhat close to smoothly..

i actually quite liked altparty and finland in general. the mix of concerts and talks with the oldschool demoparty formula is ok. the same goes for main party. it's entertainment.

and many traditional demoparties like breakpoint or evoke also have complete bullshit like themes, talks, shows. altparty just took this a bit further. nothing wrong with that.

respect to the organisers for making altparty one of the highlights of the year (at least for me).