pouët.net

Many demos being released at the moment are >30MB. Ok,ok, so we have >1TB harddrives and fast inet.. but WTF? People, have you no shame? Where is your pride? your finesse? you sense of right and wrong? your style? Don't you know that 64K should be enough for everybody? (ref: Gates)

-- but seriously:
Part of making a demo is showing technical elegance, in addition to the art, direction and sound track. Bloated demos are not elegant! In fact, if you don't care about size, why not just release the DIVX video?

We should re-instate the 8MB size limit on all PC demos. (Yeah, I'm old..)

Say NO! to bloatware, please!

That's great, but back in the days noone used, say, 2048x2048 textures. Sure, you could generate these in some cases, but there are times this is not possible, since procedural approach would not work out.

Times have changed.

i dare you to do e.g. frameranger in less.

First Gates said that 640kb of RAM should be enough for everybody and secondly my opinion:

If I had to decide whether I wanted to see a prod where much effort was put into making it a smallish demo or where the effort went into effects, design and such I'd wholeheartedly choose the latter as demos have never been about size constraints anyways. We have different competitions for that.

Lastly: A 30mb demo in 1080p is still offering much more quality per byte than a DIVX video of the same size.

Not everybody wants some crappy generated normalmaps or boring generated diffuse textures and some artists actually need proper textures with the artwork they have in mind.

One 1024x1024 32 bits texture is 4MB large (uncompressed) and DXT compression doesn't always look good.

A soundtrack also easily takes more than 5MB.

You do the maths.

The demoscene already cruely lacks gfx artists, you surely won't make them feel more comfortable with that kind of zealotry.

opinions are like assholes. personally i couldn't care less how big a demo is as long as its contents justify the size. we already have many proper sizecoding categories to display the "technical elegance" you're referring to - and the artistic values in sizecoded productions are always hampered by the limitations. why not let the artists go "all in" if they have the chance?

Frameranger: good point. The youtube video is 32MB, but the demo is >60MB.

640x480 is not anymore the standard resolution.

trc_wm: Now compare the quality of youtube version and the executable's.

Ah, one of those Thursdays trc? ;)

What everyone except trc_wm said.

Okkie: No, not particularly -- I'm always a bit of a bastard.

I think Reed has a point. if the size demo justifies the size, then ok. However, many of the recent releases are not even packed.. I just gets on my tits.

I meant to say: if the demo justifies the size..

trc: many of the recent releases are crap regardless of their size. so whats your point? besides being one of those thursdays.

i don't really mind the size yet, but i do wonder how they manage to reach 60MB sometimes

ps: I think 30MB crap is worse than 10MB crap.

Maybe it is one of those thursdays..

crap is crap. so who cares of the size in the end? and if it aint crap then why would you care about the size to begin with? dont you just want to see something cool?

Wrong.

The 640x360 YouTube version is 46MB

The 854x480 YouTube version is 114MB

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luhHghCAEaQ

No need to mention that the quality is still way below what the realtime 720p version has to offer.

In case of sewage flow reversal, I'd rather have 10Kg of shit coming out of my toilet than 30Kgs, wouldn't you?

Solution: don't download big demos.

...wat

Solution: Eat less, shit less.

Because no-one's said it yet: Go Make A Fucking Demo About It.

(i.e.: The best way to reverse a trend you don't like in the demoscene is to make the demos that take it in the direction you want - not to tell other people what they should be making)

conclusion: stop flushing your demos thru trc's toilet!

go and make a 128byte intro about it.