pouët.net

Ten. Fucking. Gigabytes.

I'm not the guy to usually bitch about executable size but you would assume that in that space there would be some interesting content, camera paths, a plot, and a concept and there would be still space left for a soul somewhere in there. I wouldn't mind the size at all if it had at least one of these things. But no. It's uncanny valley all the way down.

Technically this was ok (as in how it looks, not the size) and from that perspective Pyrotech nailed the hollywood megademo better than B in this compo.

But honestly does anyone want to watch this second time? I was practically hoping for this to end for the whole duration. Sooo booriiing. Face to skull transition was practically only part I liked (like at least something was happening in that scene), but then that was technically super weak.

Demo syntyy kivestä hakkaamalla.

Stronger messaging in the demo next time? Please continue making demos.

10 GBs? How is it explained? I say a UCAS file being 9.
Usually I expect demos using commercial engines becing 1 GB. The usual suspects.
I think they used their own engine here?

PC scene is dead.

terrible... couldn't make heads or tails of it. A lot of metal music videos on youtube are often all over the place because they asked some 'he's ok with computers'-cousin to cut a video out of stock videos but this demo was as random as that. Kudos on breaching the 10GB barrier though, at least that's a technical achievement :P

You can't be serious. That was the worst moment in the whole demo.

Like I said at least _something_ was happening in that scene :D Technically super weak though.

Pyrotech breaking limits. :]

I'll see it on the intended platform: YouTube.

Content-wise, it feels like a bland ASD lookalike without the polish that makes ASD work (e.g., the box starts crumbling way before the hammers actually strike it). Normally this would be piggie, but the size is just ridiculous; I cannot even unzip it, because it needs some special 64-bit extension to break the 4GB barrier. An average of 390 megabits per second!

Very harsh comments guys. At lease the models are nice and well textured. The image composition does not look rushed. Lighting is also well done. I don’t like the music…. And size problem is slightly concerning. Overall it’s a pleasant show.

I like it. Not taking stance on what demo sizes should be or if there is something unpolished bits, but I enjoyed watching it on big screen a lot and thumbs up for that!

I just saw it on YouTube.

Nice 3D modelling (those giants hammering that anvil) and good music.

However, the file size is ludicrous and I hope you can release a fixed version without all the bloating stuff that surely is somewhere inside that big UCAS file.

are you serious

the face closeup scenes were really nice. demo itself was rather uneven.

size of the demo was pretty insane (but allowed by the compo rules). i tend to think that acceptable demo's size should roughly be less than a high quality video capture of it in the best resolution and this does not cut it :D

you know what, lets forget about the size for a moment.
Lets try to judge it by the Pyrotech standards and story. I love the polished shaders, although some of the details could do with some polish. For example the guys with the hammers are off beat and the destroy the anvil before the final blows. Or the white guys (sperms?) going out of the mouth - they just look like a bunch of white particles. But the other models are done well, I liked the horizontal scrolling with the heads, and that rotation of the "two worlds". The music had not much progression. Maybe a moment or two of relaxing ?

»Slightly« inspired by ASD. Faces were nice though.

Looks like what you'd get if you prompted one of those "AI" garbage generators to produce an ASD demo. At least they could have synced the anvil-smasher animations to the soundtrack.

I liked it a lot during the stream, and I still like it on second watch on youtube now. Not a masterpiece, but a pretty good demo I thought.

10gb filesize overshadows all of that. It's not OK. We need filesize limits in PC demo compos.

Tries to be ASDish but it's quite cheesy, unpolished (pace, timing) and repetitive for me.

Huge filesize but it feels similar to the AI discussion when former concepts and rules are knocked down as if they were never important at all. This feels like nothing we can stop.

you know what, I ain't even mad. Feels very late 90s / early 00s and somehow that is very fitting for an Assembly demo.

pyrotech, one of the progenitors of the "Assemblycore" genre of demos, back yet again with another "blast", somehow always ending up in the top three against all common sense.

i was just a few weeks ago revisiting Project Avarus again, and remarking to friends that there's actually a lot of really well thought out scenes, and good directing and editing going on there. cheesy as it is it's still a prime example of the genre, and i do have a degree of respect for it; there's exhilaration, passion and momentum behind it. yet somehow apart from higher vertex counts and slightly better material shaders this demo 15 years later looks worse in most scenes, and doesn't feel anywhere near as sincere.

even at its best when the raw visual fidelity is acceptable, the scene contents are an awkward and completely inappropriate mishmash of trendy lowest common denominator visuals. i'm talking cheap unfitting mocap animations, generic head models, metallic skulls, and so on. the only thing even remotely fitting to the flaccid Epic Power Metal Schlager is forging "scene" (if you can call it a scene, even), which left in its current state is so half-baked and riddled with signs of either rushing or lack of care that i might as well not even count it as fitting.

i kind of like the 2D layering though, especially midway through. it reminds me of multiple exposure techniques, and the blending is very well implemented. too bad most of the layers being blended apart from the static 2D images look like a hot mess.

sorry guys, you're a fun bunch but this ain't it.

now what's there to say about file size… a demo of any size can be justified by its ambition, content and production circumstances. does this one in particular justify itself in any of those categories? well, no. but i'm also not going to count it as a negative as such, especially not if there's so many more pertinent flaws to pick on. and you shouldn't either; don't kid yourselves, you would've just watched the video capture anyway.

I feel bad just reading this comment section, but the criticism is mostly on point. Good music, but this would have needed a much stronger storytelling or thematic focus.

Please rest assured that people still wait to see your part of the show every year.

I'm willing to bet those were created using the Metahuman plugin, which would explain the size of the whole thing, as a random google search will yield a lot of "how do I reduce the size of my Metahuman project" cries.

It's questionable how much content in the demo was actually made by Pyrotech as there is not even an nfo file with references to actually judge this thing. But coming off from the general sloppiness of it regarding composition, direction, concept, color usage, and so on, it really feels like a case of "hey let's click together something in Unreal, maybe we'll get podium".

And hey, it works.

:(

The size of this thing. Eternal shame on you.

uhm, idk how to approach this comment,

... I don't mind the size, but the content quality made no sense to me. Maybe troll prod?

anyway, I don't get how 28 years of experience lead up to this specific result.

Yeah, I honestly wouldn’t mind the size if it was worth the result, but the end product just feels eternally confusing to say the least

i kept laughing at the random dancing people, especially in moments which look like they are trying to be taken seriously. the face's expression in that one animation was amusing as well. also rendering looks quite bad in some places like the first scene...

i liked the scene with the leaves on the water with fairies (?) / glowing people on top of them, that was a fun environment you could've built upon more. not a fan of the forgery scenes, the animations, effects, colors and the closeup faces feel unpolished to me.

Only 10GB? 100GB next!

Meh, superdull.

To be honest, I like the presentation, the design and the colors. This demo features several photorealistic scenes and it's obvious where the 10 GB went into, although it could have been compressed with only slight loss of quality.

Ehm .. no. Just no. And I think all that I could say about this has already mostly been said by other commenters.

I've never particularly been a fan of the "Pyrotech style", but despite all the apparent glitz this demo has, it feels like it's on a downward curve general quality wise compared to previous ones.

Better luck next time, I suppose.

Cr*p.

I saw some impressive details here and there, not like it's all bad. But as a whole I'm just left confused and conflicted. You need more than individually impressive graphical details to make a good demo.

Out of interest if any of the Pyrotech people are not too afraid to reply - does this have any original assets outside music or is it 100% UE marketplace?

Best yellow plane in a demo this year

it is my understanding that the demo had lots of unused assets for ideas that didn't materialize. and the assets that were used were not optimized for size. this all boils down to them running out of time.

well, like i said on the oneliner, there's a 5GB forest asset pack in there and only one tree in the demo :D

Haha, just two days ago there were mandatory fuckings for 100MB demosize. And that's this, so please kindly accept mandatory fuckings for 10GB presentation.

I don't care that it uses unreal, or that it's 10GB, or that a lot of the assets went unused

I do care that none of it amounted to anything coherent. It doesn't feel like anything was put together with intent, and more like a bunch of assets were thrown onto a timeline at random with mismatched music.

The demo really goes nowhere, but I like the music.

Was mistaken in my previous comment saying I thought at least they use their own engine. It was Unreal. I watched the youtube and found the single tree out of the 5GB forest. Those faces remind me of that videogame omg graphics post where they compared close ups of faces with pores, from 4 AAA games. Meh

worst prod i've seen in a while.

They could have used their own engine, but that's not the problem. Unreal doesn't have a "generate demo" button. (Though if it did, this is probably what it would deliver.)

They could have used their own assets, but that's not the problem. You can't substitute direction with building blocks, no matter how lovingly you've crafted those blocks.

They could have scheduled things better so this thing wouldn't be 10 gigabytes, if indeed running out of time is why none of the unused bloat was trimmed, but even that's not the problem. A lot of demos are horrendous messes at release (admittedly rarely to this degree), because we have decided to romanticize "partycoding" which often is just a nice way to say "deadline is in 2 hours, I'm bucking under stress and I have no way to fix any of this".

Try watching this and pretending they did all of those things. It's still not a good demo, right? I see comparisons to ASD - this disjointed jank is probably what ASD demos look like to people who hate ASD. To me, this looks more like Japotek, except even Japotek is exonerated by having had 25 years less of progress in demo design to draw from. The only sign of progress here is that pixel shaders have since been introduced.

What most people said. Also kinda funny seeing some of the exact same mixamo animations we used in our assembly demo just two years prior…

Erm... *Meh*

ok

Looks cool but maybe the right place for those hammer dudes is in a Garry's Mod youtube video.