pouët.net

Our filename broke scene.org.
Luckily FTP still delivers ;)

maybe do a seminar at revision to finally explainto the scene what's funny and what isn't so people finally start voting for the right shit etc lol wtf

reading some comments I get the idea that voting is no longer enough for the scene. what we need is voting the votes, let's call it metavoting. e.g. partymeister gives you one other random vote and you have to vote whether it's rightful and true. e.g. a five star vote can only be valid for a prod containing drum&bass, a one star vote must be invalid if the demo has a ton of particles. a cartoon demo may only be upvoted if its by cocoon (see takeover 2001). you also have to account for nationality. if any germans are involved, it can't be funny, so you somehow have to filter the votes using a threshold or sth.
for this to work, partymeister should provide a "because" feature while voting. in the form of "N stars" "because" "dropdown box with reasons".
the reasons should, in addition to the above examples, also contain some names of random popular sceners.
the resulting initial voting dataset including the because-data can then be metavoted in multiple passes until we end up with a satisfying, fair and objective prizegiving, distributing zero stars evenly thoughout all the groups. all amiga prods get a base rating of 4 stars though, because amiga.

I don't see what's wrong for a demo to be an invitation. I've seen lots of invitations that have entertained me.

It's obvious why everybody wants their party invitation to be shown at Revision: Addressable market size.

This is only a problem if invitations mostly consist of "party features" slides, especially if it's redundant information like "we have chairs to sit on, and demos". A good invitation demo should be able to stand on its own when it comes to content.

In this case the main story line of the demo was settled on being a parody on an invitation demo while at the same time being a non-invitation to an invitation-only party.

On a different meta layer, one could argue that there is no clear definition on what counts more on a demo - the visual quality? having written your own impressive 3d engine instead of using someone else's? the entertainment value? how good the storytelling was? Cocoon's release blew me away sitting in front of the big screen, and I would have not had any hard feelings if it had won. But is it better? Hard to say, they are great in very different kind of ways.

Azzaro: Under what definition of "wild compo" would that be the case...? The most common definition, and the one used at Revision, is about the hardware platform. And "PC with AMD or NVidia graphics" is not really very wild.

I do see your point. But as always, it is not that easy.

Part of Underground Conference and its invitations going back to 1995 was about giving a big fat fuck you to criticize the commercialization of the scene and infestations with gamers, which started with The Party, but to a certain extend also became a problem at Mekka&Symposium. The whole sponsorship thing then peaked at Breakpoint.

Obviously, gamers no longer are a problem these days, and the scene is no longer mainstream, and its also no longer attracting any big sponsors. That's a pity seen from a budget standpoint, but on the other hand removes a lot of conflict of interests.

One point remains, though: The part of trying to not offend anyone. It's a personal worry of mine that social justice warriors may enter the scene and damage it, just like it has happened with the german hacking scene - you had SJWs entering who weren't part of the scene, weren't hackers, and only joint so they could complain about feeling marginalized.

As we all know, Revision is much "cleaner" than what Breakpoint used to be. It is always to see it that way when you aren't the person who is liable, but the you-can't-submit-an-entry-without-a-gema-check-rule to me feels awkward. No longer being allowed to sit on chairs in front of the bigscreen for "fire safety reasons" makes my butt hurt quite as much as this 'logic' hurts by brain.

There are a couple of incidents that happened to me during Revision in the last couple of years that did worry me. A couple of years ago I had some person interrupt the job forum to complain about one of the slides containing a "fleshlight" picture, calling it sexist. And surprise, as it turned out, that person wasn't a scener, never had done any release at any party, but only had one mission: Trying to force her own matters of taste onto others.

I had a similar but worse WTF moment when last year I was told that Revision was nearly booted off Twitch due to what I had said while being on the stream. And since then I indeed have heard multiple discussions of "can we do this / show this entry" where I was wondering on why the fuck organizers find it more important to have their stream more compliant with US morality "standards" than to keep the freedom of mind that to me is a core pillar of the scene. And indeed, after returning from Revision I watched the Twitch-recording of the compos, which does include chat commentary, and voila, people actually made "oh my god, this guy said fuck on stage!!" comments there, which does make me wonder what swear words US gamers typically use when getting shot in counterstrike instead.

This demo did prove its point quite instantly already in multiple ways: Already during its creation, there had been discussions in the kind of "but elite-only is non-inclusive!!", and after it was shown in the compo it only took minutes to have a discussion on twitter where it was claimed that using the "UNHCR" logo as an illustration for the "5000m² camping grounds" and a compo called "ParalyMP3" would be offensive. And indeed, there even have been mentions of "Demos like this should be forbidden".

This has nothing to do directly with the demo, and this is only my personal view, where the Spacepigs guys probably have multiple different views on, but personally my position is this:

Words are just frequencies passing into your ears. Unless when played at too high volume, words should not be able to hurt. I absolutely hate the US approach where even the worst kind of crimes against humanity are OK, as long as you don't curse about it.

I am not going to have an online troll living in a country that starts and supports war after war leading to human suffering to tell me I am not allowed to make word play that involves a UN logo or a wheel chair. It's obvious that making jokes about sceners having a hard time trying to survive in an outdoor camp isn't making fun about refugees, it's about making fun of us nerds. It's also obvious that the "ParalyMP3" competition isn't making fun about disabled people, it's making fun on demoscene music compos. The only way to be offended by these things is if you had the GOAL of being offended in the first place.

But anyway: I do understand that to most people, words can be hurtful, and indeed I do try my best not to hurt people in weak positions. People who know me will agree that I typically attack the strong, not the weak. But as is the case with SJWs, they typically aren't actually trying to protect anyone anyway, just as "pro-lifers" actually don't give a fuck about life, they should wish to force their own hypocritical standards upon others, and that's something I seriously dislike.

Which is why I called ryg / farbrausch a "fat black jewish lesbian girl" during the prizegiving. Not because he told others discussing this entry that I am an asshole on twitter (which is fine for me), but because he'd decided to actually encourage some shitty SJW to be in the position to judge on this.

[This was referring to Gargaj's post]

That, fizzer, is highly unlikely ;)



You have to understand that this invitation directly ties into the narrative of UC9. We had to have an airplane that crashes because this premise is the starting point for the demo party. There are only so many things you can do with these overall constraints while still keeping a concept that works for scamp and us. I think your point is absolutely valid by itself but it's still hard to square a circle.

I'm personally pretty pleased with how this project went because the things I set out to do (file sys monitoring + resource hot reloading, WYSIWYG integration with Visual Studio, inclusion of C# as 2nd scripting language to deal with our lua perf problems, debugging support for in-project C# scripts) went great. There's much more I could say about this but I'll spare you the details. I'm very curious what we can come up with next in a more traditional pre-party setup. Chances are it will involve more risk again.

time to add some random personal thoughts i wanna share.

since demoscene is one of my few remaining hobbies, i tend to focus strongly on whatever grabs my interest within the short amount of time i manage to invest for a release. usually two weeks before the party during which i lock myself inside the studio and do nothing else. a passion crunch, so to say.

last year i focussed more on a bit of tech, i added the volume light tracer and realtime reflection to our engine. this year, due to the tool upgrades (see paralax comment), i wanted to focus strongly on direction/camera/animation again. being able to control 1000s of nodes explicitly within a live coding environment is a luxury i can get with making a demo. making something similar with a 3d tool, like cinema4d or sth, would have been tedious and boring. if you check out the exe instead of youtube, skip around a bit, pause it, change playback speed and you'll get the idea.

i have always been interested in "classical" direction, and with the spacepigs toolchain i found the most efficient way to continue on the path i started years back with video production.

about the point of this release being less mysterious and more traditional cartoon slapstick: i'd love it reaching a level where my stuff becomes comparable to the simpsons, actually :) nothing bad about learning the basics of an artform before adding your personal flavor to it. similar with code: maybe learn the basics of constructing a scene graph and implementing common datastructures before becoming super ambitious and reinventing the wheel everywhere. but thats just my approach.

i also like "story demos" because they give me a shitton of stuff to play around with sound design and music. much more interesting than the genre many other demos usally fit best in: music videos.

i'm very happy that we came up with an entertaining product that made some people laugh, and that we managed to finish it after the crunch of a lifetime. i was expecting 5th place or something during the prizegiving, imagine my surprise :)

some notes about some other comments here:
this is the second kevin demo. just the second. we introduced "nosegirl" as a new character, and the "kaiser" became a lot more 3dimensional ;)
this is the first time i tried to have characters interact in a somewhat logical and consistent manner.
sorry about the "rushed" greetings part, we forgot some group names there.

djh0ffman: since I just noticed that credits could be more exact concerning music: the happy hardcore/UC theme track concluding this piece was done by Eha while the rest of the audio was made by Jco.

AlphaC, tnx, nice to hear this from you.

I probably have a bit of understanding for the butthurt people whose scene we're killing by not being as conservative about the "what a demo is supposed to contain". but just a very little bit. others could copy some of the things we do well, implement it with a flavor they like, and fucking compete with us instead of whining afterwards. go read some books about camera, light, direction, color, sound design, and try yourself at those things. farbrausch did, mercury did, and a few other pc groups.

We couldn't have released this as a video in an anim compo because unlike many other demos it relies much on randomization (will be different every time you watch) and it does have an interactive part.

Since people keep voting for our prods, maybe the idiots who want to limit their demo compos to some particular aesthetics should organize their own demoparty with a "only boring drumnbass music videos and/or particle system showcases allowed" pc demo competition.

what do you expect from a pc demo nowadays? bleeding edge cgi stuff? go play the latest aaa games.

counterthumbing the "keep this shit away from the demoscene" asshole. keep shitty comments like that to youtube please, you know, the place where you watch demos, motherfucker.

AzzaroMWI: with all due respect: it does not and that's why it was shown right where it was. The compo rules are absolutely clear on that and there was not one tiny shred of controversy for compo main orga chaos^farbrausch.

Story demos are nothing new in the scene (see Okkie's comment) and if we could convince a hall of over a thousand sceners that our stick man with bad teeth has more entertainment value than the rest of the compo than this is just the way it is ;) You can believe me that there was quite some effort involved behind the scenes to making this happen. There are more facets to a prod than just graphics. I might finally write those up to make that clear.

Closing: why don't you submit your PC demo next time instead of trying to sabotage the demo compo rules? Reconvince the scene with deeds instead of cheap shots. I have to admit: I'm still a fan of Mawi.

r1g8 there is a ton of realtime controlled animation, unlike boring scene players which use deterministic tweening, we have iir filters all over the place. check out the micro movements of the security dude in the airport scene, for example. use the demo exe, press "pause". all the realtime stuff keeps running.

r1g8 with your point of view you surely hate the ninjadev stuff even more i assume?

thanks for appreciating that we try to make something which is enjoyable to watch at a party (less fancy words for understanding crowd psychology blah). traditionally, the top notch amiga demos excell at this too. and more pc demos should. an "effect" (whatever that is) isn't worth much if you don't present it in an interesting manner.

making demos to piss off unproductive assholes like you gives my life purpose and meaning.

(yup, tired of diplomacy.)

I just published an article that describes our current demo tool and how our approach to demo making has evolved over time. If nothing else it should contextualize this release a little bit: Demo authoring: now and then

roudoudou, would you trust a politician who doesn't vote for himself?

roudoudou, thanks for your counterthumb though. your standpoint that arguments like "jerk off" are more valid than standing behind ones own work are more valid is noted. apparently I have much to learn! wait until I prove my aw3some amstrad skillz!

roudoudou, hehe, feeling a bit tempted ;) but I guess next on the list is winning the amiga demo compo... it's just mod playroutine plus streaming triangle fill lists, right?

nagz: too bad, after blockbuster put in hundreds of hours worth of work and many sceners not getting that it was 3d we might have to show it off some more ;)

nagz: yeah I don't think this was ever maximized for comedic value. We discussed having some kind of ren & stimpy / sponge bob close-up scene and ended up with this z-brush orgy that cost us more man hours than all the rest of the 3d combined. To me this is at least kind of funny on a meta level considering it makes up less than ten seconds of the demo ;)

noby: that's cool then because it worked! :D

fun fact: there's a hidden QR code in the demo and it works