pouët.net

if it hasn't been said already, the obvious point about the adam demo is that the driving force behind it is not unity, but its sizable budget.
give any demogroup out there today unity, and they won't end up with adam.
give maybe some certain demogroups adam's budget and their own engine/tools, and you might end up with.. well probably not exactly adam, but something impressive (and maybe cooler than adam).

Yea true... but i (and probably others) like to see demos as having some truth to them, so its a little dismissive to say "anything goes just have fun" when were talking about legitimate culturtal and technical idea generation and progression

(not that "a budget" is even a desirable factor in the demoscene btw)

I don't see how those are mutually exclusive though, a lot of legendary music was just a result of people fucking around.

Dont think they are either.

I just dont want debate being stifled by a broad statement like that.

not that it necessarily was...etc.... ill see myself out

There's a difference between "anything goes" and "there are some basic tenets a demo should fulfill but how it does it is up to implementation". There's been debate about demos like Konsum or Heart-Shaped Box or Ch!ldren which are mostly just image slideshows, whether they really constitute as a demo but it didn't end up killing the scene, in fact some of those "slideshow" demos (Kolonija) are still pretty good. Now the debate is how much of boilerplate you're allowed to get away with, and I think the end result will pretty much be the same - some people will use Unity, others will roll their own, and the end result will decide which one remains memorable.

For all the fear about Unity and UE and etc, we're not exactly inundated with a barrage of high-quality demos solely owing to those toolsets. :) What's there is of course usually quite nice, but it doesn't seem like it opened Pandora's Box.

Gargaj: fair enough, its exciting to think that the assembly winner is just the beginning...

I think as long as it is clearly stated that Unity/UE4/other 3rd party engine is used, it's no problem.
Otherwise, at least in compos, I think it gives a bit of an unfair advantage to the demo using the 3rd party engine. I know that the first time I saw that "ekspert" demo from Asm2015 my first reaction was "damn, that's some *nice* quality rendering going on" and if I had been present and voting, would probably have put it higher on that merit since I was under the assumption that the coder has done some serious work in that department.

There's so many things that are 3rd party though.
- Stock models (Turbosquid, etc.)
- Stock textures
- Public domain shaders (e.g. FXAA, HBAO)
- Stock audio samples (I could mention 2-3 revered soundtracks where I found complete passages on sample CDs later)

Where do we draw the line?

Gargaj: what are those soundtracks?

You don't have to draw any lines actually. It is easy enough to check for the presence of some DLLs in the package. Once they are there, there will be some more aggressive thumbs down going on ;)

If we compare demos to unity/unreal tech demos (which is just too much work on the artist side and many GBs of assets) it's the same thing many modern games have fallen to, pushing all resources to look as realistic as movies, losing that other aspects that make a good game. Unique aspects exist on demos that make them special without necessary having to compete with the mainstream visuals, you will hardly see some interesting demo effects or demoish designs in games.

Optimus: exactly. They also kind of its their own tail,because once players are used to this fake real-time graphics (that only looks good at permitted angles basically, even floor reflection breaks in UE4 if you look at the "wrong" place), they have unrealistic expectations and blatantly criticize games that are doing it right = with more dynamic, interactive, nonscripted world. And there is no turning back. Now they show this beautiful scenes with photogrammetric content everywhere, but they are aware this approach is very limited (also for gameplay) and will increase AAA game production cost even more. It's greed, stupidity and disgrace. And honestly, fully baked cloth simulation is already too much for me.

*its=eats

I'm probably wrong (I actually make mistakes everyday), but I have the feeling half of the people say "Let's create a new category based on a size limit for PC demos" while the other half says "We don't want to forbid professional tools", and I don't understand why these 2 requests are incompatible.

PS I am just kidding with "stupidity" part, obviously its a natural cause of matters, market pressure, blah blah. But still, too much for me, not impressive at all.

....yes, that would be Me! :)

So far, except the "ending" part :)

(In case anyone is interested to know, right now, that "sharpening" means learning *CSS*! ....not GLSL, not 64-bit Linux asm, not Navier-Stokes equations, ..... fucking CSS!!

....because it interests me... :) (yeah, laying out pages is cool, ......someone made Pouet, no....? :) )

...and I don't see why it has to END with something awesome...??!!

That should be the BEGINNING! :)

Spectrum man myself, 1987. Asm, probably a little later.

No demos though :) ...so I'm probably not as good as you...

I thoroughly agree with the kind of thing you're saying. Chill out, man.

You're painting quite a dark picture here, I feel like the majority of players nowadays care way more about gameplay than graphics, to name just one of many examples check out "The Order 1886": great rendering tech, bad game, and that's reflected not only in the "official reviews" but also in the customer reviews.

On a side note(though I suspect you already know that) the breaking reflections in UE4 are not because of asset bakery but because of their generic screenspace reflections solution to provide (kinda efficient and "closer to correct") realtime reflections. While I feel like the limitations and thus resulting artifacts of this technique make it hardly good enough for production there are certainly people that think otherwise. However whats certain is that this is actually a step towards "doing it right" compared to the previous techniques used for realtime reflections.

LJ: sure, I exaggerated a little bit.
These guys are doing decent job. And I know SS reflection trick, yes. All of these problems are hard, because of tradeoffs you have to make: accuracy, speed, flexibility and realism.
If we take this into account, those engine are doing pretty decent job at being generic. But, that's an optimistic side of it - for the demoscene: you can always go multiple other directions and explore alternative decisions in this tradeoffs. This is why it is so important IMHO to experiment on your own with little toy engines that are solving similar problems differently. A great material for a demo. The problem is, it would be nice if demosceners would appreciate a little more this kind of experiments. Otherwise,what's the point of even showing it here? There are many examples of cool alternative engine demos presented outside of the demoscene e.g.Brigade, many cool voxel stuff, etc...but then again,maybe some guys have a point,and demoscene was never really a rendering techniques innovation center with some minor exceptions (Smash, IQ, etc..), but still...just exceptions of general activities.

To be honest I feel like they already do, take Bubble Trouble from this years TRSAC, i dont think that it would've ranked the way it did without its GI. Also asking musicians, 3d artists and other party people to appreciate "technical finesse" is kind of illusionary isn't it? Plus I feel like a lot of them actually try to comprehend the technical achievement and adjust their votes accordingly. If you want everybody to value your "insert awesome realtime accomplishment here" as what it is then you might be better off showing your stuff at siggraph or something because the demoscene is interdisciplinary and thats good.

I dont think that engines will/do pave the way for "drag and drop" prods, sure there people that dont give a damn, but there will always be people like me and you that value the technical achievement and bias their votes accordingly.

LJ: I hope you are right. We cannot predict what will happen and how finally accepting commercial engine based demos as "first demoscene citizens" will transform it in a long run. I can just imagine that motivation to make a demo for next Assembly with custom engine might be pretty low, esp.the audience being more gaming oriented there. But then again,Assembly was always special. Let's see, and judging from the voices here I think the change is inevitable (or already happened).