pouët.net

From a compo organizing perspective it's a tough cookie because the hardware (e.g. Tegra) is almost powerful enough to be considered comparable to a PC, but the software (GLES) often locks you down so bad that the platform is in a serious disadvantage.

In that case
,
it would be pretty logic to put modern mobile demos
(
like Android or iOS
)
in the regular category.

let's call them the paralympics!

Gargaj: you seem to have a very strange opinion of how powerful Tegra is ;)

Eh I meant to say whatever the newer one is, Kepler or what?

Tegra K1 is not out yet.

First devices are expected to ship in July this year, but those are definitely not mobile. No handsets are announced.

say what? :) if you call "orders of magnitude" comparable, then sure.

anyway it's not about the power of the platform, it's the opportunity to reach a broad public outside the scene. what smash likes to call dick waving apparently. tablets are becoming so mainstream (already more mainstream that PCs in ye average households), so, that's a lot of potential people you can wave your dick to. especially considering developing demos on android requires much less dicking around with hardware than first buying a new GPU to see current high standard artist/code driven PC demos. there aren't that many people out there with gfx 760+ in their PC rig as there are people with a somewhat decent android device ;)

slightly more appreciation (like, dedicated compos) might improve interest from inside and outside the scene for this platform, instead of competing with obscure things like modified refrigerators or blinking LEDs sewn in underpants. appreciation is a push'n'pull thing.

Now that's a proper demo-platform. PANTS OFF!

"Is that a voxel landscape in your pants or are you just happy to see me?"

Do a multitude of flavors of OS or different GPU hardware have to be a big issue? There have to be people tracking what exists and trends in popularity, so just like a game or any other app you can target it to the specs and OS most likely to be prevalent in a specific market. It is just a question of getting that data and keeping it in mind, as well as including info with your program that specifies what is needed to run it.

There are threats and challenges but also opportunities.

There are things you would do on a small screen that you might not do on a big-screen demo. It takes a special kind of skill to make something that translates well on a small-format screen, so you have an artistic and graphic design challenge on top of the technical ones. Book cover designers adapted to the thumbnail world, why not the scene? (Admittedly most book cover designs suck). There's also a chance to play with interactivity in a different way, if that floats your boat.

Also, it would be cool if once this exists someone made a demo for some flavor of it.
I know a guy who is working on it and he seems pretty enthused with the project thus far:
http://time.com/10115/google-project-ara-modular-smartphone/

I mean, meh Google, but the idea is fascinating.

oh yeah.

http://time.com/10115/google-project-ara-modular-smartphone/

or maybe kurli just wants to win more fingerprint readers for his demoscene efforts! ;)

I don't think that holds up since PCs used to be quite mainstream. Some might say they still are.. So yeah, I don't think the issue is availability, it's more a question of most people not giving a fuck about demos =) And I don't blame them, since demos usually aren't interactive or even particularly interesting - unless you share a frame of reference because you're making demos or some kind of VFX / CG / game dev / visual dev stuff yourself.

This is what scares me about trying to submit an oldskool PC demo at Revision or similar. Coding for 8088+CGA is really quite difficult (memory access is slower than a C64, for starters) and I have a feeling that the opposite of what branch wrote above would happen for such a prod: Regardless of demo content, I think my hardware choice would actually cause downvotes because the worst PC demo content anyone has ever seen so far has been 286+ega which is significantly faster than what I prefer to work with. (In other words, people would see a slow effect and downvote because WTF ITZ A PC U R TERRIBLE KODER)

And then, part of me wants to do it to make a handful of people laugh. Which keeps me going.

damn straight. there is zero one definition, and its not all just dickwaving unlike what some popular people say......................

trixter: don't compare the wild compo at Assembly with oldskool demo compo at Revision. Two different animals altogether.

farfar: true. but pc demos dont have a playstore that helps in the availability of demos to the mainstream. funnily i just checked and rrhoid has more downloads than spacecut (released at same demoparty), so well, there is 'a market' for non-sceners out there apparently. as long as your demo doesnt cost money, there might be bored commuters out there who might give it a go ;)

and hell, i actually recently got a new pc and i still watch everything on youtube anyway cos most demos have shitty loaderbars and you cannot skip boring parts, so what's this 'real-time' shit good for anyway ;)

really interesting point.

Maali: *exactly*.

If you put your content where people are going to go anyway, you have your shot at eyeballs.

The Pouet link points to the direct archive, I think we don't count those downloads on the scene.org page.

While mobiles might be an order of a magnitude slower than pc's they're still more than a few orders of magnitude faster than truly "oldschool" platforms(vanilla amigas tops, not expanded) and the speed of current mobiles isn't decreasing either.

And how many really push the PC hardware? And what PC hardware? Enthustiast machines with 1000$ gpu's or a laptop with integrated graphics (my 3 year old Intel chip can run Agenda circling forth at a slow framerate). Sure raymarching has pushed up the base requirements and you can always spawn more particles,etc but in terms of most artistically created content (models, images,etc) mobiles can run basically the same things as a PC.

For me a logical division would be along these lines:

Modern (demo/64/4k): PC (win/mac/linux),Mobiles, Modern consoles, RaspPI's and other comparable hardware.

16bit : amiga, atari and comparable

8bit : c64,nes and comparable

oddball : LED demos, oscilloscope demos,etc.

But already here we're faced with the issue that people are too lazy to produce at times and we often resort to merging some of the above compos/categories.. even assembly merged demo and 64k compos until dumping 64k. (and there's always HW that's borderline modern like the Nintendo DS but has been accepted at some oldschool events)

So we resort to having pre-screens that sets up the expectations for visitors by showing what platform (and size if applicable) it is before the compo and this works fairly well as long as the crowd has some idea about what the machine is capable of.

Adding more categories is a pipe dream imho and we should instead just make sure that people are free to make what they are interested in and then try to make the competitions fair and interesting based on capabilities of what people use.

garg: yeah probably.

yet, a bigger concern for the scene is the "i rather consume the demo via youtube"-trend that influences the significance of doing realtime graphics per se. that devaluates both mobile as pc hardware pushing altogether ;)

The best mobile-demo compo so far.. http://www.mobilewizardry.com/palm/contest/index.php