pouët.net

The next source engine will also be free but next year http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/03/valve-source-2-engine/

Preacher, you just don't get it! Back in 1995 I was young and the world was still an undiscovered miracle! I still long for those sundrenched golden days! Now in 2015 I'm old and I can't bear thinking about the soul crushing futility of life on this miserable planet, so let me be nostalgic about the "real elite" in peace!

1995, back when all demos where of undeniable quality

I say that depends on the platform, and your exact goals.
Doing polygons on an 8-bit system is far more difficult than on a 32-bit system.
Also the exact display hardware may throw a spanner in the works. Yes, chunky framebuffers and lots of bandwidth to videomemory make things easy. But what if you don't have those?



I disagree. It's mostly 'boilerplate' and things that 'don't really matter'.
With modern platforms you generally don't reach an 'optimal' state anyway, because there are too many variables (different CPUs, GPUs, drivers etc). You just stop optimizing when things are "good enough". You don't need total control anyway.
Generally you just implement graphics algorithms 'by the book'. Eg, you want per-pixel lighting? Well, you just implement the lighting per pixel. Your hardware is capable enoug anyway.

On oldskool platforms, especially 8-bit ones, you tend to have to go all-out with assembly optimizations and clever trickery before things even start to look somewhat acceptable in terms of framerate. The systems may simply be physically incapable of updating every pixel on the screen at every frame.

claiming that 'valid' demos are only the ones built in plain c/c++, plus api dlls is so 2009...

also what Scali said.

Those still longing to be appreciated for 1337 coding skill0rz and trick engineering still have size coding and/or old platforms, where they can shift registers and fake effects with oceans of pre-calculated tables, ping-pong animations & color-cycling to their hearts content. I don't see the conflict here. ;)

imenso: i think it is safe to say that most coders who actually coded engines find that the most tedious and uncreative part about doing demos (talking demos here, sizecoding is a different ballgame), so no idea what "art in programming" you expect is lost in using existing frameworks. in fact, it should work the other way as all time and creativity can be spent on actual effects and stuff instead of dull data management, etc :)

also, in sizecoding you dont code many things from scratch either, e.g. your OGL/DX api happily provides you 3D primitives and other frequently used crap. so plenty of "art" is lost there too!

First, I myself work professionally in the graphics industry, so depending on the case I use professional engines like Unity and Unreal for a given project. So I do not state that they are bad, but for a demo competition I will never ever say they are "the same thing" as a prod written from scratch.

Also please note that I'm always referring to the programming aspect of a demo.

Ok. I stand corrected about the "only elite ever" statement because that was indeed an exaggeration from my part.

But I believe you got the point I was trying to make. There is a tendency from the newcomers to ignore the limitations from another age, and simply conclude that all those demos suck. Also I did not say that all the oldskool demos were elite, but we cannot deny that at that time it was very hard to do some of the things that are trivial today (high-poly 3D models, per-pixel lighting and shadows are just a few).

Today, a newbie just drops an fbx into Unity and in 2 minutes have a 500k polys bumpmapped, per-pixel lit and shadowed scene with realtime global illumination rotating on screen. And that newbie wants to tell "hey look how amazing I am, my demo is much better than that Second Reality sucker, do you see how cool I am? That is so easy, those old people were so stupid. Let me thumb down that shit".

Maali, but I stated that already... ogl and d3d removed a great part of the "art" from most (not all but most) demos.

Not that art cannot be done anymore, but the point that I'm trying to make is that people tend to compare a cube rendered with unity using hw d3d with a cube rendered by a pure software engine from 1995. They are very different ways of rendering a cube, and the old one was much harder to do. They can't be compared at all.

what newbies? the intake of new demosceners is pretty low and if you add a 'they use unity' filter over them, you basically end up with poo-brain only. since i know these guys, i have never heard them utter 'our demo is much better than second reality, sucker!' or any equivalent you apparently worry about. also, even if you code a demo from scratch now, you still have little historical sense regarding technical feats in the early 90s.

They can with context.

If you make a software rendering demo, I will judge it in artistic and technical merits, with emphasis on how fast and goodlooking the engine is.
If you make an accelerated demo, I will judge it in artistic and technical merits, with emphasis on how the hardware / technology is used.
If you make a demo in Unity, I will judge it largely by its artistic merit, because most of the technical challenges have been taken care for you.

The current gen of Unity demos prove that just because you make something in Unity doesn't mean it'll be automatically amazing. Same with WZ or Demopaja.

If there ever was a ban on Unity in demoscene, we might have ended up with a world without Poo-brain's paardicle, and that's not a world I want to live in.

Ok then. I only ask you then to just consider the possibility of disabling thumb downs for old prods. Like, prods older than X years could not be thumbed down anymore.

Could you people at least do that?

That's a ridiculous proposal.

No. Blast to the past :D

WTF why?

I just told you, if people are willing to have some context, they can appreciate an old demo for what it is. If they're not willing to have context then perhaps the scene isn't for them.

+1 :)

Fortunately we are allowed to vote and thumb according to whatever logic we want. Anything goes, as long as the entry can be executed. People have different values and you just have to accept it! Ha ha ha!

Enough with this old-school demoscene purity bullshit already.

Ok, guys. =)

No hard feelings here at all, it's all nice and in the end, the important thing is to have more demos coming.

Cheers!

The scene is long dead anyway..

let's make a 2ndreal parody in unity!

This man speaks truths