pouët.net

this one is good if you wanna make photoshoppy normal maps:

http://www.paultosca.com/makingofvarga.html

http://www.free3dtutorials.com/art-theory/3d-max/making-of-paragalis-part-1.php?page=1
this is a good tutorial showing how much work a 3D monster can be :D

there maybe are some people struggling to stay below 64mb, but there are still tons of people just not optimizing their stuff, producing 30mb prods, and that's a shame. The limit still doesn't make sense: it's too big to be a challenge, unless you take a certain road where it's way too harsh..

As for flyby's, it's the equivalent of the fullscreen pixel drawings on the old platforms: they didn't survive the transition to new platform, because they aren't impressive enough. At some point flybys were impressive. Today it's boring, we need more. So add some animation in there, or just some twist to make it impressive.

And about gamer-appeal: just choose a visual style and theme that aren't video-gamish (generically realistic guns, army guys, gazmasks). ASD and HBC are good examples of heavy 3D art without being gamer-pleasers.

I'm with smash on the 64mb limit, but maybe not for the same reason. I just don't think it makes much sense to size optimise a regular demo these days.

Back in the old days, you had to fit a demo on a floppy. Disks cost money, and trading over BBSes was worse.. downloading a 1mb file was something you considered before clicking.

Now? 64MB is a couple of minutes download, which costs nothing. You can fit 100s on a recent USB stick, never mind a hard disk. So what's the limit for? It's limiting the quality of the artwork in various bad ways like smash said, and it's causing people to spend time size optimising that they could spend on something more useful like speed optimising, or effects...

Of course for everyone that cares about size coding, 1/4/64k is alive and well. Put the size coding work in there instead :)

Psonice: I guess it's more about a psychological barrier, when the size of the zip gets too close to the size of a video capture. It's probably also about legacy :)

plus the limit is there just to have one to avoid misuse. just in case jumalauta doesnt enter a 43gb demo at the next breakpoint featuring a fullHD nosfe video in .raw format :P

We have captures of everything already (well, except extatique :( ...) Surely if we're still here, it's because we still want realtime?

And putting video in.. there was a time when a demo made with pure video was actually a show of coding skills. Now, it'd be pretty lame if it's just video, and any group doing that would be in for a small amount of dissing :) Putting some video into the demo.. I think it's no different from putting 2d art in. Too much and it's a slideshow, but good stuff in the right quantity can make the demo a lot better.

besides, tbl puts 'videos' on cubemaps the last 5 years already, nobody complained!!!! (other than some mawi ppl yelling ANYMACYA!!')

my take on it is like this: the attitude of people in the scene to demo styles, size limits and so on - it's all shaped by what's popular or "teh best" at the time.
currently whats popular is coder-made, coder-designed productions (e.g. asd, mfx..) which tend to use a lot of coder art - cubes etc - which dont usually require much space.
people coming into the scene for the first time see the stuff thats popular - the good stuff and all the clones - and they think "this is what a demo is". thats why a few years ago a demo was "a 64k with a lot of generated 3d and textures", and now it's "flashy abstract glowy stuff with cubes" or "amazing things in 4k". anything else is "not a demo", "for gamers" etc.

if you contrast with the amiga scene, the prevalent compo-winning style is tbl's - lots of 3d graphics - and thats what people want to see in an amiga democompo or what they try and make to win one. or with pc 64ks - the "winning formula" is big 3d scenes with generated textures+meshes, and that's what people want to vote for. make a load of flashy glowy abstract stuff and it won't work in a 64k compo (although ironically the same thing would do fine in the demo compo).

in other words - if the prevalent style was a lot of graphics like it was 10-15 years ago, you can bet the size limit would be 512mb by now. :)

Mostly because it was a clever way to use a cubemap, not because pre-rendered animation in itself was ever cool (except for the time it was a technical challenge). When the cubemap thing was done again (and again and again) it quickly became a lot less interesting and a lot of people did complain.



Most groups still wouldn't have a clue what to do with 512 MB. Pretty much all you can use that space for requires 500+ MB worth of effort from your graphics guys. Like, take a big-budget game released on one DVD: a large team of pro graphics guys with huge libraries of stock content can spend years building 4 GB of graphics. You could never approach 1/8 of that level, unless you seriously compromise on quality, and then what's the point, anyway.

Also keops is right about the psychological barrier. If "realtime" demos grow so large that storing high-res video would be more efficient, it all seems a bit silly.

but

they might.

When you get into the world of baked normal and light maps, large HDR cubemaps, using volume textures, using video.. it doesnt take long to blow a few hundred mb, and it doesn't require all that much effort from an artist either.

And speaking of irony, you just know that such a demo will get this comment: "Should have been 64k."

..which is a stupid thing to say.

You mean when you start to pre-render stuff because it can't be done in real time? But then it's only more absurd when the final archive is bigger than a high-quality video capture of the exact same thing.

Large HDR cubemaps, sure, they can be.. large. But they can also be compressed, and a few JPEG artefacts really don't matter to anyone but the graphics artists involved, and only if they've developed a deeply personal relationship with each and every pixel. And again, if such a cubemap is painstakingly hand-drawn or modeled with enough intricate little details that it really can't be packed, scaled down or (easily) stored in some other format than a raw matrix of pixels without turning ugly, then doing such graphics is still a huge amount of work.

Volume textures, alright, but how often are they not generated procedurally anyway from some much smaller data set?

I don't want to point to Debris and say "177 kB is all you need", but if you do look at Debris, it wouldn't strike anyone as lacking in graphical content, even if they didn't know it was all procedural. Lifeforce is much less procedural, but still only some 26 MB, and I think you and Gargaj might be the only two people who would ever care about the texture resolution. Resolution != quality.

No, because a demo runs in realtime, meaning you can also set the desired resolution. A video is a video. Also, there is no codec in the world that can replicate the demo pixel-perfect.. and if they could, the video would be larger than the demo anyway. :)

Agree with Gloom, I prefer the realtime rendered stuff rather than the precombiled ones.

Well, it's "pushing it" as far as absurdity is concerned, rather. Of course the real demo is always a little bit crisper, but at 512 MB it's getting to the point where a video would be practically the same quality as far as anyone but the coder could actually tell. So all that CPU and GPU power doesn't seem like it's being put to good use.

I notice a lot of people here talking about the technical stuff behind such work...how easy it is to bake textures and alike, but what about the creativity and imagination?

The work in the original link is breathtaking to me because he has created new worlds, new characters and basically given figments of his imagination a digital form. That's something I'd like to see more of in the scene and with more megabytes to play with, I think it would make for more entertaining demo competitions.

Currently, the rules basically just mean "if you want to use really high quality artwork, video and the like, you either spent half your time getting inside the size limit or fuck off". Amazing stuff can be done procedurally, but even more amazing stuff can't.

Like wade says, if removing that size limit (or making it more reasonable) lets people make the demo they want, instead of the demo they're forced to make, surely that's all good. Put the file size on screen at the party so we can recognise the shitty "100mb for a 90s demo" entries, and give stuff like debris the extra credit it deserves for the file size, everyone is happy.

Well, about the demo filesize limits, i think to make sense they have to take into account the screen resolution of the target platform...

For example, while on Amiga 64mb is just too much (enables for pure video or .wav music... no comments...), on pc, it tends to be not enough because the screen resolutions are much higher (so scenes need more details, and higher resolution textures are needed and so on..).

This said, if you really want to be free about filesize, the wild category is there too... in case.

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about uv unwrapping, for me it is becoming more and more of a nonsense with todays memory avial on gfx cards. We could use as well filters to combine 3d textures (perlin noises, cellulars)... And voilà, no more need for uvs or uv unwrapping...

but at 512 MB it's getting to the point

no one actually requests 512mb
but the usual 64mb or less are not enough
if you want to do something different than the usual abstract stuff.

the whole problem is even worser as currents pcs are using highres screens
and watching something at 1900x1280 needs higher res textures different than amiga pal screenmodes.

i dont say there shouldnt be a limit but 64mb is just not useful nowadays.
of course it dont matters if you keep doing coderart for the rest of your life.
but then dont wonder if no one else outside is interested in the scene anymore.

let me ask a question: what is a demo to you? is it about being cool in realtime or about being cool in a certain size?
if it's about the realtime, why not let people be as a cool as they can be with a realtime thing, not force them only to use certain technqiues or resources.

and btw:

.. i can hear artists weeping.

no artist left here

smash, most 2d textures nowadays are made with variants of perlin noise or cellulars anyway, so what is your point?

i can hear even more artists weeping..