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i totally agree with smash here (no i'm not biased). 15 mb isn't enough if we ever wan't to compete with "games" when it comes to effects. If you wan't to do oldschool demos do it on oldschool machines (c-64, amiga etc.). It's always texture quality(size) that has to be cutted, and trust me, alot of effects would be nicer if we would have: bigger textures, more texture layers (specularmaps, normalmaps,dirtmaps, you name it map ... the list goes on). Most of the time all these textures also requires more data in the vertexformat as Smash said thus requires even more diskspace.

Hurray for 64mb!

pantaloon: shut up and precalc your sine-tables!

our demo system does that, bug unfortunely it generates 32mb sine tables so would require 96 mb to use them :) (they are damn nice tho).

demo system? do you mean your assembler?

no, our demo system that generated our assembler that we make demos with.

Lomp Nonja uses those, and look how people bitched and moaned about disksize.

I agree shifter, fuckings to filesize morons.

The truth.

As i recall the demoscene was more about doing the maximum possible on the most common platforms (medium range computers) than trying create demos for the highest possible configs, when did this change ?

Also, you can add the amount of maps / makeup / vertices you want, a rotating object will remain rotating object.

that changed since ppl in the "demoscene" believe they are _artists_

medium range computers has more then 64mb of diskspace i hope.

It's more a matter gfxmem.

hitch: medium range computers have more gfxmem as well, i hope.

hitch, there are alot of things you can do with diskspace to save gfxmem.

Let's say medium ranges gfxcard have 128 mb of memory.

seriously - i dont know why _anyone_ would be against this limit. if you're making a demo you dont have to use it anymore than when the limit was 20mb - so if you're making some cubes+glow, dont worry, you can still make it in 10mb (although it probably should be 64k or less if you know what you're doing, but hey).

relating filesize to performance is a bit stupid - it's quite possible to make something run badly or well in any size limit (and i'm sure those productions will be down-voted accordingly).
the only outcome i can see is either it'll be the same as usual and nothing will change, or we'll see some demos which make use of the limit and do something good. and frankly, anything that improves on the snoresville democompo of last year is good news in my book.

About time that someone increased the size limit! For those who likes to code in size-restricted environments, there's still the 64k and 4k intro compos.
Computer hardware has evolved, and so has the size of datasets required to obtain the highest possible render quality. Look at nvidia's tech demos, they can be 100+Mb and often contain only one scene! Now, I'm sure there are things that can be optimized, but 64mb for a full-length demo is not too much at all.

Smash: I never said i was for or against such limit, originally demos sizes were only limited by the capabilities of the machines (mostly by the available memory or diskspace size) so this isn't new. The problem is that these machines had fixed architectures, so i think an average demoscener computers config should be determined and used as a standard and not the most powerful machine possible (which varies from party to party too).

Notice that already, while your prods are great i can't run them on what i consider to be a medium range computer (1.8ghz + r9800xt 256mb gfxmem + 512mb mem) at more than 10-20fps (not to talk about insane loading times).

my idea of a mid-range machine is more like a 6600gt 2.8ghz with 1gb ram (2 years old machine, not 4 years old :)), but anyway. :) the size limit doesnt really bare relation to that, does it? seeing as those prods were probably 64ks. :)
there is a lot you can do to optimise loading time and performance with more space (as panta said). so it's a good thing to have more space.

smash: I think it's worth trying out. Mostly because the PC compos do tend to be tedious and repetitive that I'd rather watch an animation show if I had to choose.

But even if you need more space for the textures and meshes and 5.1 soundtracks you "need" to take advantage of modern PCs, 64 MB is really close to the size of a high-quality video the length of a normal demo. I don't know why anyone could not agree that the idea of a compo for _realtime_ demos doesn't risk suffering from allowing demos to include any amount of prerendered or precalculated content.

Besides, all that content can be generated at load-time or even realtime. So you CAN have high-quality meshes and textures, you just need inventive ways of storing and generating them. But since this apparently no longer has anything to do with the coding of the demo, I'm not sure what I'm talking about. ;)

No matter what the PC coders demands there will pop up some amiga demos that beat them bigtime in the compos.

No need for hires textures on the bigscreens, the average scener is half blind and cant spot any difference between a 128x128 vs 1024x1024 texturemap.

I'm still curious to know what the average demoscener machine is (also i think coders should have slightly less powerful machines than the majority, it helps ;)).

While i don't consider demos to be art, i don't think they should be made just to highlight the latest available gizmos either.

Wait & see.

hitchhikr: if someone could throw out four or five suggestions for different "level" systems, i could put up a poll at scene.org to test the waters a little. :)

increasing the file size is a big advantage that comes with some problems, though.

i think ryg (smash, pantaloon, etc) explained it very good.

i think this is only a matter of taste and attitude. and if i read it correctly, it is only an experiment. let's see what people will do.

right now i don't know what we will do for BP, but as we are always working with hires pics and heavy 2d graphics content, this will be a big advantage for our graphicians for sure.

as long as we don't get 320kbps encoded MP3s in each demo and pure prerendered videos that are sold as 'realtime scenes' i'm fine with it.

Definitely agree with 64Mb or bigger..?
Like the idea of mega-demo category. I'd love to see plastic art free to expand.

One thought though. All the non-sceners I know are MOST impressed by non-bloatware. Bloatware is the norm these days in any software field. Its far easier to make something using more memory than using less. -They- get a real kick and sense of wonder from seeing conspiracy 64ks or loonies 4ks.

Yeah I know, Im not making any point really.

Why don't you all just make demos that are exactly 64 MB? And is this the limit zipped, or unzipped?