The 64 MB limit at BP07
category: general [glöplog]
nutman: no, you ARE complaining and telling us we should make music in ADPCM and optimize code and do stuff as AMIGA but that would teach us meak PC faggots a lesson.
The scene is changing, PC goes stuff differently than Amiga, get used to it or just don't bother with it. You can go outside during the PC demo compo and there is probably somebody with a boombox to play you old mods at the bonfire!
The scene is changing, PC goes stuff differently than Amiga, get used to it or just don't bother with it. You can go outside during the PC demo compo and there is probably somebody with a boombox to play you old mods at the bonfire!
jesus, i suck at spelling, the first 'but' is wrong and the 'goes' is ofcourse 'does'.
Heh. This thread has turned to crap, but not in the usual pouet way. So, to help it to turn into the sort of crap we have come to expect...
Well, my point of view is of course influenced by the platform I "develop" for (Yeah yeah, NOW I develop music on PCs, because it's EASIER, but I'm not especially proud of that - believe me, if I had the same possibilities on Amiga, I would use an Amiga) and I really think that having a wellknown platform with rock-solid limitations has produced a lot of extremely hardcore sceners and.....ah....feck it...I give up. Use 64MB if you think it's necessary. It'll make your productions less impressive, in my eyes, but obviously I'm a dinosaur as long as I hold that attitude.....
okkie: read all my arguments, please (I just did, again). It's not that many. And then quote and make me see where I actually COMPLAIN instead SUGGEST that sceners shoudl try to limit themselves.
If you think that I complain because I tell you that, in my eyes, your big prods are less impressive than smaller prods, then yeah, I guess I am complaining.
If you think that I complain because I tell you that, in my eyes, your big prods are less impressive than smaller prods, then yeah, I guess I am complaining.
nutman: yes, it does feel like you are a dinosaur.
erm, so what you are saying is, when somebody does a 3d-heavy demo on an amiga it's a "great effect" and clever and everything, but when somebody does the same kind of thing on pc it's boring and doesnt show any skills?
perhaps i should point out that a 3d engine doesnt look like a call to "d3dxDraw3DScene" on pc, you know. actually, a cutting edge 3d engine takes a huge amount of work and skill. and there's shitloads of effects (yes, effects) that are part of it. it's not all done by the artist, you know. i for one am really tired of seeing people who make 3d engines, rather than spending their time shoving particles and fractals on the screen, thought of as second-class citizens in the pc coding world (and im looking at the best fx nominations at the scene.org awards for the last years as an indicator of that). just because an artist was involved doesnt mean a coder wasnt.
aaaaand, im curious - have you been watching pc demos recently? there are hardly any "big 3d shows" anymore. the current trend is for "0 polygons and shaders" and stuff like that. perhaps because hardly any pc groups actually have 3d artists? and perhaps _that_ is because the pc size limits disallowed 3d artists from being able to do the stuff they actually want to do in their spare time and use it in a demo? im talking about using zbrush, hdr, working with interesting new methods for doing lighting, hair, etc etc. a lot of people want to do something more interesting than their day job when they do demos - coding fx rather than boring IT jobs, and making 3d using the latest tools and techniques, rather than using old tech and crappy limitations for the artificial reason of not having space to use it.
aaaaaaaaaand, by the way - pc hardware still has some pretty hard limits to overcome. any coder worth his salt (and this is important - imo this is one of the things that is part of being a good coder) can think of something they want to do but cant quite manage yet on the hw, or havent quite found the way of making it happen yet. what about e.g. realtime radiosity? :) or large-scale fluid simulators? or huge, apparently-infinite 3d scenes with continuous smooth lodding?
if you cant think of a load of things that you want to do in realtime but the hardware isnt quite there, if you cant think of a load of ways of using the next graphics card thats coming out in a few months with a load of new features for stuff you always wanted to do, or you havent found the magical way of getting that effect to work fast enough at a good enough res, then you arent thinking hard enough. :) and if _you_ dont know enough about pc coding to know about that kindof thing and you're just assuming something like "pc has a gfx accellerator! pc can render all 3d for you! pc doesnt have code anymore except sizecoding!", dont assume that others don't know better.
aaaaand, no, the scene wasnt always just about _size_ limits. yea, limits of the hardware matter. a traditional wild compo is for productions rendered to video (or that were video in the first place) without worrying about the hardware. a demo competition is for realtime stuff. the only reasons there were ever size limits were for making the distribution sensible, for the purposes of tradition, and to try and prevent people from making a video and entering it (which people can spot pretty clearly anyway).
rant over!
erm, so what you are saying is, when somebody does a 3d-heavy demo on an amiga it's a "great effect" and clever and everything, but when somebody does the same kind of thing on pc it's boring and doesnt show any skills?
perhaps i should point out that a 3d engine doesnt look like a call to "d3dxDraw3DScene" on pc, you know. actually, a cutting edge 3d engine takes a huge amount of work and skill. and there's shitloads of effects (yes, effects) that are part of it. it's not all done by the artist, you know. i for one am really tired of seeing people who make 3d engines, rather than spending their time shoving particles and fractals on the screen, thought of as second-class citizens in the pc coding world (and im looking at the best fx nominations at the scene.org awards for the last years as an indicator of that). just because an artist was involved doesnt mean a coder wasnt.
aaaaand, im curious - have you been watching pc demos recently? there are hardly any "big 3d shows" anymore. the current trend is for "0 polygons and shaders" and stuff like that. perhaps because hardly any pc groups actually have 3d artists? and perhaps _that_ is because the pc size limits disallowed 3d artists from being able to do the stuff they actually want to do in their spare time and use it in a demo? im talking about using zbrush, hdr, working with interesting new methods for doing lighting, hair, etc etc. a lot of people want to do something more interesting than their day job when they do demos - coding fx rather than boring IT jobs, and making 3d using the latest tools and techniques, rather than using old tech and crappy limitations for the artificial reason of not having space to use it.
aaaaaaaaaand, by the way - pc hardware still has some pretty hard limits to overcome. any coder worth his salt (and this is important - imo this is one of the things that is part of being a good coder) can think of something they want to do but cant quite manage yet on the hw, or havent quite found the way of making it happen yet. what about e.g. realtime radiosity? :) or large-scale fluid simulators? or huge, apparently-infinite 3d scenes with continuous smooth lodding?
if you cant think of a load of things that you want to do in realtime but the hardware isnt quite there, if you cant think of a load of ways of using the next graphics card thats coming out in a few months with a load of new features for stuff you always wanted to do, or you havent found the magical way of getting that effect to work fast enough at a good enough res, then you arent thinking hard enough. :) and if _you_ dont know enough about pc coding to know about that kindof thing and you're just assuming something like "pc has a gfx accellerator! pc can render all 3d for you! pc doesnt have code anymore except sizecoding!", dont assume that others don't know better.
aaaaand, no, the scene wasnt always just about _size_ limits. yea, limits of the hardware matter. a traditional wild compo is for productions rendered to video (or that were video in the first place) without worrying about the hardware. a demo competition is for realtime stuff. the only reasons there were ever size limits were for making the distribution sensible, for the purposes of tradition, and to try and prevent people from making a video and entering it (which people can spot pretty clearly anyway).
rant over!
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doom: i recall reading the "keyframe whole model + linear interpol between" at the jurassic pack interview...
Yes, either Kalms or Rubber told me the same thing (I forget which one). And I don't have any reason not believe it. But a sample every 16 frames would mean one keyframe per second. Which would look terrible with linear interpolation. She'd be doing some kind of surreal robot dance then.
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was the doll at the start of kilofix was a realtime bones part, or did have any step precalced?
It's not realtime inverse kinematics and all that, no. ;) But it is a base mesh that's mapped onto a moving framework. Not as advanced as what most people call bones these days. Anyway, the code to do that is trivial. Making it move without motion capture equipment and/or all of 3DS' fancy features is impossible.
Of course, I did have an extra 8.5 megabytes I could have used for a lot of quick-and-dirty-packed preanimated meshes. And an extra 4 MB this year. Might consider it. ;)
you show em smash!
@Smash: Fair enough. No, I am no coder (and will never be), I'm just influenced by 11 years in an Amiga demo group, where the coders have to bend rules in ways I never would have thought of. Besides that, all I read in music magazines lately is "Limit yourself and see if you don't pick up something useful by doing that", so I guess that's where my suggestions are coming from.
I think I can safely say that I, for one, learned a lot by starting doing music using trackers. I have adopted several of these techniques when I made the switch to software studios on PC and they work really well in all I do. They have become so natural to me that I often forget I am even using them, but if I take a moment and dissect my own tracks, I can fairly easily spot them and really appreciate that I even picked them up in the first place.
And that's all I wanted: Letting people know that you can learn amazing stuff by limiting yourself and that you can benefit from this for a really, really long time after that, if not for life.
PS: Really looking forward to seeing your demo at BP. ;)
I think I can safely say that I, for one, learned a lot by starting doing music using trackers. I have adopted several of these techniques when I made the switch to software studios on PC and they work really well in all I do. They have become so natural to me that I often forget I am even using them, but if I take a moment and dissect my own tracks, I can fairly easily spot them and really appreciate that I even picked them up in the first place.
And that's all I wanted: Letting people know that you can learn amazing stuff by limiting yourself and that you can benefit from this for a really, really long time after that, if not for life.
PS: Really looking forward to seeing your demo at BP. ;)
doom, so you are not doing the fancy way where every vertex is affected by 8 or 10 bones. i didnt mean doing IK anyways.
as for the 1/16 keyframing, i dont really remember if they said the exact speed... maybe it's just 1/2 or 1/4
btw, one good thing about +4meg of diskspace is making easier to just put a 8bit wav for the soundtrack instead of adpcming to hell the music... any takes on that?
as for the 1/16 keyframing, i dont really remember if they said the exact speed... maybe it's just 1/2 or 1/4
btw, one good thing about +4meg of diskspace is making easier to just put a 8bit wav for the soundtrack instead of adpcming to hell the music... any takes on that?
smash: I totally see where you're coming from. But I also think you're overreacting. Obviously you're frustrated about the limitations, and I guess somehow that makes anyone who even suggests that maybe those limitations have some merit look like someone who's trying to drive you away from the scene. So stop that. ;)
You've got your 64 MB, and you can rest assured that the BP organizers won't let any comment from the Amiga scene, even if any such comment WERE meant as a complaint, dictate the rules of the PC demo compo.
So maybe, with that said, I can point out (generally and without referring to any compo in particular, and certainly without intending to say the BP people should go back on the PC demo limit thing) that the size limit is different from all the other limits. It's the one rule that guarantees you get realtime content - or at least content that isn't coming out of someone else's application.
All the stuff that's hard because of the other limitations (you mention fluid simulation and radiosity for example) become a whole lot easier and more feasible without a limit that says those things really do have to come out of your own code.
I like to trust people, so I'm sure if you do make some realtime radiosity eventually and put "this is realtime" in big blinking letters across it, I can trust that it is and be mighty impressed (by your hardware? ;). But isn't it at least a bit of a shame that we have to take your word for it? You can speak for your own integrity, but what happens if that style of coding becomes common anyway (whether or not anyone lies about the realtimeness of it).
I know it might seem unrelated, but that's exactly how streamed music found its way into demos, pushing out "realtime" music. It's not that coders couldn't impress with, say, realtime 5.1 stereo effects, or realtime synth or just effects using DSPs on fancy sound cards and whatnot, it's just that they don't bother because an MP3 or OGG file fits so comfortably in the 20 MB archive, or a 64 MB archive. I don't understand why nobody is afraid to see the same thing happen to realtime effects.
I do see the other side of the issue quite clearly, there's a graphician inside me too, mind you, and he's really been enjoying the 2 GB of RAM and the Intuos3 tablet I gave him recently.
And that's all I'm saying. Just, please stop making me, or anyone else out to be zealots or bigots. Overreacting is killing the scene.
The extra 4 MB in the Amiga demo compo is another thing though. It feels like it's the PC size limit rubbing off cause nobody bothers to distinguish. Actually I sort of hope that's it, cause if the BP organizers really think all the Amiga scene has left to offer is more non-coded content then that might make me mad. Grr!
You've got your 64 MB, and you can rest assured that the BP organizers won't let any comment from the Amiga scene, even if any such comment WERE meant as a complaint, dictate the rules of the PC demo compo.
So maybe, with that said, I can point out (generally and without referring to any compo in particular, and certainly without intending to say the BP people should go back on the PC demo limit thing) that the size limit is different from all the other limits. It's the one rule that guarantees you get realtime content - or at least content that isn't coming out of someone else's application.
All the stuff that's hard because of the other limitations (you mention fluid simulation and radiosity for example) become a whole lot easier and more feasible without a limit that says those things really do have to come out of your own code.
I like to trust people, so I'm sure if you do make some realtime radiosity eventually and put "this is realtime" in big blinking letters across it, I can trust that it is and be mighty impressed (by your hardware? ;). But isn't it at least a bit of a shame that we have to take your word for it? You can speak for your own integrity, but what happens if that style of coding becomes common anyway (whether or not anyone lies about the realtimeness of it).
I know it might seem unrelated, but that's exactly how streamed music found its way into demos, pushing out "realtime" music. It's not that coders couldn't impress with, say, realtime 5.1 stereo effects, or realtime synth or just effects using DSPs on fancy sound cards and whatnot, it's just that they don't bother because an MP3 or OGG file fits so comfortably in the 20 MB archive, or a 64 MB archive. I don't understand why nobody is afraid to see the same thing happen to realtime effects.
I do see the other side of the issue quite clearly, there's a graphician inside me too, mind you, and he's really been enjoying the 2 GB of RAM and the Intuos3 tablet I gave him recently.
And that's all I'm saying. Just, please stop making me, or anyone else out to be zealots or bigots. Overreacting is killing the scene.
The extra 4 MB in the Amiga demo compo is another thing though. It feels like it's the PC size limit rubbing off cause nobody bothers to distinguish. Actually I sort of hope that's it, cause if the BP organizers really think all the Amiga scene has left to offer is more non-coded content then that might make me mad. Grr!
Good thing is, if people don't manage to fill the 64MB with visual/audio content, they still can use the text from this thread to fill the remaining space :)
winden: That makes me mad. Grr! ;) Well, SOME of us are working on Amiga-friendly alternatives to ADPCM compression anyway.
keops: It'd make a fine scroller.
doom: you're right: the size limit does go some way to limiting what content you can precalc out of someone elses application. that's one nice difference between 64k and demos - on 64ks you know everything on the screen had some work behind it to make it appear. there's no use of the "bake lighting" button in max, there's no textures off the internet, if the sound is nice somebody had to code the player. thats one of the great things about the 64k compo.
im with you about the faked effects, too. i hope people _dont_ try and trick us with videos of effects being passed off as realtime. the main reason you probably wont see more big faked effects done with video in pc demos is that the size limit still wont be enough to do it at a decent res (like, the res of your screen) for any length of time, at any decent framerate, especially if you want to have some other content as well. :)
the amiga compo, however, does seem to have a problem with it
(http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=24515 , not to mention 3d demos with a lot of precalced anim data). i guess it's pretty obvious why it happened - the amiga size limit is vast compared to the screen res and power (even at 64mb, the pc limit isnt). so erm.. what can you do about it? :)
im with you about the faked effects, too. i hope people _dont_ try and trick us with videos of effects being passed off as realtime. the main reason you probably wont see more big faked effects done with video in pc demos is that the size limit still wont be enough to do it at a decent res (like, the res of your screen) for any length of time, at any decent framerate, especially if you want to have some other content as well. :)
the amiga compo, however, does seem to have a problem with it
(http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=24515 , not to mention 3d demos with a lot of precalced anim data). i guess it's pretty obvious why it happened - the amiga size limit is vast compared to the screen res and power (even at 64mb, the pc limit isnt). so erm.. what can you do about it? :)
smash: I know 64 MB isn't quite enough to trick anyone with an entire faked demo. But you can add a little distortion, some high-res clipart on top, motion blur, and other stuff that's considered good design. So I'm sure 64 MB will do if you really want to "fake" something madly impressive for 45 seconds.
Anyway, my real concern is that the idea of faking as a bad thing will fade away over time. As you point out it's already a problem on the Amiga. Seriously 16 MB is a lot considering the size of the datasets the 68060 can treat in one frame. And IS is being misused a lot. Even if nobody's actually saying it's not preanimated, much of what's in Amiga demos these days is being sold by the Amiga's limitations, even though it's really working around those limitations just by exploiting the filesize limit.
If anything would be left to make the Amiga seem uninteresting to newcomers, it's that. And I honestly don't doubt it has a lot to do with why the C64 scene sees more newcomers than the Amiga scene.
Dunno what we could do about it, though. ;) At least, for now, I'd personally suggest BP stopped at 20 MB and thought about it for a while.
Anyway, my real concern is that the idea of faking as a bad thing will fade away over time. As you point out it's already a problem on the Amiga. Seriously 16 MB is a lot considering the size of the datasets the 68060 can treat in one frame. And IS is being misused a lot. Even if nobody's actually saying it's not preanimated, much of what's in Amiga demos these days is being sold by the Amiga's limitations, even though it's really working around those limitations just by exploiting the filesize limit.
If anything would be left to make the Amiga seem uninteresting to newcomers, it's that. And I honestly don't doubt it has a lot to do with why the C64 scene sees more newcomers than the Amiga scene.
Dunno what we could do about it, though. ;) At least, for now, I'd personally suggest BP stopped at 20 MB and thought about it for a while.
IS is = it IS
WTF \o/
WTF \o/
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im with you about the faked effects, too. i hope people _dont_ try and trick us with videos of effects being passed off as realtime.
Why would anyone bother to do that on the PC when you prolly end up the same size (or smaller) to do it realtime?
gargaj: which was precisely my argument. :) there's better ways to "fake" on pc than use an animation.
doom, seriously - i'd be much more worried about the amiga compo when it comes to stuff like this - dont worry about the pc one.
doom, seriously - i'd be much more worried about the amiga compo when it comes to stuff like this - dont worry about the pc one.
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those musicians should stop whining and just be happy that some groups find their music interesting enough to be used in a production.
Yes, as we all now musicians are the pariah of the demoscene, and they should be happy that they are granted the mercy of adding some background noise to the real art. When I think of it, I can't think of any demo at all that music added something extra to. Good point.
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If the reason for extending the limit to 64MB is due to musicians whining, then I would even more advocate the suggestion to lower the limit gradually to 16MB over 3 years.
Great idea, maybe this will bring back tracked music in PC-demos as well. That would benefit the entire scene.
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Musicians: Try having your perfectly balanced and well-mixed tracks reduced to ADPCM at 28Khz, 5 bits - then you might stop whining about the sound quality of your tracks in PC demos....
Or have them played back through a SID-chip? That would really make those self-righteous bastards think, eh?
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Oh, you really SHOULD try to work with ADPCM once in a while. It's good practice to develop your mixing skills, aswell as your composing skills, as it demands that you think just a bit outside the box.
Yes, it's really developing for mixing skills to make eq-scoops in your mix to compensate for the added noise and distortion, in a futile try to rescue at least those standing in the back from bleeding out of their ears when your track is played back on a 2x10000W PA-system at the party. And then there is the added bonus of experimenting with the order of the downsample/channel mix/bit-reduction-sequence to make some marginal reductions in the loss of sound quality.
As for composing I would imagine that Amiga-musicians have experimented for years with what key sounds best in emulated 14 bit-mode, and how you best can structure your track to cover the flaws of a sound chip from two centuries ago. If they would only share these secrets with the rest of the world, music in general would be instantly better.
This made me remember that my goal as a musician really is to battle with shortcomings of hardware, not waste time trying to actually do some music. I needed that, thanks!
Gargaj: Why is there only streamed music in PC demos when you could do a lot of interesting things with realtime music? You have blindingly fast CPUs, hardware mixers, programmable DSPs, lots of memory to render ahead when the CPU goes idle. You could probably even use shaders to process the audio and then brag about it in the endscroller. And it'd be the same size or smaller. It just doesn't happen. Ok maybe that's just cause coders are more into graphics than sound and cause the sound people are too bitchy about the sanctity of their music, but it's still a little suggestive, isn't it?
smash: Well, people passing animations off as realtime effects don't worry me. I guess with the PC scene being as alive as it is you'd earn a bad reputation pretty quickly by doing that. It's much worse if it slowly becomes a standard thing to do. But anyway it IS the Amiga compos I'm concerned with. The C64 seems to be protected for some unknown reason, but the Amiga scene often gets dragged along when the PC scene moves forward to follow the hardware. Maybe it's our own fault, dunno.
At any rate I think I've said the same thing enough times now. ;)
I'd like to know from the BP people, though, if you plan to add another 4 MB next year. And also, just out of curiosity, if 64 MB in the PC compo will last a few years, or if that's supposed to go up, reflecting internet connection speeds and hosting costs.
smash: Well, people passing animations off as realtime effects don't worry me. I guess with the PC scene being as alive as it is you'd earn a bad reputation pretty quickly by doing that. It's much worse if it slowly becomes a standard thing to do. But anyway it IS the Amiga compos I'm concerned with. The C64 seems to be protected for some unknown reason, but the Amiga scene often gets dragged along when the PC scene moves forward to follow the hardware. Maybe it's our own fault, dunno.
At any rate I think I've said the same thing enough times now. ;)
I'd like to know from the BP people, though, if you plan to add another 4 MB next year. And also, just out of curiosity, if 64 MB in the PC compo will last a few years, or if that's supposed to go up, reflecting internet connection speeds and hosting costs.
OMG, DEMOSCENE IS DEAD!
[/quote]Why is there only streamed music in PC demos when you could do a lot of interesting things with realtime music?[/quote]
There just isn't any point in doing it. In addition to the playback routine you would have to make a sequencer for the musician to have something to compose the track in. Why should coders spend time writing "Cubase for pixel shaders" instead of working on engine and effects?
By the sound of it I'd guess that kb's synth could probably rival quite a few VSTs even in the commercial market, but it's still pretty pointless to run it realtime during the demo when the track could just as easily be rendered to audio from the host he uses. Not only would it conserve CPU and memory usage, but it would also be one less element in the code that could crash and burn.
It just doesn't make any sense at all, it's just huge amounts of work without any advantages over the tools musicians currently use. Except for bragging rights of course, which in the demoscene would be a valid factor of motivation I guess :) And of course, you wouldn't have to compress your tune in a lossy format. Finally, the soundtrack would probably sound worse than if made with traditional tools (except possibly for a few select synths such as kb's).
There just isn't any point in doing it. In addition to the playback routine you would have to make a sequencer for the musician to have something to compose the track in. Why should coders spend time writing "Cubase for pixel shaders" instead of working on engine and effects?
By the sound of it I'd guess that kb's synth could probably rival quite a few VSTs even in the commercial market, but it's still pretty pointless to run it realtime during the demo when the track could just as easily be rendered to audio from the host he uses. Not only would it conserve CPU and memory usage, but it would also be one less element in the code that could crash and burn.
It just doesn't make any sense at all, it's just huge amounts of work without any advantages over the tools musicians currently use. Except for bragging rights of course, which in the demoscene would be a valid factor of motivation I guess :) And of course, you wouldn't have to compress your tune in a lossy format. Finally, the soundtrack would probably sound worse than if made with traditional tools (except possibly for a few select synths such as kb's).
lug00ber: Best. Answer. EVER! :) *loud applause*
Err. The first one of course - you beat me to the submit-button there. :)