pouët.net

Statement:


Proof:


Extra-addon by musician stating this proof:

Do you have stats about that? Only assumptions.

Download numbers are fact. When a demo is downloaded 30.000 times, you can be sure that quite some people have seen it on their PC, still more than the people who saw it on the big screen.

Photoshop: Weel, isn't it really just the statement of any artist who doesn't care what the general public thinks of his work? But sure, I guess I (in my 14 years of scening) haven't been too succesful in the general scene public. However, I have managed to live up to my own goals with music - I never set out to make music that everyone would like. And I surely did better when there was still 4ch compos ;). Still, if you want to get technical, sound and music can easily be treated as two different things - music is about harmony, melody and rhythm and can be put on notes, sound(s) is(are) about pitch, filtering etc ...

Keops: Of course they are, they just don't necessarily implicate that the production has been watched by 30000 people. Still, I believe my theory is likely since far from everyone (including sceners) update their hardware all the time. It's like saying that since 1 million people got the usual useless xmas present only invented for this particular xmas and put on sale at 10% the price in january, they're actually using it. Or (relating to the Danish political system) that because 80000 people signed a petition in order for a particular political to be allowed to be elected at a national election, all 80000 will vote for that party at the election.

Keops: That should read "political party". Don't get me started on what I think about statistics in general, btw ...

Hooray, in that case let's all go back to 1998 when nobody had a 3d card, just because some sceners happen to have a videocard that does not support pixelshaders.

Check scene.org old polls to figure out how many people already had a card supporting pixel shaders 2.0 back then. Nowadays, still very few demos require shaders 3.0, so the argument about up-to-date hardware is wrong, most sceners can watch most prods nowadays.

Also, check Pouet's comments on most prod, there is usually a small minority of people asking for a video.

Frankly i'd like to have confirmation of that, i may be wrong but i'm not convinced that a majority of demosceners own top notch machines with shaders 3.0, dual processors & such.

Finally, i'd like to know what's the average machine owned by demosceners and i'd like to see parties using such machine in their pc compos.

Or how about just not having a PC demo compo at all? After all, the only true demoscene platforms are Amiga (500 only of course, AGA killed the demoscene) and C64.
What would it accomplish to refuse democoders to use the latest technology? And why are you not curious to see what good crews like Fairlight can do with the latest hardware? I just don't get it.

I'm so tired of the "good old days" fan club. If you want demos with tracked music colours running on processors that's slower than my cellphone's, fine. Do your thing, enjoy what you do and shut the fuck up. There's no reason that the demoscene shouldn't evolve just because you are living in the past.

-colours

I don't get the fuss. Just because Breakpoint will have a 64MB limit doesn't mean all other parties have to follow suite. And it's not as if the 4K or 64K categories are going away any time soon -- they're pretty damn popular!

It's funny, though. Back in the A500 days, I used to scorn all the smaller intros and dentros, and generally preferred multidisk megademos. The more disks, the better! But now I have much more respect for a jaw-dropping 64K intro. (But big demos are cool too.) Times changes, people's opinion's change, I sometimes I even change my underwear.

hitchikr depends on who you call sceners. It's typical of non-gaming musicians and graphicians not to have the hardware to display demos.

The topic of the discussion points out something I think is important: one of the main adjustment variable for demos has been the size. The other being the hardware class.

Once again, historically the bandwidth required by the display device we used was very imbalanced with the capabilities of our storage media. Generated visuals were the only way to show moving pictures on our devices.

So the size limitations has been a conservative measure used to counter the evolution of storage. It certainly had an effect overall.

Yet, we had animations and movie-like structures from the very beginning. In a way there are two different camps: those interested in describing/writing visual effects through code, for which the mean and the end are almost the same, and those who see the end as justirying the means.

The two approaches become one and the same only when programming is the simplest, most efficient justifiable mean to achieve a certain end.

Things like physical simulations or even most code-based effect can be precomputed / shipped inside the 3d package used by artists, instead of running real time in the demo.. Unless the resulting data set is larger than the storage medium or memory. If not, maybe it means you have not set a big enough challenge to yourself.

But visual effects aren't the be all end all.

I'm not certain, actually I'm fairly convinced most competition rules are not made to provide a competition ground where coding is justified.

For example if I was to again include web/network based information (not as a storage medium but as a source of information/act upon) in one of my works, I'm fairly certain organizers would not be thrilled enough to make it possible by competition rules.

Similarly, if we were to make a demo requiring live interaction from spectators through video or audio.

I believe oldschool shouldn't really be about aesthetics, in which case you're just a monkey imitating the past, but a question of attitude: trying to exploit the hardware / software / platform in a way that exhibits its unexploited qualities.

It seems that some people just hate change.

Feh, this thread is probably the most words spend on the most inane issue ever..

okkie: *cough* well, I was hoping nobody would point that (= "that upside down thingie") out. Dig up that PC anno 2000 and enjoy the excess demos in all of their 256x256 texturesize, 80 kbps Ogg Vorbis, not-upside-down glory. :)

Also; I feel I should mention that it's not that I'm not keen on seeing what Fairlight (f.ex.) would be able to pull off if they used that whole 64 MB for massive models, textures, lightingmaps etc -- I'd love to .. it's just that my current PC (3200+, 1 GB RAM, nVidia 6800) can't even play their Assembly-demo. :) Now, this _might_ be because of size "restrictions" they had to use more memory to precalc or whatnot, and if it is, I welcome the idea of more space (but 64 MB is still freakingly much; why not 32 MB?).

Anyho; I guess this subject is starting to be a little watered down now.

Oh; Doom -- I didn't know your whole line of argumentation was meant as a way of getting a push into the PC-scene. Seeing as that seems to be the whole point, I'll stop trying to convince you that you can't really compare object modelling with sound modelling (even though you can't!!!!111oneoneonecos-1cos-1cos-1)

:)

haha... it's the 386's at assembly issue all over... next thing you know is farbrausch appearing with a 64mb entry that future generations will still talk about.

gloom: you cant watch our asm demo probably because it's the worst piece of engineering we ever did, because we made most of it in the course of a weekend (and nearly died from it). we were lucky to make the bigscreen at all time-wise - it's _very_ unoptimised in terms of memory usage, a lot of the 3d effects eat a lot of memory on precalc and dont give it back, etc. true, if we had more space we could have dds'd the textures (we had to jpg them instead, making them like 4x larger on the 3d hw) and you'd lose the pauses on e.g. the zoom part at the start. but generally track one is not the best example of a demo pushing things to the limit through good code - we could have made it run a lot better if we had the time. :) actually, during the course of executing a single scene it's fine - it's quite carefully set out in that respect. the problem is, jam 10 of those scenes together and you find it eats way too much memory (main and vram).. unfortunately we found that out too late to fix it for asm. :) (we had other tasks to do, like adding a final 1/3 of the demo in about 2 hours or something :) - no wonder it goes downhill.. and reducing it from 30 to 20mb.)
we'll work a lot harder on optimising the next one, promise. :)

anyway.. let me just add a couple of things:
- the demo compo isnt just a coding compo. while you could cut the sizelimits to test the coder's skills, you limit what the artists can do. you know, the (large number of) artists i know at work find low poly modelling and small textures a lot easier and faster to do than doing good-looking high detail stuff with zbrush and large detailed textures, etc, doing high res 2d, and doing really nice animations and everything. so let the artists show their skills too.
- (obvious statement alert) it doesnt actually matter what anyone except the people making pc demos thinks, because in the end the scene is driven by the demos people make and not the opinions of every tom, dick and harry.
if youve got some great idea for some realtime sound processing, go code it, put it in a demo and see if everyone is amazed. if they are, you'll probably see a load more demos doing it and a whole trend will have been set. similarly, if there are some good demos using 64mb at bp, it'll be the new standard sizelimit. if all the large ones are shit, it might not stick. so wait and see, eh?

One of the most sensible statements so far in this thread. :) I still can't seem to wrap my head around the fact that someone just decided to jump from 20 to 64 MB though, but I guess it's just the way my mind works that makes it hard to swallow. :)

Anyho; looking forward to your next demo then, and if you need a properly encoded soundtrack, fling me a mail. :)

This is going in circles now people! I think everybody got his/her point across.

Smash said it best when he said:



So there!

damn you gloom! damn you! :)

okkie: *hugs'n'kizzez* :)

lug00ber, I see no logic in your words. You just said:

Right after this you say:

But man, the question IS: what if the better tool arrived for artists and size limits means just poorer video quality?

Compare Adobe After Effects and Apple Shake with demotools. Compare 3dMax, Maya, etc. with demotools. Do you know how the texture memory size of video adapters reduce a quality of visuals? You do not like when your tune was compressed in less then 320 kbps. Very well, now, why artists should compress textures, reduce polygons, etc? Give'em 512 Mb size limit, ok?

I hereby declare this thread closed. \o/

;)

Yes and finally, hopefully it brought some interresting discutions, i hope people on the scene can understand each other a bit better now..
Let's go for a beer :)

Was it an answer to my posts ?

If it was then understand that i'm not referring to any kind good old days gibberish & co.

I'm talking about the computers the majority of sceners are owning TODAY, i'm not interested to see demos that'll run properly on the computer i'll own next year or later, i'm not interested to see demos specially crafted to run on a top notch compo machine which probably no one in the demoscene own and can only be watched as videos. Got it ?

Also i wish the entries in compos would be presented in random order. It'll loose in the show side (albeit it can be interesting to not to know what will come next) what it'll win in fairness & honesty.