pouët.net

perhaps the orgas can get the Earth Simulator for this
party, so everybody can release a prod with full software rendering and we don't need this discussion?

why would anyone want to impress anyone?

or to be more precise:

what's the point of impressing people?
the demoscene has been quite into this whole "how-to-impress-people"-loop for the last, say, ten years or so (well its entire existence has been about that, mainly). However, one can do other things beyond impressing people. everything isn't just about impressing others. really.

If i can summarize somewhat,

1. The "oldschool" mindset makes the scene the analog of tractor-pulling or strongest men contests ..
2. sometimes the whole hw deal seems to be a crutch for defailing imaginations. If something's great that hasn't been
done before comes with the new hw, bless you, but if it's just
to add another shading method to your 3d engine, fuck it!

3. a lot of sceners are not übergamers nor game coders and thus can't really justify buying the latest money-sink heat-generator noise-producer from nvidiati

gosh what an ugly formatting ;)

IMHO (and i'm not going to BP, not entering any demo, and by any means making anything DX9 related, plus, I'm a nVidia zealot [personal taste only]), you should go and put the latest hardware available on the compomachine, be it an R9000 or whatever.

Putting latest hardware is never a bad thing, as long as older-hw-targeted demos run on it (this is the case with nowadays 3D accels). Maybe even have both a GF4 and a R9000.

Thing is, some people do nVidia-only demos, some do ATI-only demos... specially in the case of OpenGL (where most features are vendor-specific), i'm making some things nVidia only, solely for the reason I don't own (or have the money to spend in) any ATI cards (well, i have a Radeon VE hanging somewhere, but that doesn't count), so I can't just test my code. Does that mean I'd have to be immediately disqualified on an ATI-compomachine? Naw, it only means my demo will be able to be seen only on nVidia computers... but that's my problem, shouldn't be the party/competition one. This reminds me of "No GUS/No demo" (or "No SB/No demo"). I remember most parties back on those times had both cards ready for the compo and just asked you to fill the required soundcard on the entry-form. So if people who made SB-Only demos could not have entered to GUS-only compomachines how many demos would have been lost from compos?

So my vote is: have both cards and make two separate exhibitions, stating clearly which one is NV and which one is ATI (and maybe separate those demos that run in both cards). Just a quick screen before the "segment" of demos (those would be as much as three segments) and people will know, and vote acordingly.

Whatever :)

just a side note: that Strong Chap (tm) in the picture is apparently finnish :)

not that it matters at all but... *cough* ;)

oh yeah? well here's the Strong Chap himself! :)

*ahem* :)

from a discussion long, long ago:


mwhahahahaha....

anyways. who cares. if it won't run on the compomachine, then
[ ]submit it as a wild-demo
[ ]submit it out of competition
[ ]submit it on a party where it'll work
[ ]start lame discussions about how a fuckface the orgacrew is...

choose one.... or more.

You don't get it do you?
It's a compo. The most impressive demo wins. Simple as that.
Or are you telling me you enter compos because you want to make last place? You try to make the least impressive demos? I don't get it.



As I said before: YES.
Don't use OGL, use D3D. Or... only use OGL with extensions supported by at least 2 vendors (ARB, and selected NV-extensions).



As I said before, a GUS was a big addition to the hardware... It could do things that an SB couldn't do.
As for nVidia vs ATi... Well, if anything, the R300s can do more than the GF4s.
So it's extremely leim to write stuff that only works on GF4, even though technically it would be no problem to run it on the R300 hardware.

In fact, GUS-only demos were rather leim aswell (intros are somewhat understandable, because supporting other hardware requires extra mixing routines and such, which take space).

However, it's easier to have both an SB and a GUS in a machine, than it is to have 2 display cards.
So the situation is rather different.



GUS has SB-emulation (remember SBOS?). So SB-only stuff would still work on a GUS. The problem is only the other way around, because an SB is inferior hardware. Same problem with GF4 being inferior to R300.

Personally I find coding for only one vendor retarded. If demos cannot be run on a large number of the PCs out there even NOW -even though these PCs are technically equivalent or superior- and probably none in the not-so-distant future... Why should it even compete in a compo, because it happens to run on the compo-machine? So, using your logic "I only code for the hardware that I have access to", you theoretically cannot make an entry, unless you have access to the compo-machine.
Which excludes a LOT of people from the compo.
Anyway, why go for minimum compatibility, when you can easily go for maximum compatibility, just by using a more compatible API?
That's lazy... No, that's retarded.

Heh, run D3D on linux, talk about compatibility ;)
There are both pros and cons of using OpenGL vs D3D, and i won't go there (not another OGL vs D3D shit).

Main problem with OpenGL is lack of "fast" standards, meaning, yeah, they go and make ARB standards for everything, but then again, you lack the latest hardware stuff. I'm not saying OpenGL is good or not (and by any means i'm saying it's better than D3D). I just use OpenGL because I find more comfortable with it. If I want to use stuff on my card which doesn't have an ARB equivalent, i'll go for it. If ARB is slower (but exists), i'll go for two different codepaths.

If that means I can't enter my demo to a party where they have an ATI-only compomachine necause it'd either be slow, not visually correct, or otherwise totally uncompatible, so be it... the only ones who might be losing a good demo (not talking about my demos here) are the party organizers. Maybe I'm retarded because I want to use stuff that isn't standarized on OpenGL yet, or I don't want to use D3D? So be it. I don't care about people calling me retarded. I do this for fun, and I have fun coding OpenGL (while I don't coding D3D... just a matter of taste, but who is anyone to judge my taste?). If I ever code a good demo and I can't enter it to a demoparty, so be it, see if I care :)

The day I start not having fun coding demos, that'll be the day I stop doing it: _not_ the day my demo can't be shown at a demoparty. That granted :-)

oh, and SBOS was far from being any good, mind you :)

I never said that you should use D3D. I said you should use extensions that work on more than one vendor, when using OGL.
Also, linux is a different PLATFORM than Windows.
They should not compete in the same compo.
Point remains though that linux demos should run on MOST linux installations, which at present isn't the case, sadly.



Taste, lack of common sense... who knows?
Anyway, it's not about taste, or whether or not you want to enter a democompo.
It's about me (and probably lots of other people) being fed up with lousy Windows-demos that don't work if you don't have the 'right' (at this point in time actually being WRONG) brand of hardware, and wanting to see some actions being taken to stop this.

And SBOS worked well enough to run demos on.