pouët.net

I think those complaining over filesizes being to large have something to learn about prejudice. For most of us, explaining everything you see in a demo is hard / impossible if you didn´t code it yourself. The problem is that some people seem to jump to the conclusion that everything they see is trivial whenever the size of the .exe or .dat file exceeds 10 megs. It´s very much comparable to the feeling that "everything is trivial if you´re useing hw-acceleration for rendering", which I think was somewhat popular in the dark ages.

Anyway, scepticism is good in general. But before one goes out on a crusade against the 64mb-lamers, get more in-depth information. Otherwise, it´s a bit like racism. One side-effect of this is that guys like Smash have to run around pouet, explaining and defending his use of MBs. That shouldn´t be neccessary.

Insectecutor: sorry, that was a not-so-clever ironic comment. I meant that big is not necessarily bad, quality depends on more than filesize.

hyde: exactly.
the challenge of working with a project that uses hundreds of mb of data (unpacked), lots of resources and so on is something else on its own. we had to fight continually during frameranger's development against memory fragmentation, the 2gb app limit and loading/saving times in the demo tool, and actually had to do a lot of optimisation work to make it feasible to work with the amount of data. its the kind of thing you'd never have to worry about with a small amount of data.
naturally, the kind of people who complain about file sizes are in much the same boat as the ones who usually complain about hw acceleration, windows dlls and so on - they never did anything of note themselves on the platform/with that amount of data, so they dont have a clue about it. much easier to hurl rotten fruit from the fringe than to do what it takes to get a clue about what they're talking about.

omg I dissed your subculture and it makes you so aaangry!

anyway, the point is that today you see better computergenerated graphics on an avarage comercialskit on MTV than you do on breakpoint, and I wasnt comparing with videogames, and still, the new operation flashpoint looks alot better than any demos ive seen. There is only a few in the demoscene who can still keep up, and they have to defend themself against sizelimits here on pouet. duh.

Dubmood is right. I believe that one reason sceners cling to limits and old traditions is because they can then use it as an excuse for any short comings. If we take away the limitations, then we'll start expecting the same kind of quality we see in games or commercial demo reels. If that happens, coders will have to start thinking more about visual quality, direction and creativity, and those are things they don't want to think about.

I say this because that's how I used to think. I hated it when gfxers started using Photoshop because I used Deluxe Paint and was being left behind. I hated when everything started going 3d as it was something I didn't understand. Basically, I just wanted to stay in my comfort zone and I wanted the rest of the scene to stay there with me.

I've written many articles and posts just like the one by trc, urging sceners to follow one rule or another, but I can admit it now I was just stuck in my ways.

These days I'd like to see less limits and just see how close we can get to commercial developers.

seriously, you don't make shit sense. what we do is realtime, if you are cool with watching a demo at 3 frames per day, we can give you that too.

and unlike operation flashpoint we don't have 20 guys working full time on our graphics engine over a period of 4 years. maybe you might want to cease comparing apples and pears. also if you think "10 years ago the times were better" stay there. who said you have to be a part of the scene as it is today?

coders will have to start thinking more about visual quality, direction and creativity, and those are things SOME OF THEM don't want to think about.

wow this was selfish...

Yep. It's no wonder so many sceners hate me. :P

why would we want to imitate commercial crap?

come on nosfe! otherwise dubmood is not happy.

i agree, id love to do that.

Smash: Deal. We'll lift the sizelimit of the Solskogen 2010 democompo if you promise to deliver. :)

too much clueless trolls.

Commercial game developers have the advantage that their users (hardcore gamers etc) are willing to spend fucktons of money all the time for latest gfx-cards/processors/etc.

Artificial limitations allow doing interesting things without bleeding edge hardware.

jua: That's a rubbish argument and just proves that you have never done any game development yourself. If you think that loads of new hardware in a segmented market is an _advantage_, you are sadly mistaken.

gloom: The "advantage" part was meant in respect to "delivering breathtaking graphics", not in respect to ease of development. I'm not a game developer, that's true -- but I can certainly imagine what a pain in the ass game development on these moving targets must be.

the point gloom was making is that these days games usually cant afford to aim for the highest end because it would restrict the amount of money they can make.

i think the sizelimit for demo could easily be the size of cd-rom or a dvd.

this has probably been said before. but ill say it anyway. theres a problem with sizelimit when it comes to the point where you can make the whole demo in lightwave, 3dsmax or some 3d-modeller program render it to avi and just code an avi-player to play it. noone need to code anything except for using all the available tools that can be used on a modeller. thats why i think this is an problem. not that i know how much space a 5 minutte avi-movie would take ive never tried, but i think it wont take more than 100 megs depending on the resolution of course. but i think there must be drawn a line between these things or else someone would just use this approach. and then coding a demo would be useless. dont you agree on some of this? also would it be fair to do this in the demo-community? i dont think many would be glad, but then again anything is possible to do as long as it is some art and music.

rydi, i think you should visit the clue-shoppe before you speak again.

why would any democoder want to embed only an avi and play it ? isn't the whole point of democoding to actually code something fun ?

pantaloon: i just say that the possibility is there, and someone would utilize it. not that i would personally. but i think someone would be pissed if someone did so. i would for a while, then i would just not care about it.

nosfe: ?

arent "pure" videos banned from most democompos aswell.