pouët.net

more so for javascript

I think you guys should make a choice. One language for all the scene, one language that would say "this is a demo if it's coded in..."
Oh and the same should go for musicians and graphicians.

Just tell me if I'm getting it wrong, please.

cg_: I'm not even sure you would find that low a number when counting releases .. I don't have any stats about that, nor do I care about them :) But there are many young parties all over the place, lots of places to release stuff. Maybe it's just that where - in the old days - you would tend to release your stuff at either Assembly, The Gathering or The Party, now you have a plethora of smaller parties where you can do it. Whichever way you want to look at it, I think there is still lots of quality releases coming out every year, and stuff that keeps raising the bar. That to me is a sign of health.

also: where does it say that the number of releases per year is an indicator of how healthy the scene is? maybe the scene has just changed to be a more social place, and the indicator we should rather be using is whether or not people attend lots of parties and have a good time.

beer goggles on! 8)

Probably not likely to be good for 1ks, but out of curiosity I am interested in knowing if any of you have taken a look at the Native Client framework I linked on the previous page.

There's a small gallery here. The cube sample would be the most interesting when looking for a demo framework.

AFAIK, the samples only run in the newest chrome for now (you have to run with the command line option --enable-nacl).

One of the nice things is that it allows the amount of javascript to be kept at a minimum and enables you to run compiled c++ code natively. Sounds good for porting your demo code to a browser without having to kill yourself over javascript.

plaf: that was exactly my point, I guess I just left too much room for interpretation :) It was a reaction to/against the doom and gloom.

Are you in a position to make that happen? Would be very nice to have that.

cg_: then we agree and because of that it's time for pepperschnapps! :)

I think the main problem to the demoscene right now is not really high barrier to entry, but the fact that *very* few groups are doing inspiring stuff.

There is very little being released now that would have been completely impossible to do in, say, 2003. Certainly people are doing some nice raymarching tricks and so forth, but at the end of the day it's still just very safe dx9-era graphics. Boundaries are most definitely not being pushed.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing per se, but currently it seems it's just ASD, Fairlight (and I dunno, some others, Still perhaps) doing interesting things in the demo area (64k seems completely dead and while 4k's can be cute, they are much too limited in scope to appeal to the 'outside world').

A thought that's just struck me about that compo - maybe it succeeded *because* there was no overt demoscene association? Out of the general non-scener geeks I know who've heard of the demoscene, a lot of them seem to regard it with a sort of awestruck "it's those crazy guys who remake Halo in 4K!" mystique. Perhaps if it had been pitched explicitly as a demoscene project, the general reaction would have been "ha, it's those demosceners doing their crazy 1K shit again. I'll never reach that level in a million years" and it would have seen a lot less active participation. But instead, they latched onto it as the Alistapart 10K competition's little brother, and therefore it came across as something much more approachable.

Unfortunately, if that's true, I'm not sure what lessons we can usefully apply from that, other than running competitions with a built-in bait-and-switch mechanism. "Congratulations, you won the competition! Oh, by the way, you're a demoscener now. BWAHAHAHAHAHA"

...or maybe it's a sign that we should resist our natural urge to show people ASD/Fairlight/Farbrausch masterworks in our outreach efforts, and concentrate on stuff that's - in their eyes - less intimidating.

Perhaps people avoid demoscene only events because they believe most sceners are a bunch of arrogant weirdos who just believe they are cool like fonzie? Seriously guys, I love watching demos and everything related but you better have to choose between "we want to make people discover about the scene" or "we keep the scene for sceners and we do releases for the sceners only".

Why don't we ask to some of these javascript / processing / whatever coders why didnd't they feel the urge to embrace this wonderful community entilted the demoscene... it could be hurting and people will again try to hide behind their usual sceners egos.

If they want to discover the demoscene they will, you can't force them - just help.

knl, the answer is quite simple - JS is much more straight forward if you already build websites galore instead of fiddling with some odd compilers.

And could we please skip that "scene is dead" thing? Take every other culture movement as example, HipHop has been declared dead in 93/94 and came back in 96/97 - it's the way it goes. It may be a bit quiet for some time, but it'll come back - but it'll look different..

My point wasn't "scene is dead" but "scene is not adapting". Plus the sect point gasman stated.

Gasman has a valid point here. A problem in much of the "demoscene outreach" is that we are, perhaps without fully realizing it, promoting the subculture (demoscene) rather than the artistic activity (demomaking). This may not make so much difference to us, but even a choice of words may lead outsiders to the mindset that they are, indeed, outsiders. Every time we talk about "demoscene productions", "demoscene events", "demoscene competitions" or "demoscene demos" we emphasize this feeling of separateness.

This brings me to the topic of "beginner democompo". As far as I know, the competition will be held because of requests from some actual beginners who had stated that they have been thinking about making a demo but have been demotivated by the high standards in the Alternative Party demo competition. I do have some mixed feelings about this competition as well, but I still keep on hoping that it might be able to help in presenting demos as something that can be made by anyone and not just by a secret cult of hardcore programming ninjas.

Hyde said:


That's indeed a great development but I haven't seen any of the other browsers showing intentions of implementing it so it may still take a while...


Gloom said:


Unfortunately I'm not :/

i'm with Navis on this one. the future is all about Java on the Amiga

i hate the idea of browser-demos completely !
if scene goes that road imma start coding Atari 2600 only :/

the future is assembly for HL2 GMOD wiremod hardware !

don't know if you know gary's mod, never tried it, but it's a sandbox game with a "matrix" feel, i read a bit about it and it seems attractive in a weird way to me.
I stumbled on this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOpz5XqC2h0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wghkhmVLCrQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o5wflseq1A&feature=related

fucking madness...
seems the hardware is made from logic blocks to build a machine for which you can write asm.

hehe. new platform.

Many people speaking about the demoscene in different forums tend to go one way (culture) or the other (artisitic). I tend to talk (and show) a lot more around the artistic (and by that I mean visual) side of the scene, and it seems to be working.

i think this nacl thing is just as useful as java applets, i.e. a bad thing.

HeLLoWorld: don't know, it seems kind of pointless... yes, the hardware building thing is interesting IMHO and could maybe be used at schools/universities for teaching purposes... but i can't help the feeling that there shouldn't be such a waste of precious CPU cycles.

I've never been a scener. My first and last real experience were the last two Bizarre lan parties in NL in 2000. Making demo's just wasn't my cup of tea, watching them was. So take this from whatever view you desire.

I'm the guy that started js1k. And while I love the scene for as far as I know it, and added a canvas tag to facilitate saving some bytes over some boilerplate, I didn't really create the compo specifically for the scene. This wasn't a very conscious decision, mind you. It just happened that way. That's also why it clearly says canvas isn't required.

I think the question of why there are so many submissions (btw, there are 350+ unique runners, the 700+ is the number of submissions including duplicates and rejects, just a database id) has a few simple answers.

1. Accessible. While youtube made it easier to show your demo to others, getting people to create one is a whole different matter. Compare setting up your coding environment (including testing and compiling!) to creating a script and firing up a random browser.
2. Simplicity. People know JavaScript and/or it's easy to learn. Sure, the level of knowledge varies, but that's okay. The platform has a fast learning curve which easily draws in new coders. Of course you still need to know a few tricks of the trade, but those can be learned.
3. As pointed out, a lower bar. As js1k didn't start out as a scene compo, the initial entries were relatively simple. And I still love some of them. I remember that as soon as p01 entered his first demo, everything (especially sceners, I think), was buzzing him to be the winner. That's it. When in fact, with all due respect (!), his compo at that time might not have won (note: I'm not a judge). Even now I see a couple of tweets coming from slightly disappointed runners drawing the inevitable conclusion that their demo won't stand up to certain others.
4. This leads me to the last point I wanted to make. The js1k compo is different from (as far as I know) your average scene compo. Whilst it seems to me that scene demo's focus a lot on complex computations, amazing graphics and dito audio, they often lack input and interaction. Whereas I think about half the js1k entries are games (or could be ;)), or are at least interactive. The game changed and people are digging it.

The popularity of JavaScript is still rising. And while not all of the scripters might be up to the level of creating a demo that would be considered competitive in the scene, they are still gaining a lot of traction from the general public. For instance search (twitter, etc) for the tiny chess demo.

The js1k demo's are not all about graphics (or audio) and I think this is something the scene is lacking. But maybe I'm wrong here...

Anyways, that's just my advice. Use it as you please.

As for the scene.org link, I guess that could be arranged. Mail me with details to the email of this account.

somehow the way the discussion is taking makes me laugh.

javascript compos for beginners? PLEASE NO. i'd rather see the scene die.

qFox: I'll be in touch :)

groepaz: How utterly selfish of you then.

selfish? oh well. maybe. i just don't agree with "the scene" doing questionable publicity stunts to somehow attract new sceners. (or rather, individuals doing it in the name of the scene). i don't believe it actually does attract a significant number of new sceners either, but i feel that the whole publicity and media whoring does infact interfere with what i used to like about the scene. and i'd rather see it vanish than turning into some playground for wannabe webcoders that cant code their way out of a paperbag for their live. to me the part that involves hitting the hardware where it hurts is an essential and required part of what makes the scene. i am not interested in pretty short movies running on $genericplatform. i am not impressed by javascript crap that shows effects similar to what my 486 can do, but running inside a browser at several ghz. its about as interesting and inspiring as a christmas demo written in commodore basic in 1985.