pouët.net

Lines are the coolest option, though.

hmm... if you're interested in MASM, try [sheep]'s dib tutorials :
http://wireload.cjb.net/dibdemoschool.rar

WTF is dib?

dib = device-independent bitmap
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Bitmap

oops, here the english vesion ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format

Enthralled: Try to visit a demo party, Function in hungary would be an excellent choice. It will take place in september so there is some time left to get into the demoscene a bit and perhaps even code something for the party. But even without a prod, you will find it awesome! Don't forget to talk to people who seems to do interesting stuff, I promise you, unless under a tight deadline, everybody really always wants to talk about their stuff :-)

Second: see if you can find someone on campus who knows (a bit more than you?) about programming since it's always good and fun to have a couple of frinds around to program with and show stuff to.

Welcome to the demoscene, may you stay forever :-)

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54507

Modeling and scripting to bypass DirectX and OpenGL.

Thank you for the additional answers people!

@psenough I didn't know there was a demo group in Serbia/Belgrade. I'm very surprised, hehehe. That's awesome, I'll try to contact Kosmoplovci.

@thec I'd really love to go to a demo party, but unfortunately there are none in my country. The nearest one seems to be Function which you mentioned. Hmmm, it would be pretty cool to go there if I find enough time and someone to go with. Thank you for the ward welcome! :D

Enthralled: the Extrait guys used to visit Function, maybe you could contact them. :)

Enthralled: all of the advice so far has been centered around single-machine game engine style demos, which is what the active members of this particular community lean towards. Keep in mind that many if not most of the decent democoders/groups are simply reusing their day job's game engine/tools/assets/models/art, so standards are set quite impossibly high. Some lazy bastards like Navis (ASD) even use time at work to build demos.

There are other ways to make computers do interesting things than this. It may all depend on your aims - do you wanna make game engines? Or do VJ work? Do you want to mess around with 8-bit gaming consoles from the 80s, brew your own processor on an FPGA or crunch out pre-rendered photoreal videos? There are different shared sources to draw from for each crowd. Some people will happily freely hand you their life's work, others will demand huge $$ to fork over ugly non-functional code tricks.

I started off making Game Boy Advance demos and musicdisks and trudged through the horrible horrible NeHe OpenGL material until I found D3D and XNA, then came back around to Processing+OpenGL for my VJ work.
OpenProcessing.org is a nice rich mix of beautifully great and also really horrible coding practices/design. Like the Rock Band game controllers, it's a perfect place to start. The effort required to play a song and draw some weird pictures is essentially zero, and you can pull off the training wheels at any time.

Bartoshe: no.

Demotools are not the answer if you wanna learn to code demos.....
Building them, maybe (if you know how to use the tool well, like what Ized did with werkzeugg)....

I actually started doing OGL stuff while working with emulation related things. And random stuffing around.

The hardest part for me, is actually the creativity part. Coding is fine, but the actual artistic stuff (ie texturing/modeling/music) is something I need to greatly improve on. Unless you find some like minded people, and wanna do a group effort at least...

wtf

oh, don't you try to deny the truth!

@Enthralled
Pista and me most probably will go to Function this year. We're from Novi Sad. If you want, you can come with us.

Hello Enthralled!
I'm from Novi Sad (I spend the most of my days there, i'm studying at Fakultet Tehničkih Nauka), our group is eXtrait, active in the scene since 2007. I'm very happy that you are joining the scene :) (you know, nowadays there are just a few sceners in serbia...)
We are planning to visit Function this year (and hopefully release something), you should come too. I was there in 2007 and 2008, and it was awesome, and it's going to be awesome this year too :)

About coding: Nehe tutorials are a good start - my first 64k intro is basically an expanded version of the texturemapping nehe tutorial :D Math should not be a problem; you will need stuff like understanding sin/cos, calculating normals and such stuff... Be creative and don't stop after the first negative comments.

i think the last serbian party was virtual scene party something like 3 or 4 years ago. i actually attended it, despite not being from the balkans, i was visiting the kosmoplovci guys at the time.

extrait is also active nowdays as the guys just wrote. and i can only highly recommend visiting a demoparty. especially if it's your first, you'll get alot of knowledge and experience that you would never attain anywhere else. both about the technical and social aspects of the demoscene. function is your best option indeed.

but as rale pointed out quite well earlier in this thread: everything you need to make demos is posted on the internet. but getting some fellow coders to talk some ideas with is quite useful now and again.

i wrote an article on the history of serbian/ex-yuguslav for an issue of pain diskmag at some point. you should probably hunt that down if you're interested in what was happening in 80s, 90s and 00s.
its probably in one of the last ones: #59 #58 #57

is not just one way to make a demo. there are platforms (with hardware) to choose from and programming languages to choose from. pick your choice. also there are similarities between these, so one can try something on one platform and if it dont work well jump onto another. similarities as an example can be drawn in low-level languages like assembler instructions that in most cases perform the same operations on different hardware. assembler is not always an option to start with though, but for platforms like c64 it certainly is not an option not to choose assembler.

OK, I've said it before on this forum when a message like this came up, and the responses I got were NOT positive, but I'll still say it again: the whole POINT of the demoscene is that you want to Excel. NOT just get something good looking out the door as quickly as possible.

SO.......

Ditch APIs. Fuck DirectX and OpenGL, and learn from scratch. There is a free download of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Blackbook on the net (he's the co-author of Quake, the game that started it all), read it, and get coding. Gasman here on this forum does Javascript stuff for the browser WITHOUT a 3D card, so see if you can get in touch with him or something.

BEST OF LUCK!..... :)

Because it worked so well for you :P

also beware that the liberal, alternative and nerd-centric nature of the demoscene does mean that it has a tendency to attract the kind of freaks, zealots and fuckwits who feel alienated from regular society, so all opinions you see expressed should be taken with a pinch of salt.

What a piece of shit advice. Just terrible, awful, idiotic advice. How on earth are you going to excel at something of you don't practice it? People with talent are just people with a lot of practice.

I don't want Excel, it's too expensive

I would stick with OpenOffice instead. At least it's free.

Actually I think it is a waste of time to try to rebuild everything from scratch. Excellence in the demoscene does not mean that you make an excellent API. It means that you make demos that look outstandingly good. Even if you use an API such as OpenGL or DirectX, you will have to complete a lot of work to achieve something good. Making everything from scratch doesn't help.

zerohero: haha :D