pouët.net

On ZX Spectrum (don't know about C-64) there are a lot of demos fileld with animation instead of effects. The authors are saying that's for design.

I can't agree.

If a prod has virtually no effects we can't judge it as an animation because it will definitely LOSE against the real animation. The only reason for authors to fake effects is to make a scene look like a real thing without making a real thing, i.e. to cheat viewers. Demo is still software.

In the past, demos had keys to control effects to make everybody sure that they see the real thing.

If we can make any effect as animation what is the purpose of a demoscene then? To show animations in "demoscene style", something like mp3 music in "8-bit style"?

That's just like your opinion, man.

Yeah right, the demoscene was never about bragging and trying to do impossible things, no matter by which means... And it certainly was never about pure aesthetics, too!

It's not cheating if you don't get caught :)

I think it all depends on the animations. Some of them are so obvious that most people will have no problem detecting them, in which case I'd say no harm done. And if you're able to pull it off without anyone noticing it's an animation, then that's an worthy achievement in itself ;)

The spectrum really can't do anything. So I guess everything is cheating on it that imitates hardware features from other systems such as fullscreen scrolling, sprites, multichannel beeper stuff, border effects, sampled music.... :D

So then, is animation in this demo is OK for you or not? If I'd see such an animation lasting, say, 10 minutes in 128k demo without loadings, it is still effect and still there was sufficient effort to put 10 minutes of such animation in 128k, so it is OK for me. Sure thing you can have lame animation with many loadings, but then overall demo would look lame.

some c64 demo has animations too.
what is your point?

at the CC99 contest a demo (Anamnesis?) won Jam/DR because design has been so fucking good.

you can't disagree, because you still dreaming about your fucking demo 'New Wave' stay at the top, but part of teh demo containg a driller-animation.

www.go2home.com

Let's differ animation-looking-like-an-effect from animation-looking-like-a-movie.

I thought I saw 2013 in the date of this post, but it must have been 1993.

There are literally no rules. And if there were, I'd do my best to break them at every opportunity.

I see no problem in having a "pure" animation in a demo, as long as it integrates well with the effects and/or it is the basis of an effect (eg use do some post-process on it, generate meshes from the animation frames, etc...)
A good example of a demo with some pure animation in it is State Of Mind by Bomb!. I see absolutely no problem having such things in a demo.

If the rules become more strict on this subject, someday maybe someone will ask if it is correct to have "pure" music in a demo instead of a generated one, and so on with graphics and textures, etc...

alone: I am wondering whether BluREU demo on C64 is animation or not :-) And why?

visy: unless they're compo rules I guess? :)

lvd: I dare to say BluREU is a 7,5 MB bulk of animation except maybe some effects.

Someone complaining about faked effects in the demoscene? Well now I've seen everything.

Gargaj: Of course :)

It's an interesting question sometimes when I show a demo to someone, say it's realtime and then it's harder to convince it's not just a video or he is like "why u make so much effort to code realtime engine when I am not supposed to control freely? What a waste man!"

Also, sometimes I think the more precalced an effect is (which you have to do in 8bits) the more in a twisted view it approximates an animation. Effectively in old computers we are trying to approximate animations without being such. Which is still more effort in 8bits, and where to draw the line: more precalcs/less slow versus more realtime/less memory.

it's funny how some people tend to think that plain animation sucks .. looking at some comments (not pointing someone in particular here) it's like the data was already available on the web, at the right machine-specific screen format, and of course nicely packed into the perfect file format..

I personally enjoy a mix of both. Complete full anim is boring (yes, we all learn of our mistakes), while with full code FX it misses some kind of "free impressive stuff" to be added.

»Why u make so much effort to code realtime engine when I am not supposed to control freely?« – Interesting question.

Also, where is really the line to not cross with precalculated data? (because animation is precalculated data, right?)
I mean, using a sin table is precalculated data - is this WRONG because the machine is not computing it in real-time?

I basically tend to think that if people gets entertained enough by showing usually-impossible stuff to a 30 years old screen, whatever the internals involved, you won.

ANYMACYAAAAAAA

The line between animation and "effects" is really blurred, especially on the old 8-bit systems I think.