Mobile demo compos
category: general [glöplog]
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I've been thinking about that, and i reckon there are 2 ways to handle it. 1: put some interactivity in. 2: create a 'launcher' app with a nice menu that lets you choose a demo and watch it.
What about benchmarks? Those are allowed, right?
So just put in a framecounter and some other bogus stats, and display them at the end of the demo? :)
psonice: its the gpu thats the issue. not in terms of features but performance. maybe its almost comparable to a 10 year old pc gpu speedwise, but its being asked to do a lot more pixels than a pc was back then. the gpu is so busy just filling the screen once there's not much left for anything else. (not to mention that the architecture of many mobile gpus is designed around just filling the screen once.)
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PCs aren't selling less because people aren't upgrading them as often (although that's probably part of it). They're getting used less because people are using other (i.e. mobile) platforms instead.
That's the same thing, only with backwards logic. There's plenty of expansion to be left on the mobile field so no wonder people keep buying them. The market will saturate there eventually as well, only still prolly ~10 years left of it.
Website (especially Wikipedia) statistics are hardly relevant considering that's pretty much the only activity you can do on a mobile. Show me a statistic on how much people use mobile exclusively for things like image processing or software development or even something as menial as spreadsheets.
smash: the GPU is plenty fast enough to do cool things with - but yeah, it's not going to run 5 faces. Not everyone wants to write stuff for the very high end though.
To put it in perspective a bit, I'd say the iPhone 4 was close to that "fill the screen once per frame" line. That was horrible to work on, same GPU as the 3GS, 4x more pixels. The 4S was massively faster (think apple quoted 7x, which was true in some cases but not across the board). The 5 had ~18% more pixels, but ~2x the speed. 5s has the same screen, ~2x faster again.
So we're probably at ~20x the performance of the iPhone 4 now on a per-pixel basis, plus some additional from the new features (I have 2 code paths, one for iPhone 4 and one for newer devices, the newer code path is much faster and I'm not using ES 3.0 yet).
To put it in perspective a bit, I'd say the iPhone 4 was close to that "fill the screen once per frame" line. That was horrible to work on, same GPU as the 3GS, 4x more pixels. The 4S was massively faster (think apple quoted 7x, which was true in some cases but not across the board). The 5 had ~18% more pixels, but ~2x the speed. 5s has the same screen, ~2x faster again.
So we're probably at ~20x the performance of the iPhone 4 now on a per-pixel basis, plus some additional from the new features (I have 2 code paths, one for iPhone 4 and one for newer devices, the newer code path is much faster and I'm not using ES 3.0 yet).
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Show me a statistic on how much people use mobile exclusively for things like image processing or software development or even something as menial as spreadsheets.
No stats I know of on any of those, but:
Image processing: you might be surprised. I work in the photography field, and I see a LOT of people editing on a mobile device now, particularly on the iPad. You have a screen that's higher res than most desktops, fast processing, and pretty powerful + easy to use apps. The high end still requires photoshop and a fast desktop, but for most people an iPad is probably a better choice.
The others: these are jobs best suited to a workstation of some kind. I suspect we'll still be using regular PCs for this in 10 years. Mobiles aren't going to kill off the PC, they're just going to eat certain parts of the market. I prefer to browse the web, message or game on an iPad, but i definitely wouldn't do serious coding on it (and I have coded stuff on an iPad ;)
With demos there's certainly 2 parts to it: creating and consuming. PCs are better for any complex creation like this, but people are moving to mobile for consumption.
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psonice: its the gpu thats the issue. not in terms of features but performance. maybe its almost comparable to a 10 year old pc gpu speedwise, but its being asked to do a lot more pixels than a pc was back then. the gpu is so busy just filling the screen once there's not much left for anything else. (not to mention that the architecture of many mobile gpus is designed around just filling the screen once.)
10 years ago, it was not all that common to run games or demos at the maximum resolution of your monitor. People would gladly run in 640x480 or 800x600, even though their displays were capable of more.
The same can be applied to phones: you can render to an offscreen buffer at lower resolution, then stretch it to fullscreen. So I don't see the screen resolution as a limiting factor.
psonice: no need to quote marketing figures - i know very well what that gpu can do, i worked on vita remember. :)
We can talk all day about how platforms should be combined (or not) at demo parties, but the sad fact remains: not enough people actually make demos. So how about we shift the conversation to that instead.
Would a separate mobile device compo lead to more prods being made? Or would a combined compo do so?
Would a separate mobile device compo lead to more prods being made? Or would a combined compo do so?
The reason mobile devices aren't used for more is that the keyboards suck. On-screen keyboards always suck. Yes, you can attach one, but then that sort of defeats the purpose of a tiny mobile device.
So what will happen:
1) old people (e.g. me) will get used to it / the kids who grew up with it won't care
2) someone will find a way to make external attachable mobile keyboards suck less, as the rolly ones appear to be flakerific. This is already happening, slowly, although as far as I've seen only for the iPad. My phone, which if I had bought it when it was new four years ago would be the awesome wow expensivo has USB host, so using that as a solution isn't a new thing.
So what will happen:
1) old people (e.g. me) will get used to it / the kids who grew up with it won't care
2) someone will find a way to make external attachable mobile keyboards suck less, as the rolly ones appear to be flakerific. This is already happening, slowly, although as far as I've seen only for the iPad. My phone, which if I had bought it when it was new four years ago would be the awesome wow expensivo has USB host, so using that as a solution isn't a new thing.
Gloom: good point. Part of the reason we list so many compos for our party is to get peoples' minds working.
Open to other ways to do that.
(Speaking as someone who is trying to learn Processing of all things so I actually make a f*cking demo one of these centuries, because I certain don't lack for ideas).
Open to other ways to do that.
(Speaking as someone who is trying to learn Processing of all things so I actually make a f*cking demo one of these centuries, because I certain don't lack for ideas).
smash: ha, i'd forgotten actually :) I thought that comparison would be helpful for others though, to get an idea of roughly how powerful they are. And yeah, marketing numbers :D In apple's case they're sometimes semi-usable though, as a very rough indicator - e.g. they said the iPhone 5s was 2x faster than the 5 for gfx. triangle throughput is down, but compute power more than doubled, and overall speed is often ~2x.
gloom: personally i'd be happy with either combined or separate. If it had to go in the wild compo though i doubt i'd bother. It'd be like entering a mac or linux demo and being told it had to go in the wild compo somehow.
gloom: personally i'd be happy with either combined or separate. If it had to go in the wild compo though i doubt i'd bother. It'd be like entering a mac or linux demo and being told it had to go in the wild compo somehow.
Btw, something i forgot to mention before: mobile device hardware is in some ways comparable to older PCs but quite different in others.
Example: there's a hardware h264 encoder/decoder. It's quite viable to render your demo at 1080p, stream it to disk as mp4 at the same time, then stream it back in direct to texture data. Echo/delay effects for 3D? Write it out at high res / low nitrate for glitchiness :) Could be fun to play around with, and it's the kind of thing that would be pretty hard on a PC.
There's also a ton of different sensors and such for interactivity if you want to take it a bit past the old school demo style :)
Example: there's a hardware h264 encoder/decoder. It's quite viable to render your demo at 1080p, stream it to disk as mp4 at the same time, then stream it back in direct to texture data. Echo/delay effects for 3D? Write it out at high res / low nitrate for glitchiness :) Could be fun to play around with, and it's the kind of thing that would be pretty hard on a PC.
There's also a ton of different sensors and such for interactivity if you want to take it a bit past the old school demo style :)
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Part of the reason we list so many compos for our party is to get peoples' minds working. Open to other ways to do that.
Well, I don't know about your audience, but for me that feels counter-productive. There are few things that kills motivation less than knowing you'll be in a compo with no / few other entries. There is no glory in winning by default. Having a ton of compos more or less ensures (especially in this day and age) that many of them will be empty / be quite thinly populated.
s/less/more