pouët.net

bob's example is not exactly valid cos his demo is not real-time and that's usually a (unwritten) precondition for demos.

and having a proper quantity of nice demos _AT ALL_ these days is a blessing, if people need unity or ue4 to get it done, so be it :) if ppl shit their pants that a unity demo can beat their halfarsed "custom coded engine" that rotates wireframed cubes to crappy untz music, it's more their own fault and i'd recommend giving unity a go ;)

4mat: What i ment was that demo compo's are about the best demos. Thus also who has the best code or coded effects. Or coded engine.

When engine's are used like Unreal 4 for example, that aspect gone imo.
Than it's only about the best 2d, 3d and music ?

(correct me if i am wrong or forgotten something ;)

Also: That's only from a compo perspective.. I really loved Jugi's latest demo for example. So it's a good thing if really nice demos are created with free engines like unreal or unity. Or even more demos will be released becoz of these free engines.

Okay, so all the people who use werkkzeug but didn't actually code it should not be allowed to participate in demo compos, go it!
Don't try to justify it, you'll never get that thought right. And as someone whose only participation in demos so far appears to be "text" and "support", you should probably be the last person to forbid someone which tools to use.

make a demo about it

tsk, as if you would even notice the difference between an unity or custom engine driven demo, magic... well unless you're told. besides, non-custom engines have their own limitations you have to deal with. like i've been told there's only one VBO in the non-pro unity?

More stars, more sprites, more shade bobs, polygons, colors, pixels, more stuff, it's easier to quantify in a sports kind of way. Demo effects used to be essentially tricks, and demos used to be trick and stunt shows, like what skateboarders do. When the trick aspect is taken away, what is left? Something must still be left, because G. Moroder's video producer considered a demo's visuals worth taking.

That said, I'm more into the "trick" aspect myself, and I think quite often big demos are just collections of ugly and/or tasteless and/or just stupid crap, skateboarders pretending to be ballet dancers. Just do some damn tricks that are fun to watch.

what ps said.
there are much easier ways to show off your 3d scene without writing any code than importing it into ue4 and stripping down default engine's asset anyway.

yzi: Funny that you mention "tricks"; I always thought calling size-coding "trick coding" or even "stunt coding" would be appropriate. :)

Exactly. That's why I'm mostly interested in size-limited and oldskool stuff. Fun things, tricks, groovy music, jazz. Demo parties are called parties for a reason.

yzi: You might have noticed that in the past 20 years or so, many demos have shifted away from pure coder pr0n to being more aesthetically pleasing but not necessarily being technically groundbreaking.
And besides, there are still plenty of tricks left even when using UE4 or something (like Maali just mentioned)

Maybe I should have more clearly pointed out that the question was rhetorical and I acknowledge that some demos have aesthetic value.

all comes down to where you want your creativity to be put in, and how many options you want to have.

I really like to see Unity and UE4 and whatever as TOOLS instead of "here's a demo ready for you". I've always lacked the tools for many many things that instead of a simple mouse drag spent hours of getting something stupid moving properly when I just going to a proper tool UI and just fixing the damn thing.

If anything, this is huge improvement and will again give a chance to people who otherwise wouldn't have it in digital art.

This will not kill the magic of any other type of demo either. I don't even think it'll be any more popular than any readymade engines have been for years now.

It's just weird that people call for RULES AND REGULATIONS and whatever like this somehow endangers the purity of something. Stop it.

Omg. the scene is dead!

OSDM me beautiful!

Holy fucking shit it's 2015 and we're having this discussion

who cares

fucking really

it's just a framework

a framework does not make a good demo

get the fuck over it

and if you can't please make a demo to prove that all these premade frameworks are inferior

(I still won't give a shit though)

Unreal4 just a framework? You are not a programmer, I suppose.

I think that magic is talking coherently here, and I understand what he is saying. Ok, no need to prohibit, but using such ready, professional engines definitely kills one of the more appealing sides of demos. They simply remove the ART aspect from the programming, and I would say even from the visual/musical sides.

So, no intention to offend here, but as a programmer I can't give great value to prods done with Unity, Unreal or any other ready, professional engines.

I do not accept to compare a prod written from scratch to another built over millions of ready code.

So, while I respect their right to compete, I am one that will always respect more a 64 bytes prod written from scratch than a 50mb demo generated by any ready engine, even if it looks fantastic.

When you automate something, turning it into a trivial and easy to do thing.

I will even go further and say that opengl and d3d already removed most of the programming art from the demos.

Still, I do agree that we don't need to prohibit opengl and d3d, but I never compare those with oldskool pure software demos, that is an ignorance imho.

So please, be free to "program" your 500mb cubes, but never ever say again that this is all "the same thing". This is not.

(In the previous comment I meant "when you automate you turn it into a trivial..."*)

Also, just to finish, I noticed some people digging 20 years old prods and thumbing them down. That is a sacrilege... please stop doing that.

People who do that are most probably ignorant of what was that era's current state-of-the-art of things. We cannot compare hardware, compilers, compression techniques etc to what is available today. Again, that is ignorance and a sacrilege.

I would be happy if Poüet disabled thumbing downs for prods more than one year old. I would also -- if possible at all -- separate pure software (the only real elite that even existed imho) from hw accelerated and ready-engines based demos. This should be very clear that they are different things.

Just my 2 cents.

Thank god a GOOD demo/intro is not only made of/by technique, used hardware, compression and so on.

So, for example Amiga-demos aren't something made by "the only real elite", as they use a form of hardware acceleration? :D

What exactly is "elite" about software rendering? The math is exactly the same, the programming languages are exactly the same and polygon fillers are almost trivial to write. If anything, writing modern stuff with shaders is a lot more complicated because the underlying systems and APIs are a lot more complicated, optimization relies on interaction between a lot of things like drivers you have no control over and you have the processing power to do things you couldn't even dream of back then.

Demos in 1995 were mostly high school level maths and different ways of abusing two or maybe three tables for texture offsets. Demos in 2015 are a whole different ballpark.