What happened to the 4k intros?
category: general [glöplog]
Is it just me or does it look like the most productive years was from 2008 to 2010 when it comes to quality and perhaps quantity. The most liked Windows 4k releases was in those years and that is like 10 years ago!? We are in 2018. Is there something wrong with this picture or have the intros changed during these years. Yes, i know there are still 4k intros in compos, but they don't get as much likes here on pouet, is that the quality, or too few people in general who vote here on pouet, or does it really matter? :-P
There are several factors:
- if you look at pouet all time top 10, they are from 2000-2009. It doesn't mean that no better releases were made since then, but youtube versions became more popular (no hw requirements, no download+unpack, no fake virus alerts, no precalc, etc...)
-since iq released a tons of tutorials of raymarching, most of the intros are similar (also they are using the same synths)
-the artistic level of top teams is so high, that hobby teams cannot even get close to it (the bar is way too high for 2nd, 3rd level groups)
-for most of us this is just a hobby, with limited time and effor available. We only would like to (and we can) compete at the level of local demoparties, which doesn't mean big bang pipularty intros
-and don't forget namevoting. Just look at the results of smaller parties' results. I can go into details, if you want...
- if you look at pouet all time top 10, they are from 2000-2009. It doesn't mean that no better releases were made since then, but youtube versions became more popular (no hw requirements, no download+unpack, no fake virus alerts, no precalc, etc...)
-since iq released a tons of tutorials of raymarching, most of the intros are similar (also they are using the same synths)
-the artistic level of top teams is so high, that hobby teams cannot even get close to it (the bar is way too high for 2nd, 3rd level groups)
-for most of us this is just a hobby, with limited time and effor available. We only would like to (and we can) compete at the level of local demoparties, which doesn't mean big bang pipularty intros
-and don't forget namevoting. Just look at the results of smaller parties' results. I can go into details, if you want...
go and make 4k great again
but don't make 4k too great... or it will turn into 5k or more!
5.5k according to Reptile :)
or 8k...
ye, some good points here.
ye, some good points here.
Strange topic after a 2017 which was probably the best windows 4k year ever.
http://www.pouet.net/toplist.php?type=4k&platform=68&days=420&limit=20
http://www.pouet.net/toplist.php?type=4k&platform=68&days=420&limit=20
It's really not complicated honestly. If you look at the general trend of attention the most noteworthy productions from each year recently get, it's much lower than around 10 years ago. This also applies to 4k intros, they're not an exception, but let's look first at 4ks in particular anyway.
Ten years ago 4k intros also of course went through a renaissance of sorts with advancements in tooling and more flexible programmable shaders, and eventual popularization of techniques such as sphere tracing. It was an exciting time, many more people could with relative ease create something that kept surprising the audiences. This is what mainly in the end contributes to "votes" that a production gets on pouët, the surprise and novelty. But of course these techniques wear out eventually, as does the novelty and the attention.
No comparable technical innovation has really come up since then (albeit compute shaders might enable a small boom, we'll see). We're still in large part using the same techniques as 5 or even 10 years ago which kinda locks us into a stylistic corner unless we intentionally try to work ourselves out of it. It's more difficult to surprise people, which is why many of use have sought to do this via innovation in stylistic aspects as well as putting more emphasis on audio. This is of course difficult since the primary author of a 4k intro by the nature of the category has to be a programmer, who often don't have as much intuition in the aesthetic department. Still. I think we're getting there as especially 2017 already demonstrated.
Aside from 4k specific factors, it should also be obvious that there are fewer active people in the scene at the moment overall, especially the really skilled and dedicated ones. Same applies to pouët; there just isn't as much traffic these days which is caused by multiple factors, including the earlier one.
Personally I think 2017 was by far the best year for 4k intros this decade, though it might not correlate directly by just comparing vote counts, but this is explained by the general downwards trend of activity in the scene.
Ten years ago 4k intros also of course went through a renaissance of sorts with advancements in tooling and more flexible programmable shaders, and eventual popularization of techniques such as sphere tracing. It was an exciting time, many more people could with relative ease create something that kept surprising the audiences. This is what mainly in the end contributes to "votes" that a production gets on pouët, the surprise and novelty. But of course these techniques wear out eventually, as does the novelty and the attention.
No comparable technical innovation has really come up since then (albeit compute shaders might enable a small boom, we'll see). We're still in large part using the same techniques as 5 or even 10 years ago which kinda locks us into a stylistic corner unless we intentionally try to work ourselves out of it. It's more difficult to surprise people, which is why many of use have sought to do this via innovation in stylistic aspects as well as putting more emphasis on audio. This is of course difficult since the primary author of a 4k intro by the nature of the category has to be a programmer, who often don't have as much intuition in the aesthetic department. Still. I think we're getting there as especially 2017 already demonstrated.
Aside from 4k specific factors, it should also be obvious that there are fewer active people in the scene at the moment overall, especially the really skilled and dedicated ones. Same applies to pouët; there just isn't as much traffic these days which is caused by multiple factors, including the earlier one.
Personally I think 2017 was by far the best year for 4k intros this decade, though it might not correlate directly by just comparing vote counts, but this is explained by the general downwards trend of activity in the scene.
2 possible reasons that are not limited to 4Ks:
- maybe releases slowly accumulate more upvotes, causing older releases to rise in the all-time top. If so, the current intros will show up in the all-time top eventually.
- maybe the number of active Pouet users declined over the years, in which case new releases may never match the amount of reactions of old releases. Is there any historical data available about the number of users and comments?
- maybe releases slowly accumulate more upvotes, causing older releases to rise in the all-time top. If so, the current intros will show up in the all-time top eventually.
- maybe the number of active Pouet users declined over the years, in which case new releases may never match the amount of reactions of old releases. Is there any historical data available about the number of users and comments?
What happened was "make 64k great again", and so they did.
4k and 64k intros has much more focus on design and direction, than technical achievements in the last decade.
<3 the scene isn’t dead yet. Come on you guys!
Did I get it right, the problem is not the actual intros and compos and parties themselves, but the lack of meta stuff on Pouet or elsewhere? I think there are lots of great intros being released all the time, in great compos on great parties, and whatever happens on Pouet is secondary.
We just need to try harder!
No matter how polished some raymarchers look, they make me yawn.
Do something new! Do something real. Take it outside as well. Make the public part of the demo. Become aware & more social-minded/oriented. Take your demos up a notch please.
[[Earth got into music after some aliens crash landed a perfectly functioning glockenspiel into a swamp in New Zealand, that was some time before homosapiens as we know them now existed]]
Backstory to a small project I’m trying out. ^
Got assets.
I’m dyscalculic but great at chaos. RNG. So if you wanna combine those together: https://youtu.be/S6MnT3vk9rs this is with clinkster and is still 4.7k lol :D ok well I tried but the Soundtrack came first. Tune is on scene.org ftp in exe format. 👍👍
[[Earth got into music after some aliens crash landed a perfectly functioning glockenspiel into a swamp in New Zealand, that was some time before homosapiens as we know them now existed]]
Backstory to a small project I’m trying out. ^
Got assets.
I’m dyscalculic but great at chaos. RNG. So if you wanna combine those together: https://youtu.be/S6MnT3vk9rs this is with clinkster and is still 4.7k lol :D ok well I tried but the Soundtrack came first. Tune is on scene.org ftp in exe format. 👍👍
(Forgot the link and also how to html]
woops
.>
this is the public outreach effort 👍 it was a gift I sent in after the win.
3LN @ ULA lol :D!
I am a robot, sorry I ate the bbq ]]
Bowchickswow 4K come ooooooooon folks!
woops
.>
this is the public outreach effort 👍 it was a gift I sent in after the win.
3LN @ ULA lol :D!
I am a robot, sorry I ate the bbq ]]
Bowchickswow 4K come ooooooooon folks!
Quote:
No matter how polished some raymarchers look, they make me yawn.
I feel the same, lets be honest here, we've all seen visuals that relied on light as a medium, its nothing new really, once you've seen one illuminated pixel you've seen them all, its pretty lame... I was thinking about doing my next 4k on an etch-a-sketch but then I realized that, if you just look close enough(but not too close), it's ultimately the same concept of setting up individual wavelength filters on some kind of multidimensional grid...
I came to the conclusion that anything that results in some kind of projection onto your fovea and retina looks the same no matter how polished it is. However instead of being devastated by this fact, thinking that everything is the same and I've seen it all, telling everybody how boring this light stuff is, I set out to find a solution to the problem, I set out to discover something fresh, something nobody had ever seen before! At first it seemed like squaring the circle, every "solution" I came up with, every experiment I conducted, it all turned out to be based on wavelengths that interact with your retina...
One day, tired of my seemingly hopeless endeavour I sank my head into the palms of my hands, and all of the sudden the solution revealed itself to me, it was in front my eyes the whole time! While I sunk my head into my hands I was accidentally applying physical pressure to my eyeballs that resulted in strange visual phenomena in spite of the absence of any visual wavelengths interacting with my retina. I quickly found out that these were called phosphenes and known to mankind since antiquity, so after I conducted a myriad of studies it showed that offering people to excerpt physical pressure to their eyeballs did not result in any significant number of participants so I settled for offering hallucinogenic drugs which (unexpectedly!) had a very high rate of participation!
One night however, drunk by the success of my research(and 5g of mexican mushrooms) it hit me out of nowhere: in the end it doesn't matter what technique was used to trigger the neurons in your visual cortex, the final outcome of a raymarched tunnel geometry is the same as a rastered polygon tunnel geometry, same goes for everything else, there is no visual difference introduced by the technique that was used to determine if a certain surface is visible on screen or not since there is no necessary implication on how the resolved surface is shaded. My worldview was altered for ever, no matter how I twisted or turned it, like the dot product of one and the same vector I was enlightened with the one and only singular truth: its just not related.
Quote:
I feel the same, lets be honest here, we've all seen visuals that relied on light as a medium, its nothing new really, once you've seen one illuminated pixel you've seen them all, its pretty lame... I was thinking about doing my next 4k on an etch-a-sketch but then I realized that, if you just look close enough(but not too close), it's ultimately the same concept of setting up individual wavelength filters on some kind of multidimensional grid...
I came to the conclusion that anything that results in some kind of projection onto your fovea and retina looks the same no matter how polished it is. However instead of being devastated by this fact, thinking that everything is the same and I've seen it all, telling everybody how boring this light stuff is, I set out to find a solution to the problem, I set out to discover something fresh, something nobody had ever seen before! At first it seemed like squaring the circle, every "solution" I came up with, every experiment I conducted, it all turned out to be based on wavelengths that interact with your retina...
One day, tired of my seemingly hopeless endeavour I sank my head into the palms of my hands, and all of the sudden the solution revealed itself to me, it was in front my eyes the whole time! While I sunk my head into my hands I was accidentally applying physical pressure to my eyeballs that resulted in strange visual phenomena in spite of the absence of any visual wavelengths interacting with my retina. I quickly found out that these were called phosphenes and known to mankind since antiquity, so after I conducted a myriad of studies it showed that offering people to excerpt physical pressure to their eyeballs did not result in any significant number of participants so I settled for offering hallucinogenic drugs which (unexpectedly!) had a very high rate of participation!
One night however, drunk by the success of my research(and 5g of mexican mushrooms) it hit me out of nowhere: in the end it doesn't matter what technique was used to trigger the neurons in your visual cortex, the final outcome of a raymarched tunnel geometry is the same as a rastered polygon tunnel geometry, same goes for everything else, there is no visual difference introduced by the technique that was used to determine if a certain surface is visible on screen or not since there is no necessary implication on how the resolved surface is shaded. My worldview was altered for ever, no matter how I twisted or turned it, like the dot product of one and the same vector I was enlightened with the one and only singular truth: its just not related.
yeah but discontinuity artifacts
which you won't see on a polished intro just as you won't see any z-fighting or clipping on a polished rasterized intro.
Quote:
so I settled for offering hallucinogenic drugs
You offered drugs? :)))
Demoscene midlife crisis :)
lol LJ
@LJ: so deep thoughts =)
on the other hand, can't say anything about "4k's are not THAT nowadays than 5/10/20/10^6 years, so dunno :)
on the other hand, can't say anything about "4k's are not THAT nowadays than 5/10/20/10^6 years, so dunno :)
