pouët.net

what we need is more 8k compos. revision has the only one. :(

This.
We acually rushed our 8k because of this.

And whilst many things are unthinkable to do in a 4k, there's really no thing that you can make in 16k that you can't do in 8k. In 8k e.g. there's room for things like order independent transparency, animated meshes with gpu tessellation LOD, mixing raymarching, mesh rendering and tons of PP effects, lots of sync data, 32 midi channels of good sounding music, etc. 8k clearly is more than 2*4k.

I'd like to hear how 16k would be more than 2*8k.

Just make a fixed number of unnamed compos at parties, and sort the entries into similar groups... music, graphics, do some probability analysis on intro sizes and group them into slots...

Same as LJ, smash, fizzer, xtr1m, etc...

Intro compo classes currently represented at major parties include 1k, 4k, 8k and 64k (not counting non-modern platforms and byteintros, different domain). All of these serve a very specific purpose.

1k is the category where managing to cram anything worthwhile into is a respectable feat. In 8k as long as you approach it with the correct mindset you can pretty much do anything you want (I don't think we've come even close to the category's potential). 4k lies somewhere inbetween where you can do almost anything within a single domain as long as you restrict yourself to certain features and design the tech around your content; it's painful but feasible and that's where the surprise aspect comes from.

64k is a wholly different domain again where you really don't have any limits as long as you're able to generate it via code, and we're getting better and better at that.

The thing about 16k is that you either accumulate too much overhead doing it the 64k way or struggle to actually fill and complete the 16 kilobytes doing it the 1-8k way. We've seen that 8k already proves to be a challenge. By all means though please make 16k intros if you feel there would be potential there, but I haven't seen any actual coder wanting to explore it. (Or well, actually I remember viznut years ago suggesting it since it'd lie "nicely" between 4k and 64k, since 4x4 is 16 and 4x16 is 64. This is a silly "engineer person argument" imo though that's only attracted to a neat looking pattern without actually examining practical aspects of the proposal.)

Thank you for your participation and insight and making this a serious thread <3

So it looks like the time for 16k is at least not now and we will have to look forward to how 8k is evolving.
Since we have a combined intro compo at Nordlicht anyway this was more of a hypothetical idea (although there are ideas for an exclusive tinysize compo too - stay tuned).

what baffled me is how revision didn't have a 256byte compo, despite having many 256b entries. they are one of the pinnacles for Function and played a huge role at Demobit too, thought it's a thing everywhere, at least deserving its own category.

sorry, didn't mean to derail the conversation. 16k, yaaaay and stuff :)

In case you didn't know, Revision didn't have (m)any 256 byte in previous years and this was an attempt by several sizecoders to get some attention for their beloved 256b category. ;)

When we stared doing the PC 8k compo at revision it was probably because of two main reasons:
- we (maybe "I" would be a bit more precise here) wanted to make it happen.
- there was a clear demand for something "in between" from a not too small group of people (hi, yeah - you still know who you are).

I don't see that demand for 16k or 128k at all.
But while we are at it: I clearly see that demand for 256b (Yeah - we got the memo!).

It also doesn't really matter to me whether other parties adapt it or not, as long there are people enjoying that type of competition while it is being explored (and I think the experiment is showing very promising results). As someone who organizes that particular compo, I wouldn't recommend anyone organizing a smaller party to open up "yet another compo" in the 4k - 64k range - you are increasing the chance that you have to merge competitions which IMHO always sucks. If you magically know beforehand that there will be enough releases, no problem - but I really don't like it when compos are being combined during the party.

Furthermore, I like size-coding a lot and kind of disagree with smash. Simply given the number of entries in the demo compo, the barrier to enter anything there is seemingly pretty low already. ;)

There's nothing wrong with just trying something new - just try it and see what happens. If people like it they will do it - if not, well then just don't do it again - maybe try something else.

If you don't want to experiment: IMHO the right question(s) to ask is(/are) whether there are enough competitors who want to take part in a certain type of competition (and maybe also whether it is interesting/impressive enough to watch for everyone else). Technicalities are secondary and do not matter at all if no one wants to do it and it's boring as hell to watch.

My answers to the above questions w.r.t. 16k would be: Absolutely not interested in doing one, but I would watch and probably enjoy such a compo.

I'm slowly starting to warm up to the concept of the 8k compo. 16k would make more sense (256b*4=1k*4=4k*4=16k*4=64k), but 4k has gotten popular enough where there are "overflow" intros that didn't compress well enough or they wanted to add just a little bit more. So I see it as more of a "4k expanded" compo to complement the 4k. I think One of those Days helped me see the value in 8k (and to a lesser extent, the Nexus 7/Second Reality remakes).

We had this "what do we do? 16k/8k/nothing/something?" discussion in ~2013 and the "general" consensus was like: "while 16k is definitely the nicer number, 8k is right now the more interesting option for those interested in an extra category at all". It wasn't an arbitrary choice.

I reckon we'd just spend it on vocal samples ;)

Not at Revision you wouldn't. ;)

Agree with Smash - introduce conceptual constraints instead. It’s perhaps more difficult to come up with, but also potentially more interesting than another technical constraint.

If you like the idea of a particular 16k / 32k / 40k / 128k / conceptual / whatever compo: Go organize one at your next demoparty!

8k is already enough for that. In 8k you can do advanced rendering, elaborate music and detailed scripting, all at once, as xTr1m also points out.

8k is 4k without the compromises. Those compromises are what makes 4k in my opinion the most interesting of all categories.

The 8k category is still young. Every 8k compo has me eagerly awaiting the intros that transcend the limits of 4k and become something more. That are not just 4k intros without compromises. That anticipation sort of gives the 8k category merits in itself, but maybe in a more meta way. :)

In 8k you can also choose a design concept, figure out a way to do it and do it. In 4k you should really only do it if there is a good match between your design concept and technical concept. There is a certain element of luck in hitting those (technical) concepts that turns out to be a good/possible 4k fit in the end.

You can do advanced rendering stuff in a 8k (just not too much of it / too much content), you can allow yourself to optimize for speed if necessary etc. But direction wise you are mostly still searching for good random seeds and the like ;)

A serious 16k would be more into a 64k context in regards to modelling, editor etc (as hardy says). It's not feasible / not the right priorities, especially direction wise, to try to expand the 1-8k way of doing things to a 16k. I guess point of a 16k category would be to make it a less intimidating 64k, but that probably wouldn't be the case.

And yes, as smash says, another kind of limited-amount-of-work-even-if-its-good demo compo should be preferred over another size category. Short time limits, effect compos with a certain theme (the recent amiga effect challenges springs to mind) etc. Something you can do in a few days and still feel somewhat proud about.

indeed.
sizecoding compos are inherently coder-centric, and beyond that biased towards one very narrow kind of coding. (there's a reason i pretty much hate sizecoding nowadays. :) )
the set of compos on offer both reflect and affect the kind of people and productions you have in the scene. there's little doubt sizecoding has become a lot more popular over the last 20 years but the amount of artists+designers working on (pc) demos has decreased over the same timeframe. the sizecoding compos reinforce that trend in a feedback loop.

id really love to see more realtime compo options for artists & designers (even working alone e.g. via unity/tooll etc) and for coders who care about other things than sizecoding, and which are limited enough to allow something to be made and polished to a good standard in just a few days. so it's not a hard binary choice between releasing nothing or stretching out a limited amount of content/ideas/time to several minutes of dull.

we (notch) ran a compo earlier this year where there was a 30 second time limit, it had to run realtime and the soundtrack was provided upfront, and it worked out really well with 30 entries. https://www.notch.one/crowned-notchmeister-001/

I concur; I think sizecoding is already satured enough, adding more would just head towards some sort of bizarro-singularity of having 65535 different compos between 1b and 64k.

That being said - and this is me as an "organizer" speaking - one of the practical reasons sizecoding is nice is that it's a very easily measured metric - you look at the file size and it's right there. (The same is true for quasi-fixed oldskool platforms.) You could start doing framerate- or memory-use-bound compos, but those depend heavily on the execution environment. Time limits can be interesting, cos they're easy to measure, but then it might be underwhelming when a demo loads longer than it runs; that kinda lends itself to the idea that perhaps a "10 second demo-loop" compo is fun, but then how would you ensure that it's a loop and not something evolving - which would be great, but would defeat the purpose? We floated around an idea for the first NVScene to have some sort of SDK-based compo where there'd be a central software doing the mix with between the effects with a fixed audio track but it was just turning out to be a pain because of the various APIs and so on.

The Notch compo works because it is a by-design walled garden (since it's - let's face it - corporate interest to keep it that way) but once you step outside that you will find that most limitations are either not fun or implausible to keep track of.

@fizzer: asking just for my general interest :) I got similar lecture this year at Revision - you do 8k when you suck in 4k, you do 16k when you are just lazy to do 8k? I guess only 64k is something different...that's what you said?

Nah, that´s not what fizzer said!

But even before there was an official 8K-Competition at Revision, often people had a nice concept, which in the end just didn´t fit into 4096 bytes, so people called it "8k" and entered into the 64k-competition.
There may have been some few intros that were treated the same way as deadline approached and there was simply no time left to get it below the limit.

Now with an 8K-competition at Revision one always can opt to drop it into the 8k-compo (instead of into the 64k-compo), and knowing that in the back of your head may lead to just overdeveloping a prod that was planned as 4k, but you know you can always enter the 8k, so...

What fizzer said is that with an additional 16k-category everyone would just make something and enter it where it fits filesize-wise in the end!

No1 sucks! Everyone who does small stuff rulez! ;)

well, while reading all the reviews for the prods after every bigger demoparty, that's the still the essence of the demoscene :) - 'yeah man, awesome what did you make in that mini-intro'; or I've seen somewhere - nice PC demo, but should have been 64k rather :)



sounds like a mess :)

But don't misunderstand, visually I love those small-size categories too, just trying to get a point why the other like it too...but I think I answered it myself before - the essence of the demoscene :)

I wasn't implying that 8k is for people who can't do 4k, I meant that having a complete series of logarithmic exe size categories leads to a disregard for the size and thus misses the point of sizecoding in the first place.

Gargaj already made some rhetoric about allowing a trend of adding more size categories, but the practical limit state there is to have only one category without a size limit, and allow the audience to judge a demo by it's executable size. I think no-one would be in favour of that for the same reason that we don't put PC demos in the same compo as Amiga demos.

Demos were size limited to sizes like 16MB/64MB/128MB not too long ago.

and demos used to be handed in on floppy disks :)