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smash: you can always do what Gargajs post shows with dope -- maybe with a big red arrow pointing to the transparent object?

Isn't that what Frameranger tried? :)

jco: lol, wins the thread to me.

Definition of effect (from Oxford Dictionaries):



Even for a rotating cube, you could say that the rotation (on its own) is even an effect.

Here's a list over socalled oldschool demoeffects.

In the real world there is also a number of different types of effects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_effects
You also have Special effects, Visual effects: SFX, VFX,... and so on.

And there is the cause and effect idiom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality.

We should make a compo for demos without effects.

Been there, done that. *yawns*

Like youtube kinda "Marinows" or "NoDemo"

Thanks for making this thread, I freely admit I was one of those people who was rather firmly in the"press magic button, get cool demo" camp whenever I saw Notch, Unity or UE being used. I'm glad this thread has made me think it through a bit more and made me reconsider my opinion.

As to the topic at hand, we've always had this discussion. We will always have it. Whenever something new comes along, mainly for PC, we will have this discussion. What is a demo? How is it made? What is ok? What is not? Is it to show off technical skills or design skills? Or both? Is it different for different platforms? Is it ok that it is or should a newschool demo and an oldschool demo mean the same? Are size limited productions somehow better?

I'm old enough to remember the rage when people wanted to use graphics cards for demos and not make everything themselves. When parties existed with separate demo compos for software and hardware rendering (see Magic, it's been done already). Or, heh, with a separate compo for demos made in Java (same party, different year).

Or then, when graphics cards were more accepted, when someone wanted to use the newest card with all the possibilities they offered (hello smash, navis), while the rest couldn't afford them. Huge drama!

Doesn't stop with the PC though. Read the end scroller in Robotic Liberation. Watch BluREU and make up your mind about whether it's a C64 demo or not. Should Aga demos run smooth on 020 to be real demos?

My point, I guess, is that there will be as many people who have an idea what a demo is and what it's for as there are people in the demoscene. I'm pretty sure we'll never get to a stage where everyone agrees (maybe apart from it having to be real time).

As such, I think it should be up to the organizers of the given competition to set the rules for that competition. Don't like their rules? Well, that sucks for you, but their party, their rules. And for now, that means that all you can do is either judge the demo according to your own thoughts on what a demo should be - or wether it follows the rules - or both, and let everyone else do the same.

Oh and also, the Orange demo rocks. Should they have told us they used UE on a slide? Possibly. Do we need to discuss it for 14 pages? Possibly not..

I'm reminded by an earlier discussion about what counts as effects ...

Knowing the platform and size limit should be enough for everyone.

Seeing as sceners are dropping out majorly every year and the uptake of new people is but a trickle, I'm not really sure what other method for having that 'party blockbuster' scene of yore exists. Getting a coder and designer free at the same time is super difficult in any group now (not musicians, there's billions of those) , so if you want more than a few big PC demos in 2018 I don't really see where these contributors are going to come from. tbh with both the big 3rd party engines personally I'm writing enough code and shaders just in using them, so I don't have a problem with them being in demos.

I feel you may belittle the issue at hand. This is about the role of coding in demos now. It is perhaps a larger issue than 3D accelerator cards or Vic-20 memory expansions - regardless of one's opinion.

For musicians, if you have trouble getting your music used in a demo, slap some visuals together with the music. You'll probably make better music sync than most coders.

No I think she's right on the money; 3D accelerators were the same debate, basically "now 3D is too easy, noone has to code polyfillers anymore", then there was a transitional period of really boring 3D flybys because that's where effort stopped, and then when shaders came along things slowly became interesting again.

Of course the sideeffect then was that software rendering effectively died out.

On PC :D

I do see a near future where demos and intros( you read right, stay tuned) will be done in unity, unreal engine and notch.

And only in these engines

For me it looks that the supposed easiness has been just one issue on this thread and saying that the other side is just complaining about easiness is a misrepresentation of their views.

With shaders and raymarching etc, software rendering has come back. It feels fun to code just like making basic 3D, gouraud and texture mapping and env mapping and bump mapping etc did back in the day. And 4klang feels fun like trackers. And you can even extend it. It's just that the fun is in 4k size. 1k is also fun to make. 64k is not fun to make, and big demos are not fun to even watch. (Though I try to, because it feels like an obligation)

as in "in no other engines" or "not without engines"?

I'm having a hard time seeing how you'd improve, say, the 4k workflow much by using an engine. You can't use any of the provided rendering help and you definitely can't use the engine itself. The timeline editors etc could be usable, but then again most 4ks have procedural camera paths etc exactly because storing them explicitly would take too much space.

For 64ks they might be neat tho, if just for directing.

Ok, they also think that knowing when exactly to flip that bit in $D011 is somehow a higher form of craft or art than let's say making millions of particles dance in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Also, no, it's definitely not the end of coding. Adding custom code in UE or Unity will always give you an edge above those who just use the timelining tools (which are pretty recent btw. I remember times where you couldn't even rotate a cube in Unity without code), writing your own shaders will always give you ways to express yourself that a stock engine will not, and even if you don't write a single line of code - the optimization challenges aka making your stuff run at least remotely well in realtime on your machine are the fucking same, regardless if you type some text into a text editor or fumble around in a graph with the mouse.

We need more Unlimited Detail!

made with Unlimited Detail Suite XXLeet

you mean like that Euclidean Engine thing? ^__^

You could, but unless you were being completely context unaware and just straight up argumentative, you wouldn't. On that topic, here's another word from the Oxford Dictionary: