pouët.net

Oh. OK. Sorry, didn't see that.

You criticising the was a-okay, it just became somewhat tedious when you randomly repeated the same thing over and over again.

What Krill was saying with his ironic statement is that everything would "normalize" again. People want to see bullshit, otherwise there won't be a market for Facebook Reels. And that we as those "who are stuck with the past and who are not ahead of the pack" have to accept that the world is always developing like that.

And that there's no way to defend the demoscene from this kind of degradation.

Face it, 4gentE, IT'S OVER! ;-)

OK, I understand if I did that. I'm not so sure I did it, but if I did, I understand.

It's over. The bastards killed Kenny. ;-)

There was no irony, or which statement do you refer to?

Clearly no irony!

I was serious. What is demoscene if not trying to surpass other people's productions?

Forgotten knowledge? The old machines at least are better documentated than ever. The information is available to everyone with a few mouseclicks. When this stuff was new I didn't even know where to order the real reference manuals. Instead I spent all my money for expensive rip-off books from publishing houses in my native language, for about twice the money and half the information.

Where you get the motivation from? That's an interesting topic. I would ask myself if I'm doing this for cheering people, and if I'd do this even if there were no cheering people at all. I have a few answers to that, but of course they are personal and might not apply to everybody :-)

I was thinking more of "visual" knowledge about perspective, proportions, lighting, color theory, brushstrokes, manual pixel placement etc. But let's stick to motivation. One can possess such a knowledge but be discouraged from using it because what's the point in a world described there by Krill.

How's your handwriting skill? Mine is increasingly shitty because I type everything.

Hasn't that already happen to a degree, due to the ever-increasing focus on code and technical achievements? In the late 90s and early 2000s there seemed to be a wave of interest in design and making stuff look cool, but it seems like most of that was replaced by raymarched fractals at some point.

So, I submitted that pic at Syntax 2023 pixel graphics compo. It has pretty much all that technical mambo-jumbo you are describing and more (storytelling, composition etc). And yet when it goes to peoples' preferences, it trails behind a (yet another) cutesy cat face and barely manages to stay ahead of a (yet another) skull with an 'aftereffects' layer.

Now, I know both those pics are from respected people in the C64 scene who do know their stuff when it comes to producing nice pixel pics. I don't want to disregard their work, and in no way to complain about that compo result.

I only bring this up because you are talking about how a graphician should feel and his motivation. Put AI aside for a second. Should I be getting discouraged from entering compos with a platform other than C64 or Amiga, then? Should I be getting discouraged from entering compos with anything outside the 'girl-face, skull, cute animal' all-star triptych? Should I get inline with 'scene politics' that go by the norms of 'platform vote', 'group vote'?

Nah, because the prior reason I do my pixels is the personal satisfaction. Then, it's the people I can relate to. Finally, it's the fact that, if I didn't make/release those pixels within the demoscene, I wouldn't have made them in the first place. I am not an illustrator nor a graphics designer (I do work in the broader graphics design area, but I don't consider myself to be one).

Will AI crap in the scene make any difference at all with regards to what I do and why I do it? Nope, I will continue to do the stuff that make me happy. Ofcourse it's not the same for everyone. Some scene graphicians have their concerns and they do express it. Within that 'how to regulate it, then' context, I wrote a few ideas some pages ago, and that's all I could contribute to the matter, I think. So, please don't just assume that every scene graphician should have absolutely the same concerns and/or same way of thinking. And please keep in mind that potentially de-motivating things are happening in the demoscene since ever and it's the very people involved in the demoscene who chose to not give more than 2 cents about it.

100% what rexbeng wrote.

Plus, if we're going to talk about "discouraging" people to enter the scene, my hot take would be that the upvoting/downvoting system on this very website has caused far more inertia around this, right here and now in the present, than AI could speculatively cause in the future. I know this for a fact - so many people raise it, and just this weekend at a demoparty two people who were respectively "totally new" and "wanting to do more future stuff" raised the fear of downthumbing/snappy negative comments on here as something holding them back. They didn't talk about AI.

And hey, if we want to go analytic about it (as on previous pages of this thread), that *can* be discussed in relation to the modern forms of communication technology that have reshaped the nature of work and the labour market (example: when you're leaving a store and there's a touch screen smiley face/sad face thing to rate your customer service experience).

If negative comments and downthumbs discourage them rather than motivate to improve their skills, then.... they may be a bad fit for demoscene.

I know of at least one demoscener quitting due to the "state of art" in making animdemos...

I don't understand you guys. I just can't get why exactly should we applaud this grifting tech that aims to deskill and exploit people. The tech that wants to relieve people of what we came to call "creative work". Because it can be used creatively? Really? So can anything, as I mention before. What is this? "Give art back to engineers"? But OK. Maybe I'm just too old.

Nobody said you should applaud it. Please stop making things up over and over and over again, and accuse people of their wrongdoings and questionable ethics based on your hallucinations. Please.

It's quite interesting you know how sceners need to feel and react ;-) It's not always about surpassing other people's production or satifsying all the other people in our little subculture in order to make them give you a thumb!

Because what rexbang said:



Actually it is that simple. Better work with those people. Because when they get "sorted out" i.e. their craft is being done by an AI-driven technology, then there's also less reason to do pixels to get this personal satisfaction. That makes them suffer and will make this community starve out.

OK. Goodbye. Great prod. Keep it up!

That's more the effect and not the cause - starting from 2007 realtime graphical quality jumped up, we didn't do proper outreach to new artists and focused a lot of our demoscene presentation on coders, coders didn't want to spend time creating tooling UX to pull / keep artists in, potential artists saw Unity and UE and got used to that standard, and now have no use for the scene, coders now just do raymarched fractals because that's what you can do without an artist.

The AI syndrome is basically just a result of all of that, with coders saying "raymarched fractals, but I need some textures / pictures on top of it too but I don't want to deal with artists", and of course some artists make demos in UE / Unity because they don't want to deal with coders.

So yeah, we're in a great place.

Another false dichotomy? :) I mean, yes, yes of course. Also i thought people would have gotten the memo by now that "we" don't care so much about the thumbs. =)

Hey, I'm pretty sure one could make a quick diagram of the main arguments & counter-arguments, or we could go on for 25 more pages, ahah :)

Then depending on one's own motives, the personal conclusion could be drawn. I'm no artist, but personally I'd have trouble disregarding the context (required efforts // existing tools and other productions). I tend to think the scene is a very peculiar social & technical alchemy. There must be a common reason why it gets back to such an active state in the last few years.

I read " or we could go on for 25 more years, ahah " =)