What are you going to do once the demoscene is dead?
category: residue [glöplog]
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Growing up today is much more doom and gloom. What would a today's teenager see? First of all, a constant pressure to conform. Do as you're ordered, or get canceled. Talk to others as if you were walking on eggshells. One wrong word to a girl, and you're forever a pariah.
Those teenagers must be so lucky to have your support
I was wondering (a little bit) why this thread would be in "residue" but I can now figure out the perfect explanation after reading the link Darya posted.
No comments. Better this way before it derails into a disgusting pit.
No comments. Better this way before it derails into a disgusting pit.
Things move on. I was wondering why the demoscene is doing those GBs demos in game engines and AI driven stuff and if there is an UltraSatanIDE on Atari and 4MBs of RAM then someone will use it to it's full extend as to make something that looks more bloated than in the past. If the potential exists, things will be moving there.
It's even true with real life software where people always wonder why modern software seems as bloated or even more maybe than in the past when we have so powerful computers and clever compilers yet it seems to get worse. We tend to talk that programmer's quality has decreased, they don't teach stuff at the universities, but I think sometimes old programmers will abuse the new technologies in ways that make things more bloated. Because they can. Because the same thing in an old computer would not fly, so they'd have to optimize. But now if you write some basic or even bad code that does the thing and maybe is a tiny bit unresponsive but not much, it passes.
Not a complain, just realizing there is a natural entropic force, where with more technology people will abuse it. It's just that some of us were interesting in the scene from the technical standpoint so you don't see that anymore as much.
It's even true with real life software where people always wonder why modern software seems as bloated or even more maybe than in the past when we have so powerful computers and clever compilers yet it seems to get worse. We tend to talk that programmer's quality has decreased, they don't teach stuff at the universities, but I think sometimes old programmers will abuse the new technologies in ways that make things more bloated. Because they can. Because the same thing in an old computer would not fly, so they'd have to optimize. But now if you write some basic or even bad code that does the thing and maybe is a tiny bit unresponsive but not much, it passes.
Not a complain, just realizing there is a natural entropic force, where with more technology people will abuse it. It's just that some of us were interesting in the scene from the technical standpoint so you don't see that anymore as much.
I (repeatedly) fail to see what exactly makes quite a lot of people in the scene like, or even love bloated MB (or evenGB) demos that look exactly like sub-mediocre music videos. The applause they give out to such artifacts grants those artifacts their raison d’etre. Turns out itks possible present a sub-mediocre music video as a state of the art demo. Get celebrated even. While I can certainly understand the amount of work required, those things do nothing for me. So, obviously, demoscene has many faces…
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It's just that some of us were interesting in the scene from the technical standpoint so you don't see that anymore as much.
I agree. There are now fantasy consoles with artificial technical limits, but artificial limits are not so interesting as real limits.
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…artificial limits are not so interesting as real limits
I got slightly ridiculed in this forum just for mentioning that there is a difference between realworld (hardware) limits and artificial (self-imposed, cultural) limits. The only valid point I remember from that episode with which I can agree is that the very choice of vintage hardware can be considered an artificial (self-imposed, cultural) limit.
There is some truth to that, like even in real hardware we purpose artifical limits, from the max size of a demo, to tiny intros like 256b, which unless you make a boot sector intro, it won't make a sense. It's more like a convention, like in the 90s one could technically make a 200MB demo on 486 as a standard HD at the time would alike (so it's not like expansion hardware was used like in the case of the STE demos), but it was absurd for the time so artificial limits for demos at compos and a general sense helped to not go overboard a sensible at the times size.
But anyway, fantasy console don't attract me as much for the reason that the hardware is so over the place, like no real sense of limitations or historical perspective, is it comparable to an 8bit computer as it looks like such or early 32bit in power? Strangely though, a lot more of the pico8/tic-80 stuff are displaying quite interesting effects, so it's an inspiration of ideas. Probably coders not having to care much about the technical details will become more inventive with shapes and animations.
But anyway, fantasy console don't attract me as much for the reason that the hardware is so over the place, like no real sense of limitations or historical perspective, is it comparable to an 8bit computer as it looks like such or early 32bit in power? Strangely though, a lot more of the pico8/tic-80 stuff are displaying quite interesting effects, so it's an inspiration of ideas. Probably coders not having to care much about the technical details will become more inventive with shapes and animations.
There are no conceivable 200mb worth of assets that make sense on a normal 486 machine - they don't fit in the memory and even if they did, there's not enough clock cycles to use them. However there are plenty of massive assets that make sense on a modern system.
Probably some streaming then from HD. But would not make sense if someone had to download that from a BBS at the time.
I had this dilemma with 3DO for example. The CD-ROM is part of the original hardware. It wouldn't be absurd to offload data streams of precalced textured polygon scenes and show something extraordinary but not being realtime 3d (STNICCC is the same after all). But it would not be something interesting to me. I also had some discussion with someone from the 3DO discord. He made a Bad Apple demo but streamed as video and we wondered if it would make more sense as a demo if we stored it as polygons instead and rendered with the quad rasterizer of the 3DO. But then I felt like what's the point if we already run it as a video data stream? Then I lost interest and preferred to do realtime 3D on the console (and STNICCC is an exception :).
I had this dilemma with 3DO for example. The CD-ROM is part of the original hardware. It wouldn't be absurd to offload data streams of precalced textured polygon scenes and show something extraordinary but not being realtime 3d (STNICCC is the same after all). But it would not be something interesting to me. I also had some discussion with someone from the 3DO discord. He made a Bad Apple demo but streamed as video and we wondered if it would make more sense as a demo if we stored it as polygons instead and rendered with the quad rasterizer of the 3DO. But then I felt like what's the point if we already run it as a video data stream? Then I lost interest and preferred to do realtime 3D on the console (and STNICCC is an exception :).