pouët.net

Hello everyone!

I am officially on summer vacation from college, and I wanted to fully enjoy it. Along side some other things (visit places I never went in Rio, meet up with people in the FGC, visit my family...), I wanted to learn a lot about demomaking during my vacation.

I already have dabbled in a bit of Processing (and its demo toolkit), but I also want to expand my horizons and learn other tools (cables.gl, OpenGL...) and other parts of demos outside of coding (graphics and music).

What kinds of tips do you recommend to get as much experience in the demoscene until the beginning of February (the beginning of classes)?

P.S.: I already know about psenough's guide, but if anyone can provide tips on how to use it well, feel free to do so.

P.P.S.: I know some degree of Python and have also dabbled a little in Unreal Engine and Godot.

I think at this point writing a release and finding out what your specific questions are, might be a good approach :) Writing actual demos helps a lot when trying to improve. Source: I learned it that way.

Me personally, I find cables.gl to be a very interesting tool, because the CustomShader op gives you automatic sliders for all uniforms in your shader code - neat! Also it lets you export a releasable demo directly from the tool.

unreal / godot are also fine tools tho. Work with any of them and find out what you like or what's missing.

In my opinion, what's much more important than facts and tools, is to find like-minded people to share ideas with and experiment and improve as a team.

Or improve without a team. ;o)
Both is possible.

a team tends to speed up the process on learning / knowing some things and can also be a motivator to get things done.

on the other hand: dealing with other people, urgh!

would agree with NR4: just try to make a demo, get or make some music, figure out a simple storyboard that you can realistically accomplish, and just start tackling it one scene at a time. cables or tooll would be good places to start. processing or tic80 also good places to do a first demo on.

THIS! ;o)

practice brings experience. and the bonus thing about practice is that you'll find out which tools work for you and which don't

By the way, could anyone suggest a demo template for cables? Like, not a single scene, but a decent demo project with some typical management being done - several scenes switched, resource preloading, soundtrack syncing? I haven't seen such stuff there, to my surprise.

Here's an actual minimalistic demo template!
Also, if you check out the "demo" tag you will also find quite a few demos, for example Hallmackenreuther. Hope that helps :)

Especially jazz musicians…

they're the worst

Hello again!

After going to a lot of places (including some of the links here) and revisiting the psenough guide, I'm still lost.

Is this a case of "writer's block", or I just haven't dug deeper?

Thanks a lot, exactly what I wanted! Wow, it seems there are way more projects with the demo tag nowadays =)))

Old Potato here.

There was no how-to. One simply tested what computers could do. If one still wants to do that (which I don\t really know why, most people went on a long time ago) maybe demo for games programming?

"Demo" in the sense of po(ü)et has become a cultic phenomena, thus "how-tos" as if there are cultic rules. It has little to do with the early demostage of computers.

Most people are mad in the games industry though, so you might still have a chance.