The Demoscene might not be about limitations anymore
category: general [glöplog]
The trend we're clearly seeing is: Removing limits, not Demoscenish celebrating them and working within them. Where's the actual beating the limits? Where's the grit and personality and expression, as opposed to slick and popular?
It's fear. Everyone so afraid of not winning, going for the popular and slick and not the progressive, feared to not be appreciated for the achievement. If you did well, you will be appreciated by me. Don't be afraid.
And where's the achievement with these forces (datalumps, gigabytes of APIs and frameworks despite DosBox running at fantasy-CPU speeds, replay, non-realtime, using the best tools available, using AI to help you even if you know how to code, overly powerful compression to fit old stale size limits that should be lowered).
Didn't we have fun working actually within the limits? Don't the limits breed creativity anymore? I just think they still do! :)
Isn't the truth that many sceners blame lack of time as grownups to warrant being lazy and taking advantage of powerful tools and too-generous size limits etc in compos?
This has been on my mind lately.
Things have changed around prods over decades, but we're bearded old men stuckin our way apparently, and so we're not changing the limits of the prods. Are we really about proving whose compo machine runs the fastest? Isn't that insane?
With this, by limiting tools and sizes, the cheating winners, the animation replays (Bad Apple by any other name, if you would stink as foul), the AI users are placed in the PD, not Demoscene category. I'm being provocative here to crank out some arguments why this view (updating limits including sizes and tools with the times, after decades) is wrong from a creativity standpoint.
It's fear. Everyone so afraid of not winning, going for the popular and slick and not the progressive, feared to not be appreciated for the achievement. If you did well, you will be appreciated by me. Don't be afraid.
And where's the achievement with these forces (datalumps, gigabytes of APIs and frameworks despite DosBox running at fantasy-CPU speeds, replay, non-realtime, using the best tools available, using AI to help you even if you know how to code, overly powerful compression to fit old stale size limits that should be lowered).
Didn't we have fun working actually within the limits? Don't the limits breed creativity anymore? I just think they still do! :)
Isn't the truth that many sceners blame lack of time as grownups to warrant being lazy and taking advantage of powerful tools and too-generous size limits etc in compos?
This has been on my mind lately.
Things have changed around prods over decades, but we're bearded old men stuckin our way apparently, and so we're not changing the limits of the prods. Are we really about proving whose compo machine runs the fastest? Isn't that insane?
With this, by limiting tools and sizes, the cheating winners, the animation replays (Bad Apple by any other name, if you would stink as foul), the AI users are placed in the PD, not Demoscene category. I'm being provocative here to crank out some arguments why this view (updating limits including sizes and tools with the times, after decades) is wrong from a creativity standpoint.
Idk what you’re talking about, still plenty of limits around and nobody’s forcing you to go outside of them
I disagree AI is without limitations. The token prices are quite steep these days ;)
Transhuman/Pachinkoland and generation x are running on a single 880kb floppy disk with custom format and compression tricks and even imbed a custom copy tool to copy the disk and run it on real hardware. That's even trickier to run them on emulators and Transhuman/Pachinkoland even detects if you run it from an emulator or from the real hardware.
Charlie about generation x:
Therefore I don't get your point about "removing the limits" when these two are clearly pushing the limits of real floppy disks.
Charlie about generation x:
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This was the first demo had to I run from a physical floppy for compo recording after many many years. But this time it was for a very good reason. Luckily the drive in my A500 was still up to the task.
Therefore I don't get your point about "removing the limits" when these two are clearly pushing the limits of real floppy disks.
Abled people who are still into this scene should perhaps seek greener pastures, as this is clearly not the place to meet the best and brightest. :-)
Don't give damn about what people on the internet think. They don't give you 5 minutes of their time, they don't keep a machine running for your platform, they don't read the supplied documentation, they watch your demo on a PC in fast forward from US web servers, and then they show up at Pouet with foam at their mouths. :-)
Don't give damn about what people on the internet think. They don't give you 5 minutes of their time, they don't keep a machine running for your platform, they don't read the supplied documentation, they watch your demo on a PC in fast forward from US web servers, and then they show up at Pouet with foam at their mouths. :-)
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blame lack of time as grownups to warrant being lazy
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I'm being provocative here
You don't say.
Also, looking at your personal output in the demoscene, by staying within the limits do you mean keeping doing the same stuff over and over again?
Because we do have that too, even in the PC scene.
Because we do have that too, even in the PC scene.
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Abled people who are still into this scene should perhaps seek greener pastures, as this is clearly not the place to meet the best and brightest. :-)
I always considered Pouet as a platform for demo-consumers and much less for demo-creators.
Is there a place where creators meet and exchange ideas?
hfr: Meeting in person I think is best. E-mail is pretty cool, I made several productions by e-mail alone. We have a chat server running, you are heartily invited. But technical infrastructure alone doesn't solve the problems and creates new ones.
Also I don't see a strict reason to publish a demo on a website which adorns itself with the label "demoscene". It depends on what you are interested in - personal satisfaction, group experience, fun in making, crowd confirmation, party atmosphere? There's no universal answer.
Also I don't see a strict reason to publish a demo on a website which adorns itself with the label "demoscene". It depends on what you are interested in - personal satisfaction, group experience, fun in making, crowd confirmation, party atmosphere? There's no universal answer.
We still have oldschool, only compos that can impress me in demoparties anymore. Also PC 4k/8k/64k sometimes, Revision was really good in those categories and size is a more clear limit.
There is a tendency sometimes even in oldschool to have animation replayers, use the extra storage hardware, etc. If there is hw power, people are gonna use it. But I agree I wish to see more stuff targeting the classics. There were more 68000 amiga demos this year, but when it's about AGA I wish to see some targeting 68020-68030 instead of always 68060.
There is a tendency sometimes even in oldschool to have animation replayers, use the extra storage hardware, etc. If there is hw power, people are gonna use it. But I agree I wish to see more stuff targeting the classics. There were more 68000 amiga demos this year, but when it's about AGA I wish to see some targeting 68020-68030 instead of always 68060.
Optimus, Revision has problems. 16:9 screen wankery for oldschool platforms which are not 16:9, giving more screenspace with 70% the number of pixels and unfair competition, using an ECS Denise, which most prominently allow buggy demos to have more screenspace covered by sprites, and so on. But I wonder what Photon's point was to get all worked up about, to begin with. Maybe he should give examples.
I like back in time when most oldschool demos were running in the actual machine and not recording, but I get it's gonna be a problem for the schedule with numerous platforms in the wild/oldschool. Very few and small parties might be doing actual platforms.
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We still have oldschool, only compos that can impress me in demoparties anymore. Also PC 4k/8k/64k sometimes.
There were more 68000 amiga demos this year, but when it's about AGA I wish to see some targeting 68020-68030 instead of always 68060.
Yeah same here. I'd wish A1200+FASTMEM (2+2MB should be enough ;D ) prods more than 060 - though they're usually very nice too.
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Transhuman/Pachinkoland and generation x are running on a single 880kb floppy disk with custom format.
The latter is actually a 920kb disk, hence the custom disk format. As someone who's pulled apart and reverse engineered a lot of disk formats on the Amiga ( and a few on the ST ) I really love this stuff. That said I'm not really a fan of it when it's used for a demo. Being 40kb over 880kb budget feels like an achievable goal, but it's still cool to see how someone else approaches such a challenge. At the end of the day, the demo works on real hardware.
The important thing is that the demoscene is a place of free expression and art. You can do whatever the hell you want, even if it upsets old men stuck in their ways.
In the archive are two versions - 81 tracks regular format, and 74 tracks custom format. Party version was 81 tracks. That was a mistake, as it could have used 75KiB more memory, and all the infrastructure (disk copy) and transfer tool was there, and I handed out 50-100 disks at the party. https://home.sm41.de/tek/trackmo/TEK-Transhuman.lha
Actually demos are not just about expression and art. It's about what's important to you. It's entirely possible to do demos just for yourself or maybe just a few people to show the stuff on your bigscreen at home. A lot of the whole experience is lost with prerecording, youtube and emulators.
Actually demos are not just about expression and art. It's about what's important to you. It's entirely possible to do demos just for yourself or maybe just a few people to show the stuff on your bigscreen at home. A lot of the whole experience is lost with prerecording, youtube and emulators.
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I'd wish A1200+FASTMEM prods more than 060
Indeed. People should support more platforms that are actually in use, rather than getting hung up on either 500-OCS or 1260-AGA.
If you want more demos for a particular platform or setup, then you need to start making some :)
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In the archive are two versions - 81 tracks regular format, and 74 tracks custom format. Party version was 81 tracks. That was a mistake, as it could have used 75KiB more memory, and all the infrastructure (disk copy) and transfer tool was there, and I handed out 50-100 disks at the party. https://home.sm41.de/tek/trackmo/TEK-Transhuman.lha
Actually demos are not just about expression and art. It's about what's important to you. It's entirely possible to do demos just for yourself or maybe just a few people to show the stuff on your bigscreen at home. A lot of the whole experience is lost with prerecording, youtube and emulators.
What's that? like 67kb extra at standard MFM rate? very nice!
sorry, you said 75kb more memory.. not disk space!
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I'd wish A1200+FASTMEM (2+2MB should be enough ;D ) prods more than 060 - though they're usually very nice too.
A1200 + fastmem is just an arbitrary point on the slippery slope that led to 060 (where it then ended abruptly, for reasons beyond our control).
Vanilla A1200 is the name of the game. That's a challenge.
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What's that? like 67kb extra at standard MFM rate? very nice!
sorry, you said 75kb more memory.. not disk space!
Sorry, I meant disk space and 72KiB with 80 tracks. With 82 tracks it would be 96KiB more. And there's a lone superfluous AmigaDOS track for the README. I used smaller gaps & instead of 11 sectors 3 jumbo sectors and smaller sector headers, so $3000 bytes per custom track and 980992 bytes with 80 tracks, or 1005568 bytes with 82. The disk copy could have handled that (Amiga has 2x524288 bytes RAM).
Diminishing eyesight and clarity of thought - I can't keep up, especially with recent developments in coding against emulators and DMA cycle accounting... so I'm probably just jealous and dishonest. My most recent projects are more Amiga tools, Unix and playing with AI...
