3 ms·

Ah, the 80s & early 90s, when you had to implement everything yourself and every byte and instruction counted :) The demo scene these days feels somehow less s

by Radim 10y ago

Ah, the 80s & early 90s, when you had to implement everything yourself and every byte and instruction counted :) The demo scene these days feels somehow less satisfying. The demos definitely look better, but they can plug into such a vast ecosystem of system libraries that 64KB feels like cheating. ASM mode 13h nostalgia.

dualogy 10y ago
> The demo scene these days feels somehow less satisfying. The demos definitely look better, but they can plug into such a vast ecosystem of system libraries that 64KB feels like cheating. Some of these sceners are doing shadertoy.com type stuff that is to say, complex imagery and geometry calculated only from pixel shaders (no polygonal geometry / vertex shaders etc), ie. ever-cooler, faster, more-complex "faux (but realtime) ray-tracing" with a VERY limited set of operations, no real frameworks/libraries etc, everything fine-tuned down to the last float, endless neat tricks and approximations --- probably recaptures/continues quite a bit of the very same spirit! Stuff like this https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ttSWf https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ttSWf WARNING might crash your browser or temporarily crawl it to a halt while open, save your work! Sadly WebGL performance is STILL abysmal is newest browsers on even current-gen Quadro workstations.. what a sad joke. And here there's not even any particular per-frame data-to-GPU/VRAM transfers!
EvilTerran 10y ago
The minimalist scene is still out there, it's just a niche within a niche. For instance, here's a demo from 2015, done in immediate mode and 256 bytes - I've got a feeling you'll enjoy it as much as the live audience clearly do: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07KHwjebf7k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07KHwjebf7k For another recent example, also in 2015 some wizards managed to coax 1024 colours (among other impressive visual effects) out of an original IBM PC - as in, hardware from 1981: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/ https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > For instance, here's a demo from 2015, done in immediate mode and 256 bytes - I've got a feeling you'll enjoy it as much as the live audience clearly do: > https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07KHwjebf7k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07KHwjebf7k Even more cool (but from 2006) and also from digimind: > http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=26655 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=26655 > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6zhyutgX1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6zhyutgX1k
  - tripzilch 10y ago
    Wow to both. Yet to me, Immediate Railways (2015) blew my quite a bit more than Demoplex (2006) ;) Maybe I missed a detail, a film cinema room, including chairs, middle aisle, rotating camera, friggin ambient occlusion AND an animated plasma on the projector screen. Absolutely jaw-dropping, not a single doubt. I used to write 4096b demos but this is a class of its own, even crazier skills I don't have, I could have a stab but I'd get stuck at 512b at least, - cough - :-P But Immediate Railways is the first 256b demo I remember seeing that actually has multiple parts! Three parts and they actually make sense! You could even argue that the three parts connect in a (very basic, minimal, three-clause sentence) story line. Now I haven't been keeping up with everything in the scene, but that's a first for any 256b demo I have ever seen. Many cases a 256b is showcasing a single "thing", scene or effect that is a few times more complex than Kolmogorov's worst acid dream. Also I think the design and colours are nicer than in Demoplex (and yes, that counts). Fun thing to imagine though, if you'd concatenate 16 of these babies to make a single 4096b demo, you wouldn't stand a chance in a modern 4k compo :) Not even allowing 20 of them, sharing init code. The expectation of "way more than the sum of its parts" has already exploded in the step from 256b to 4096b. I'm not even sure one could fit a softsynth worthy of the music expected in a modern 4k into 256b? (ok probably one could, probably someone did, prove me wrong already :p mine was about 1100b, back in 2000)

by Radim 10y ago

dualogy 10y ago

> The demo scene these days feels somehow less satisfying. The demos definitely look better, but they can plug into such a vast ecosystem of system libraries that 64KB feels like cheating. Some of these sceners are doing shadertoy.com type stuff that is to say, complex imagery and geometry calculated only from pixel shaders (no polygonal geometry / vertex shaders etc), ie. ever-cooler, faster, more-complex "faux (but realtime) ray-tracing" with a VERY limited set of operations, no real frameworks/libraries etc, everything fine-tuned down to the last float, endless neat tricks and approximations --- probably recaptures/continues quite a bit of the very same spirit! Stuff like this https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ttSWf https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ttSWf WARNING might crash your browser or temporarily crawl it to a halt while open, save your work! Sadly WebGL performance is STILL abysmal is newest browsers on even current-gen Quadro workstations.. what a sad joke. And here there's not even any particular per-frame data-to-GPU/VRAM transfers!

EvilTerran 10y ago

The minimalist scene is still out there, it's just a niche within a niche. For instance, here's a demo from 2015, done in immediate mode and 256 bytes - I've got a feeling you'll enjoy it as much as the live audience clearly do: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07KHwjebf7k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07KHwjebf7k For another recent example, also in 2015 some wizards managed to coax 1024 colours (among other impressive visual effects) out of an original IBM PC - as in, hardware from 1981: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/ https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...

wolfgke 10y ago
> For instance, here's a demo from 2015, done in immediate mode and 256 bytes - I've got a feeling you'll enjoy it as much as the live audience clearly do: > https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07KHwjebf7k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07KHwjebf7k Even more cool (but from 2006) and also from digimind: > http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=26655 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=26655 > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6zhyutgX1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6zhyutgX1k
- tripzilch 10y ago
  Wow to both. Yet to me, Immediate Railways (2015) blew my quite a bit more than Demoplex (2006) ;) Maybe I missed a detail, a film cinema room, including chairs, middle aisle, rotating camera, friggin ambient occlusion AND an animated plasma on the projector screen. Absolutely jaw-dropping, not a single doubt. I used to write 4096b demos but this is a class of its own, even crazier skills I don't have, I could have a stab but I'd get stuck at 512b at least, - cough - :-P But Immediate Railways is the first 256b demo I remember seeing that actually has multiple parts! Three parts and they actually make sense! You could even argue that the three parts connect in a (very basic, minimal, three-clause sentence) story line. Now I haven't been keeping up with everything in the scene, but that's a first for any 256b demo I have ever seen. Many cases a 256b is showcasing a single "thing", scene or effect that is a few times more complex than Kolmogorov's worst acid dream. Also I think the design and colours are nicer than in Demoplex (and yes, that counts). Fun thing to imagine though, if you'd concatenate 16 of these babies to make a single 4096b demo, you wouldn't stand a chance in a modern 4k compo :) Not even allowing 20 of them, sharing init code. The expectation of "way more than the sum of its parts" has already exploded in the step from 256b to 4096b. I'm not even sure one could fit a softsynth worthy of the music expected in a modern 4k into 256b? (ok probably one could, probably someone did, prove me wrong already :p mine was about 1100b, back in 2000)