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Yup - it happened - I remember several games that just used trig. via lookup tables. (Esp. If they were mostly Z only rotation - cf. battlezone). Also, many ga

Yup - it happened - I remember several games that just used trig. via lookup tables. (Esp. If they were mostly Z only rotation - cf. battlezone). Also, many games rasterized convex polygons, so gradient per scanline was a thing. In those days there was so little information easily available - and very little contact with other coders. Once you had figured out something that kinda worked, you got on with making a game. The European demo scene did a lot to move ideas around, but was not quite the same as game development.

pandaman 10y ago
Demos are not production games, it's kids teaching themselves. I should have written "beyond CG classes and demoscene".
- tripzilch 10y ago
  That's one way of putting it. In the early 2000s, commercial production games were just as much "demos done inefficiently" (for good business reasons, mostly). Maybe I sense an unintended connotation with the term "kids", though. I remember ATI came to demonstrate their GPU at the Breakpoint demoparties (02/03 or so?) .. it was not unimpressive, and I didn't really understand what a "shader" was in the context of a GPU back then (it was also a dumb choice for a name, given what "shading" meant in gfx programming back then, the term "vertex shader" was borderline nonsensical). But they mainly showed stuff we could already do, except doing it in a higher resolution (on what had to have been the most high-end consumer hardware available, ATI brought themselves, it wasn't the official compo machine, for sure). Given I now know what a GPU shader does (parallelism, domain specific instructions but mainly parallelism), I know that "the same thing but on a higher resolution", is absolutely the most obvious thing you can do with a GPU over just a CPU. In demoscene terms, boooooring :-P This was a few years later, THIS is what a demoscener does to a GPU: https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-particle-system/ https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-... Either way, at some point (late 200X's?) professional game industry blew past the demoscene in production level. It did happen. I always thought it was the Hollywood movie level budgets (because those exploded too, in that era, didn't they?), but there might have been other factors.
  - pandaman 10y ago
    My memory of early 2000s is different. Commercial games gave up on software rendering with PS2, ubiquitous 3D cards on PC and Microsoft paying everyone who agreed to develop for the Xbox. Graphics programming in games then was not much different than now. It was about giving good tools to artists and designers and not about doing "cool fx". Though I cannot speak for the whole industry, obviously, just what I've experienced. > it was also a dumb choice for a name Blame Steve Jobs and his Renderman :) At the time consumer GPUs with shaders came out it's been long established term for any code processing graphics data during rendering. >Either way, at some point (late 200X's?) professional game industry blew past the demoscene in production level. It did happen. I always thought it was the Hollywood movie level budgets (because those exploded too, in that era, didn't they?), but there might have been other factors. I remember in mid 90s some demo-groups claimed to work on actual games ("Into the shadows" guys said it's a prototype for the game they had been writing) and even on hardware (Pyramid3D lol) but I don't think anything noticeable came out. Remedy Entertainment is, probably, the most successful exit from the demoscene and it never set the bar for the AAA industry. The difference between demos and games is the difference between dancing and fighting. You move your body in both cases but with dancing you are fine as long as you pull some cool moves, while in fighting you actually need to survive and harm your opponent as much as possible. Same as in games you need to draw what the artists want and in demos you can draw anything as long as it's cool. There was never a sensible competition between the two. I imagine game programmers suck at making demos just as much as democoders suck at making games :)

pandaman 10y ago

Demos are not production games, it's kids teaching themselves. I should have written "beyond CG classes and demoscene".

tripzilch 10y ago
That's one way of putting it. In the early 2000s, commercial production games were just as much "demos done inefficiently" (for good business reasons, mostly). Maybe I sense an unintended connotation with the term "kids", though. I remember ATI came to demonstrate their GPU at the Breakpoint demoparties (02/03 or so?) .. it was not unimpressive, and I didn't really understand what a "shader" was in the context of a GPU back then (it was also a dumb choice for a name, given what "shading" meant in gfx programming back then, the term "vertex shader" was borderline nonsensical). But they mainly showed stuff we could already do, except doing it in a higher resolution (on what had to have been the most high-end consumer hardware available, ATI brought themselves, it wasn't the official compo machine, for sure). Given I now know what a GPU shader does (parallelism, domain specific instructions but mainly parallelism), I know that "the same thing but on a higher resolution", is absolutely the most obvious thing you can do with a GPU over just a CPU. In demoscene terms, boooooring :-P This was a few years later, THIS is what a demoscener does to a GPU: https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-particle-system/ https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-... Either way, at some point (late 200X's?) professional game industry blew past the demoscene in production level. It did happen. I always thought it was the Hollywood movie level budgets (because those exploded too, in that era, didn't they?), but there might have been other factors.
- pandaman 10y ago
  My memory of early 2000s is different. Commercial games gave up on software rendering with PS2, ubiquitous 3D cards on PC and Microsoft paying everyone who agreed to develop for the Xbox. Graphics programming in games then was not much different than now. It was about giving good tools to artists and designers and not about doing "cool fx". Though I cannot speak for the whole industry, obviously, just what I've experienced. > it was also a dumb choice for a name Blame Steve Jobs and his Renderman :) At the time consumer GPUs with shaders came out it's been long established term for any code processing graphics data during rendering. >Either way, at some point (late 200X's?) professional game industry blew past the demoscene in production level. It did happen. I always thought it was the Hollywood movie level budgets (because those exploded too, in that era, didn't they?), but there might have been other factors. I remember in mid 90s some demo-groups claimed to work on actual games ("Into the shadows" guys said it's a prototype for the game they had been writing) and even on hardware (Pyramid3D lol) but I don't think anything noticeable came out. Remedy Entertainment is, probably, the most successful exit from the demoscene and it never set the bar for the AAA industry. The difference between demos and games is the difference between dancing and fighting. You move your body in both cases but with dancing you are fine as long as you pull some cool moves, while in fighting you actually need to survive and harm your opponent as much as possible. Same as in games you need to draw what the artists want and in demos you can draw anything as long as it's cool. There was never a sensible competition between the two. I imagine game programmers suck at making demos just as much as democoders suck at making games :)