2 ms·

Well deserved! Demos are a marvel of art and engineering, and their authors are wizards, AFAIC. I've always been amazed at the sheer skill and creativity of th

by imiric 3y ago

Well deserved! Demos are a marvel of art and engineering, and their authors are wizards, AFAIC. I've always been amazed at the sheer skill and creativity of the programmers in this subculture, to the point where I consider them to be in an entirely different league from the "regular" programmer building web, desktop, mobile and enterprise apps using some high-level language, of which I'm humbly a part of. Demo programmers can seemingly control electrons at their will, and mostly do so for fun and pleasure, whereas we work with layers and layers of abstractions and mostly for compensation. I'm not saying that the world doesn't need both, just that one is more aligned to that child-like curiosity and wonder at making lights blink, taken to an extreme level, which is IMO a purer reason to love computers.

p0nce 3y ago
Er, we once win a "scene award" with a demo. You are right there was plenty of talented programmers there (and the level has only gone up), but this is also an _art_ scene and to be able to work so long for free on something that won't make any money (and that you can only present at a single event) in the end you need to either have a job developing 3D software, and/or be independently affluent. I was happy to leave the scene quickly as I feel it wasn't very respectful, when you release something you can see your "competitors" send harsh comments and tell you your thing sucks, unlike any other scene (?). This doesn't make sense, when people are in music they don't go around telling other people their music suck. Also, demoscene is pure greenfield, you can learn more working in maintenance programming.
- whizzter 3y ago
  I'm not gonna say you're wrong in your experiences, because there's much damnning about how people have behaved, but it needs to be taken in stride and things have changed a bit. The demoscene always did sit in a weird intersection between technology and art, and the roots and association with piracy (that often in the beginning in large parts were teenage ganglike groups) did add a distinct "harshly" competitive edge you don't see in other art perhaps with the exception of hiphop. However, 2 factors is changing things out to a mellower experience, one is that people have grown older and there's probably a realization for many who still participate about our mortality as people literally start to die off and few fresh faces appear. The other is that the workload to make code that could be impressive has risen and with hardware getting faster without changing much the pure rendering quality of what pre-made engines like Unity and Unreal can accomplish (or tools like Notch, whilst being demoscene rooted still is a commercial product today). SDF's gave the scene productions an edge in achieving cool stuff for a bunch of years (still beneficial for size) but usage is spreading quickly in games today. This might be part of why many seem to have taken "refuge" in working on retro-demos since squeezing cool stuff out of old machines isn't directly comparable to what people working full time on games,etc can achieve. As for what you can learn, yes, it's plenty of greenfield programming but "maintenance programming" gets boring quite quickly as well unless you work for a hyperscaler and/or a startup.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  Fwiw I loved the adinpsz demos, sad to hear you left on such a sour note.
  - p0nce 3y ago
    Because I'm a sour individual :) did reuse demoscene teachings in homemade post-processing (CPU! thanks to all the in-talk about raytracers being fast on CPU, and well drivers).

by imiric 3y ago

p0nce 3y ago

Er, we once win a "scene award" with a demo. You are right there was plenty of talented programmers there (and the level has only gone up), but this is also an _art_ scene and to be able to work so long for free on something that won't make any money (and that you can only present at a single event) in the end you need to either have a job developing 3D software, and/or be independently affluent. I was happy to leave the scene quickly as I feel it wasn't very respectful, when you release something you can see your "competitors" send harsh comments and tell you your thing sucks, unlike any other scene (?). This doesn't make sense, when people are in music they don't go around telling other people their music suck. Also, demoscene is pure greenfield, you can learn more working in maintenance programming.

whizzter 3y ago
I'm not gonna say you're wrong in your experiences, because there's much damnning about how people have behaved, but it needs to be taken in stride and things have changed a bit. The demoscene always did sit in a weird intersection between technology and art, and the roots and association with piracy (that often in the beginning in large parts were teenage ganglike groups) did add a distinct "harshly" competitive edge you don't see in other art perhaps with the exception of hiphop. However, 2 factors is changing things out to a mellower experience, one is that people have grown older and there's probably a realization for many who still participate about our mortality as people literally start to die off and few fresh faces appear. The other is that the workload to make code that could be impressive has risen and with hardware getting faster without changing much the pure rendering quality of what pre-made engines like Unity and Unreal can accomplish (or tools like Notch, whilst being demoscene rooted still is a commercial product today). SDF's gave the scene productions an edge in achieving cool stuff for a bunch of years (still beneficial for size) but usage is spreading quickly in games today. This might be part of why many seem to have taken "refuge" in working on retro-demos since squeezing cool stuff out of old machines isn't directly comparable to what people working full time on games,etc can achieve. As for what you can learn, yes, it's plenty of greenfield programming but "maintenance programming" gets boring quite quickly as well unless you work for a hyperscaler and/or a startup.
skrebbel 3y ago
Fwiw I loved the adinpsz demos, sad to hear you left on such a sour note.
- p0nce 3y ago
  Because I'm a sour individual :) did reuse demoscene teachings in homemade post-processing (CPU! thanks to all the in-talk about raytracers being fast on CPU, and well drivers).