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I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died. Up until the late 1990s it was not possible to playback full screen video on regular PC hardware, because

• Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  For what it's worth, YouTube's compression renders many videos of demos into a mushed up mess, especially things like 10,000 item point clouds that still look crisp with each point individually rendered by the program but on YouTube comes out as a vibrating smudge.
• galangalalgol 3y ago
  I was never part of it. But it seems like it is still fairly popular. The constraints are artificial now, but other than just creating work, those constraints shape what is produced in a way that is still pleasing. Other constrained stuff like tiny wasm game competitions are fun too. I'm hoping demoscene on microcontrollers becomes a thing. Though you'd have to be selective. Many of them absolutely demolish the capabilities of an amiga1000. Constrained generative networks would be interesting too.
  • MDGeist 3y ago
    As an outsider myself this was my assumption for why the demoscene is not the same as it once was, the hardware constraints are no the same as in the 90s. That being said I kind of look at the demo reels for new versions of Unreal Engine as a sort of modern incarnation of pushing the limits.
    • leptons 3y ago
      Take a look at the 64K and lower demos that are still very much a technical challenge and show off a lot of programming skill. https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=64k&page=1 https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=64k&page=1 There's even a 32 byte demo category. What can someone do that's interesting in 32 bytes? Not a lot, but they still do it. 64K, 8k, and 4k compos are still alive and well on modern platforms and they are just as amazing as they used to be.
• badsectoracula 3y ago
  I was into demoscene back when i in middle school in the late 90s and people were claiming even then that the demoscene is dead. Turns out this never happend and it is alive to this day[0]. There are new productions for various platforms ranging from modern to retro and from full restricted intros (256 byte DOS intros, 4k Windows intros) to full blown demos all the time. [0] https://www.pouet.net/index.php https://www.pouet.net/index.php
  • Jare 3y ago
    The demoscene died when the PC became too powerful for hardware tricks to compete. Actually, it died when people started making demos in C and horror C++. No wait, the demoscene died when 3D cards made art/modeling the only valuable thing. No wait, let me get this right. The demoscene died when mp3 music produced in DAWs replaced mods, and photoshop and wacoms replaced deluxe paint pixelart. Hm... maybe it died when the internet made everthing available so nothing felt special anymore. Or when the web and Flash became the place to get a quick fix of visual design. Maybe it died when kids became more interested in esports and LoL than in coding. I'm sure it died when Youtube meant you didn't even need the hardware or the download to watch a demo. Maybe it was when the iPhone appstore meant the most popular device on earth couldn't run demos. I don't know, I can't decide.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• adhoc32 3y ago
  The demoscene has always been about real-time graphics. It never sought to compete with video animations. Many demosceners were, at heart, game developers who valued and appreciated real-time code, often considering animations to be "lame".
  • vidarh 3y ago
    But that's the point. Today this is a big distinction that makes it more difficult for many people to appreciate. When we saw Commodore 64 demos for example, they often impressed even relatively non-technical people. But today a demo that pushes the limits technically will often only look impressive to those who understand the technical limitations. That has significantly changed the potential audience to a diminishing subset even if relatively technical people.
    • 1000100_1000101 3y ago
      Anyone who plays AAA games knows the currently state of the art and technical limitations. Sure it's not everyone, but a large enough non-technical portion of the population will be able to appreciate it, to some degree.
      • vidarh 3y ago
        This is assuming that they'll look at a non-interactive demo and get why someone would insist on not pre-rendering everything in the first place instead of comparing it against pre-generated video. That was becoming a problem already 20+ years ago in explaining to people what made a given demo impressive, because most people aren't interested in the technical limitations.
  • smokel 3y ago
    I totally agree that this was the opinion of many demosceners. However, my point is that this would seldom be the opinion of the general public. The demoscene grew organically, and trying to define what it should be about seemed a bit silly. The artificial limits, such as 64K or 4K intros sure were fun to compete with, but they make little or no sense to the uninitiated, and were pretty much arbitrary. It was actually what put me off a bit -- I enjoyed the demoscene to learn new things and to experiment with computers in total freedom. I had no need for artificial limitations set out by competitions, and never really cared much for the gatherings of socially less developed boys who smelled pretty bad (even though I exactly matched that profile myself :). I really liked the contrarian groups who faked a lot. In Nooon's "Stars" (1995) a 3D bee is rendered with a complete wing missing, to fake a high poly count. "Transgression 2" by MFX may also be a good example of what I am trying to convey here. Obviously it was not real-time ray tracing, but what was it? It puzzled me for weeks!
• warpspin 3y ago
  > As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice. Not sure that was a factor. You could already earlier prerender things, just maybe not minutes of it, but for loops it always was a thing. Back then in the late 80ies/early 90ies, at least in the C64 scene, it was a huge topic sometimes and people stressed when especially spectacular effects where "realtime", so there will be no doubts, cause prerendering carried a huge stigma with it for a long time. In fact, this was what held back the demoscene for a while, cause a lot of very stylish things just were not possible at least on C64 hardware without prerendering or at least doing the 3d calculations up front. The scene actually had to overcome their fixation on "realtime" effects before a lot of very artsy, stylish demos became possible, once people started focussing on what you see, not how you achieve it. The latter part might not apply to stronger machines, though, admittedly. On the C64 any kind of long running animation is a feat in itself, even if you trade limited CPU for limited memory.
• gnramires 3y ago
  Procedural art has a different quality to it though :) Edit: That is to say, I don't think the only value of the demoscene is to create something cool under technical limitations. I think it's to create something cool in a computational medium (the spirit lives on as procedural art, shader art, etc. as well). Every method of producing a work (done under finite time, I guess :P) will give sometimes vastly different results. Hand drawing an animation will give something completely different under similar time constraints as video editing and completely different from procedural drawing. To give some examples: you can easily render thousands of points, e.g. stars, make them twinkle, draw thousands of trees, and give them all detailed movement. That's very hard to do by hand. By hand you'll have better control of style, and details like paint texture, etc.. Animating characters (with genuine character) is trivial by hand but quite difficult procedurally (you have to resort to essentially manual animation in the end). There's the question of offline vs online rendering... if you're offline rendering you can go bonkers with millions of objects. I personally like being able to run it real time, I find it gives it a more intimate feeling, and is easier to reproduce (but am not against offline rendering if you find it suitable!). Also very exciting to me is baking randomness, either with a fixed seed or changing seeds every time. You get a different piece every time you watch it! The possibilities are really vast, and mostly unexplored.
  • smokel 3y ago
    This is a very interesting addition to the discussion. The digital art world and the demoscene sometimes briefly met, but I assume that most of the time its members look down on eachother. An interesting artist in this respect is Karl Sims [1]. As far as I know, he was not involved in the demoscene, but he sure did make some interesting things! [1] https://www.karlsims.com/ https://www.karlsims.com/
    • algorias 3y ago
      From the little exposure I've had of the digital art world (I assume you mean high art as in fancy galleries and such) is that it's much more fad driven. One year the "it" thing is interaction, and so everyone rushes to do that. Then it's AI, so people rush to be the first to publish a book written by AI or whatever. Say what you will about the current demoscene stylistically, it is to this day an underground, non-commercial movement (maybe countercultural? labels don't really matter, I'm just trying to gesture at something). People make stuff for the hell of it, with themselves as the target audience. It's hard to beat the sheer joy of that.
• boomlinde 3y ago
  The basic premise of this post is utterly wrong. > I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died. It didn't die. Revision hosts hundreds of sceners every year. This year over 400 entries were submitted to the competition, including 40 full PC demos and over 40 tracked/oldschool/executable music entries. Even for small, local C64/Amiga parties here you have to race for tickets to these events. We released a C64 intro outside a competition a couple of months ago, and within a couple of days it was buried in the inflow of new C64 releases on CSDB. The C64 scene is bigger now than when I got into it 18 years ago. > The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s. That didn't die either. Things don't die just because you stop pay attention to them. The notion of competing with Pixar is absurd; the terms of competition and markets are entirely different. Pixar makes movies for the mainstream to make money. Sceners make productions for sceners that may be more interesting to them than a Pixar production in an esoteric sense that the mainstream will not understand.
  • smokel 3y ago
    No need to be so harsh. You seem to be misinterpreting and misunderstanding my comment. I get it that there are still people who are trying to keep the spirit alive, and I wish them all the most of fun, but as I try to explain it is no longer the same for most of us who were there in the 80s and 90s. "The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it. Edit: To go into the Pixar argument a bit more: In 1993 a demo such as Second Reality could impress "normies" as much as an MTV video clip could. Remember that back then video clips were often total utter crap, and some demos were buttery smooth 50fps animations with a distinctive feel that you could not find anywhere in popular culture. In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.
    • tari3x 3y ago
      I'd like to fault the Pixar argument in yet another aspect - every Pixar video any of us have ever seen is heavily compressed. I did not appreciate how much is lost that way until I started playing real demos on the big screen as opposed to their youtube rendering. Take Through the Cracks by Still - it is not compressable, and everyone I show it to on the big projection wall agrees that it is unlike any video they've ever experienced.
• skrebbel 3y ago
  > the demoscene died It didn’t!
• Zetobal 3y ago
  In germany a lot of it was because of the success of Crytek with Crysis at the time. The first cryengine was mostly build by demoscene enthusiasts :) They gobbled up a lot of demoscene people and from Crytek they got scattered around the globe.
  • effekt 3y ago
    Not just crytek! Yager also had founding demosceners I believe? There's more in Germany for sure. 3DMark the benchmark by Futuremark is as the name suggests, made by ex Future Crew. The list goes on. If you go around looking at where most demosceners from the past decade or two work today, you'll find the vast majority of them work at places like Unity, Unreal (Epic), etc.
    • Zetobal 3y ago
      Yeah, most of my circle works at epic or VFX studios now.
• gorkish 3y ago
  If you want to contend that a screen of video and two channels of audio is the endgame, that's fine. But it's not :)
• z3phyr 3y ago
  Can it be not expanded to the current hardware? Making it do what other people think is impossible, investigating undefined behavior in hardware, which would be more given the behemoth size. A real time demo where every pixel can be deformed, giving rise to an ultra interactive world in less than 4GB memory.
  • leptons 3y ago
    The real competition on modern hardware is the 64K and lower competitions. Doing something interesting in 64K or even 4K is how you really show off programming skills on modern hardware.