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Programming Graphics Software IT Technology

Farb-Rausch Releases PC Demo Creation Software 203

Posted by simoniker from the rsi-demo-maker dept.
RaD Man [ACiD] writes "Farb-Rausch, one of the best-known groups at the forefront of the PC demoscene, has just released Werkkzeug, a fully featured, freely downloadable PC demo creation tool used to make the visually stunning and award-winning demo The Popular Demo. Not only have they freely published the creation tools, but they've also released the original datafiles for The Popular Demo as well." We also recently featured a 96kb FPS demo from the same authors.
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Farb-Rausch Releases PC Demo Creation Software More

Farb-Rausch Releases PC Demo Creation Software

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  • Leading the scene (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rodrin ( 729362 ) <chris@coggburn.DEBIANus minus distro> on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:14AM (#9492835) Homepage Journal
    Computer demos have always led the way to the latest in graphics. Be it with commodore 64 (those were the days), Amigas, or the PC it will always be amazing to see what the next year's demos have to offer. I say that this will only spur on more creativity..good for them.
    • Yes - you're right - I'm not serious about bringing the government anti-trust watchdogs in on this, but the move to release such a tool certainly is a smart way in staying *AT* the front.

      If you're in the lead and make others use your tools to build their demos with, then you're at the advantage in you being able to always use a 'newer' more feature rich tool that will only be released AFTER you release you next latest and greatest demo...

      If there was serious money in demos, M$ would probably follow THAT p

      • Not really... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by kb ( 43460 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @04:29AM (#9493076) Homepage Journal
        The scene itself isn't really interested in making stuff with the .werkkzeug, most comments we got so far were more like "Thanks for releasing, I'll have a look at it, let's see what I can learn from it for doing my own stuff".

        There have always been the '1337 selfmade and the l4me demomaker demos, so I don't think we endanger the scene at all. But perhaps some "outsiders" fiddle around with the tool and get interested, that'd be a cool goal ;)

        kb^fr

  • WTF Mate! (Score:2, Funny)

    by iR-Corp ( 790386 )
    I dont see why they would do this, although it is fun to play around with, they are basically throwing their money out the window, this is a great advantage to the average joe designer that likes to play. What do you think?

    • Re:WTF Mate! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Rodrin ( 729362 )
      Common, what money is there in the demo scene's dev tools? Squat. However the talent that is put into making the demos happens to be what is worth the big dollars. So WTF Mate to that. =)

    • Re:WTF Mate! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, this giving stuff away for free crap will never lead to anything good!

      Err...

      Never mind.

    • Re:WTF Mate! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Gongo ( 316724 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:43AM (#9492949)
      Why they would do this?

      Maybe for simple reasons, maybe just as simple as the 'new' scene spirit of sharing as opposed to the original hacker culture. More of a 'hippy commune' (hi Statix, ehm ... alex ;-)) act, but in the past big demo groups have released even their source code for next generations of sceners to learn from (ofcourse ripping is a fact :-().

      In fact, there are a few other demo-authoring tools out there already. (Demopaja, smouse, ...)

      What makes this one so unique is that it allows you to make REALLY small demos, as opposed to the multi deca-mega-byte demos. It allows you to create small demos called intros. (all fitting in 64k).

      The big trick is to GENERATE your data from parameters as opposed to loading the data from a file. (jpg, tga, gif, xm, mod, mp3, 3ds, iwo, ...) Thus allowing to show something spectacular in such a small sized package.
      As for the commercial value of this: The other mentioned demo creation tools are also commercialised (at least some) as VJ tools for a videowall or related devices. This is not the case for this tool. Maybe shortsighted of me, but I do not see the commercial value of this product besides the obvious one: get the competition to pay for reaching your level of competence, but even still, then this is only scene related.

      And as everyone knows: it is not the tools that make you good (but it helps), so I fear that if it is the intention of Farbraush to level the competitionfield (because it is all too easy for them to win competitions :-)), it still will be difficult for most groups to reach their level ;-)

      Gongo / Green ^ openUDS

    • Ah, but is it better than the Red Sector International demo creator?!

      My friend and I used to love playing with this back when I was a kiddie on his Amiga 500. Unfortunately, he used some funny hack to switch his df0: and df1: assignments, as his df0: was dodgy, and one day we ended up overwriting the beginning of the disk with one of our demos.

      Oh the humanity!

  • Wrong one... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dwedit ( 232252 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:16AM (#9492843) Homepage
    What's this about "The Popular Demo" being 64k? It's actually 8,854,016 bytes long.
    • Good point, there is a flaw in the story. Good job pointing it out.

    • Re:Wrong one... (Score:5, Funny)

      by RobertKozak ( 613503 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:19AM (#9492856) Homepage
      What's this about "The Popular Demo" being 64k? It's actually 8,854,016 bytes long.

      Probably a result of it being zip compressed. :-)

    • Re:Wrong one... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ZeroExistenZ ( 721849 )
      I think he got the wrong link.

      The one the author mentioned is a demo of the same crew.
      Check out the legendary 64K demo @ The Product.de [theproduct.de]
      • --To save time, here's the actual page that contains the above-mentioned demo with (2) download links:

        http://theproduct.de/index.html

        --Scroll down until you see [[
        fr-08: .the .product
        released 29-dec-2000
        download (63.5 kbyte)
        alternative download
        ]]

    • Re:Wrong one... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Gongo ( 316724 )
      search on the farbraush site for other productions, or on pouet on farbraush productions (including the .produkt). Candytron, ...

      both 64k demos (with a lot of generation) and full fledged demos are possible with this tool.

      Gongo/Green ^ openUDS
    • There are other files there that are for Computer Demos and one for Parties. I believe the Party Demos are for like Raves and what not that are carried out through the US and Europe. The video from that is displayed on a big screen and people dance to it.

      Go back there again and you will see Party and Demo, the Demo is the 64k ones.

      • Re:Wrong one... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I believe the Party Demos are for like Raves and what not that are carried out through the US and Europe. The video from that is displayed on a big screen and people dance to it.

        "Parties" are the events that demogroups use to show their newest productions and compete with other groups. It's like a LAN-party without the script kiddiez ;)

  • Coooooool (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vandan ( 151516 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:18AM (#9492854) Homepage
    I used to love sitting in front my my K6-2 333, smoking cones and watching demos. Favourites were Tribes and B-Hyper. If anyone has some links to demos that run under Linux or wine, feel free to post them.

    God I miss the demo scene, even if I did kind of 'miss' it to begin with - I noticed them just after the scene died...

    • Re:Coooooool (Score:2, Informative)

      by Rodrin ( 729362 )
      What do you mean? The scene isn't dead, it is still active albeit not quite what it used to be. Everybody always considers a project dead when the masses leave. However from my experience this COULD be one of the best times for development, no distractions.

    • Re:Coooooool (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There's a bunch of Unix demos here [kameli.net]. Some with source.

    • Re:Coooooool (Score:2, Insightful)

      by zyche ( 784345 )
      Well... The demo scene is like BSD: it has died so many times we have lost count.

      I also miss the demo scene. But the the PC scene is kinda mixed up since there is no reference machine with certain specs. Yesterdays state-of-art demo can be done in Basic tomorrow...

      C=64 demos still rules! I was blown away at The Party '94 (and '95) in Denmark when I saw all the clever tricks they managed to make those old machines do!

    • OpenGL, Display postcript and a CPU with vector processor. Should make for a nice, compact eye candy.
    • I noticed them just after the scene died...

      The scene didn't die -- it just died DOWN.

  • mirrors (Score:3, Informative)

    by crache ( 654516 ) <josh@ c r a c h e.org> on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:22AM (#9492867) Homepage
    I smell a slashdotting, here are their listed mirrors: Werkkzeug ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/resources/demomaker/thepro dukkt/pno0002_werkkzeug1_v1200.zip&id=242925 ftp://ftp.pl.scene.org/pub/demos/resources/demomak er/theprodukkt/pno0002_werkkzeug1_v1200.zip&id=242 925 http://http.pl.scene.org/pub/demos/resources/demom aker/theprodukkt/pno0002_werkkzeug1_v1200.zip&id=2 42925 Datafile ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/resources/demomaker/thepro dukkt/pno0003_the.popular.demo_datafile.zip&id=242 926 ftp://ftp.pl.scene.org/pub/demos/resources/demomak er/theprodukkt/pno0003_the.popular.demo_datafile.z ip&id=242926 http://http.pl.scene.org/pub/demos/resources/demom aker/theprodukkt/pno0003_the.popular.demo_datafile .zip&id=242926
    • This seems a little easier to read, but I'm not too sure about the links so I won't anchor them.. ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/resources/demomaker/thepr o dukkt/pno0002_werkkzeug1_v1200.zip&id=242925 ftp://ftp.pl.scene.org/pub/demos/resources/demomak er/theprodukkt/pno0002_werkkzeug1_v1200.zip&id=242 925 http://http.pl.scene.org/pub/demos/resources/demom aker/theprodukkt/pno0002_werkkzeug1_v1200.zip&id=2 42925 Datafile ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/resources/demomaker/thepro dukkt/pno0003_the.p
    • I seriously tried to link them, but it won't let me (too few characters per line, they won't fit on one line and it breaks the a href into seperate lines.. oh well.
      • Er, you fail it then ;)

        Seriously though, someone else managed to link them fine, so I'm not sure how you failed it, but I'm going to take a guess and say you're trying to make the link text be the same as the link url, as in:

        <a href=http://foo.com>http://foo.com</a>

        If so, FYI: the first "http://foo.com" is the link, and the 2nd one is the displayed text. So if the URL is long just do:

        <a href=http://really.long.url.at.foo.com> link </a>

        Replace "link" with anything; it

    • Re:mirrors (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @04:12AM (#9493027)
      Goodness; does no one here know HTML? Here are the four "the.popular.demo" mirror sites, as links: And, by the way, "the.popular.demo" is 8.2MB, not 64KB as stated in the article. (Rather a difference, so expect a long download time.)

  • 64KB INTRO! (Score:5, Informative)

    by rexguo ( 555504 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:26AM (#9492885) Homepage
    Is "Poem for a horse", not "The Popular Demo". This 64K intro was shown at SIGGRAPH'03.

  • Popular demo not a 64kb demo (Score:5, Informative)

    by octal666 ( 668007 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:27AM (#9492889)
    The popular demo is not a 64kb demo, farb-rausch are good, but the popular demo is a 8Mb demo, as it can be seen if you just follow the link to pouet.net.

  • Back in the old days... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kjba ( 679108 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:28AM (#9492890)
    Back in the old days, when groups like the Future Crew still ruled, the demo-scene was way more interesting. Making stunning effects is much more of a challenge when the hardware you're working on is limited. These guys used to create a 3D-engine from scratch in 64kb, as there was no DirectX. For me, the massive computing/graphics power we have today has taken away all the fun.

    • It's still damn impressive (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @05:07AM (#9493171)
      I mean I just picked up Unreal Tournament 2004 a couple weeks ago. Total, it weighs in at SIX CDs. Looking on my drive, the textures alone are nearly 3GB uncompressed. And against that stands 64k demos, which really have pretty cool 3d when you get down to it.

      Now I'm not oging to go on about bloat or any of that shit,I know full and well why UT is huge when the FR stuff isn't. However the FR demos are still cool in their own right. It isn't easy making shit that small. Their mathematical texture generation adn tiny sound engine are programming works of art.

      That they have 3d hardware to make it possible doesn't diminish their acomplishments. Programming isn't just about making a bare CPU do cool things, it's about pushing a whole system, complete with advanced subprocessors to the maximum.

      Now they are doing only once kind of maxing, diskspace. One might note that there are other areas that suffer, memory usage in particular, but it is still an impressive feat. They are showing what can be done by focusing on the on disk optimisation.

      Also the artistic aspect is not to be discounted. It isn't easy to design pleasing visuals and synch them to music. FR is on par with FC when it comes to demos that appeal to the senses. Far too many demos from the FC era were just slideshows of algorithm implementation. The FR demons, by and large, are quite artistic. An accomplishment even given no space constraints, more so given their small size.
  • I haven't actually checked anything out from the demo scene since the commie 64 era. Do they still code this stuff in assembly? Or is it all done using OOP now?

    • Re:It's come a long way... (Score:3, Informative)

      by kb ( 43460 )
      Our demos and tools (and I think I can speak for the majority of the scene here) are mostly written in C++ (with simple, lean OOP mixed with imperative style whenever objects don't make sense) plus a few time-critical routines in assembler (most notably our software synthesizer and parts of the texture generator).

      Doing everything in Assembly is overkill most of the time, demos nowadays are pretty much GPU limited, the only exceptions are the things mentioned above.

      kb^fr

  • DirectX 9 (Score:3, Informative)

    by RobertKozak ( 613503 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:31AM (#9492896) Homepage
    Make sure you have DirectX 9 [microsoft.com]. I usually dont keep up with this so I didnt know.
    • Try installing the latest DirectX 9.0 on Windows XP Professional

      - The DirectX 9 drivers cannot be installed as they have not been certified for use with Windows XP Professional

      Well, thank you, Mr Plug'n'Play operating system.

  • The technology is awesome (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rexguo ( 555504 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:35AM (#9492915) Homepage

    I've just attended CommunicAsia 2004 in Singapore where Apple announced and demo'ed its answer to Adobe After Effects, called Motion [apple.com]. It is one incredible piece of software I tell you. Check out the Quicktime demos online at Apple's site. Anyway, my point here is that Far-brausch's tool has the exact same "real-time preview and update while everything is still running" technology that Apple was spending 90% of its time showing off of Motion. I'm also very impressed by the way Chaos solved the classic problem of layout problems in a graph-based media technology by using stacked operators. Everything snaps and stacks up nicely and you know how the data flows. I did something very similiar but far from the polished state that this tool has. It's called HyperNet [waterlogic.com.sg], and it's done in Java, making heavy use of its built-in reflection mechanism.

    • MOD PARENT UP! (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by rexguo ( 555504 )
      Who's the idiot that modded my post Offtopic? I'm bringing up similiarities between a flagship commercial product of Apple and this free tool, and talking about its cool technology, how is that Offtopic?

  • Just pointing out... (Score:5, Funny)

    by 222 ( 551054 ) <stormseeker@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:35AM (#9492916) Homepage
    I just wanted to make the comparison that notepad.exe is 64.5k...

    • Re:Just pointing out... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, but "the.popular.demo" is actually 8.3MB (the story is wrong), not 64KB. So I'm much more impressed with Notepad, honestly, in utility per byte (even though it does just create a window with a common Windows control straight out of a system DLL).
    • I still think the best demo maker is NASM. :)

      It's the best way to learn assembler, and I think it would be a great class at a university. I have a 57 byte static-like snowy screen thing I created that will even exit when you press a key. I sacrificed a lot of speed for size, and it isn't that cool, but I just wanted to see how small it could be done in. If anyone wants the fully documented assembler code, it's definately short enough to post. It's fun to tell people that their monitor cable came un-don

  • The real 64k intro (Score:2, Informative)

    by rhymesmith ( 528299 )

    Actually the first 64k intro (as the small ones were/are usually called) created using this tool was The product (das produkt) [pouet.net] released at The Party [theparty.dk] and ranked 1st in the intro competition.

    A really mind-blowing piece of work considering it was made four years ago and fit into 64k, be sure to check it out.

  • Errr... not meaning to troll, but the Popular demo is around 8 meg - only in a Windows environment could it be called a 64k demo ;) On topic, I've been a fan of Farb-Rausch for some time now - they seem to be one of the few PC groups that have that "wholly-rounded production" feel that was such a feature of the early PC scene and the old Amiga days. But then, I'm an anorak for this sort of thing - thinking of the days of Sanity, Anarchy et al. on the Amiga scene gives me a warm glow in my vitals. Looking

    • Re:Demos.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by jpop32 ( 596022 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @07:01AM (#9493523)
      from the days of glorified LAN parties

      LAN parties? Surely you mean _copy_ parties. There were no LANs in the _real_ good old days. Hard disks were scarce, too. And bandwidth was measured by how many floppies would fit in a envelope.

      Oh yeah, and we had to walk uphill both ways. ;-)
  • Demopaja [inside.org] was released a couple years back, and is really the same thing with older fx. So this has been done before.

    • Re:Demopaja was still the first (Score:5, Informative)

      by kb ( 43460 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @04:12AM (#9493028) Homepage Journal
      No, it's not. Demopaja is "only" (not to say anything against it, it's one of the coolest tools even for producing videos ;) a timeline editor for external plugin DLLs, so to say a tool that demosceners can use to concentrate on coding their own effects while leaving the dirty direction work to the artists. .werkkzeug on the other hand is a complete, closed content development system which does not support linking your own code (because we never needed that, Chaos always implemented what the others wanted) but includes everything from texture generation, mesh generation/editing, timeline editing, post-processing effects and a few other things.

      So you can't even compare both tools, as they've got radically different uses within the same context.

      Oh, and in fact the only thing that we claim that hasn't done before is the completely nondestructive modular texture and model editing. We know we haven't invented texture generation itself or demomakers, don't worry. Damn, I used those tools back on the C64 when I was 14, so... ;)

      kb / farbrausch

  • What happened to the demo scene anyway? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Analogue Kid ( 54269 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:36AM (#9492925) Homepage
    I really used to love all those demos. They were small, they were fast and they looked great. Basically they were the cutting edge. I used to hang out with 5 of my buddies and watch them on a 486 in my basement. At that time, the demos looked better than anything in any game. But going back and looking at them now is a little sad. It just makes me think of how the demo scene pretty much dried up.

    Have any of you seen a demo that supports hardware acceleration? Maybe something that uses openGL? That would be sweet, a modern demo. I mean, a normal video games graphics beat the heck out of any of the old demos now. But the way I see it, at this point it wouldn't be too tough to make hardware accelerated demos that rivaled or surpassed movie graphics. That is, if anybody bothered making them.

    If anybody's got links to show me I'm wrong and there are modern demos, PLEASE POST THEM NOW!!!

  • notice the email.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by sinner0423 ( 687266 ) <{sinner0423} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:36AM (#9492927)
    radman from ACiD posting, demo's being released, all we need now is some boxing tutorials, door games, and a hex edited renegade chock full of ansi art.

    one day i'll get my THEDRAW skills up to par, i swear it. 708/312 repruhzent.

  • 3d engine, texture+music, and even a speech synth! (Score:5, Informative)

    by PommeFritz ( 70221 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:37AM (#9492928) Homepage
    I was stunned when I downloaded Farb-rausch's "Candytron" 64K demo.

    It contains a 3d engine, procedural texture creation, realtime music synthesizer AND also a speech synthesizer! The music in some of their demos is actually accompanied by a (robotic) singer! You can even make out the words...

    Farb-rausch rule, IMHO :-)

  • for more info on demos and the demoscene: (Score:5, Informative)

    by spiny ( 87740 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:42AM (#9492944) Homepage Journal
    a few links:

    orange juice (news site): http://www.ojuice.net"> [ojuice.net]


    pouet (demo archive with discussion): http://www.pouet.net [pouet.net]


    scene.org (pretty much all demos since 1993 ...) : http://www.scene.org [scene.org]



    those three have plenty of links to other sites too. nearly all platforms still have strong demo scenes active, from the Oric (no really! [defence-force.org]) through to the Atari Falcon (and ST/e) [www.dhs.nu]


    you don't have to be a programmer to take part either, if you can pixel or weild a graphics tablet, knock up a catch chip choon or an entire mp3 album you'll fit right in.

  • Natural progression for demos (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mav[LAG] ( 31387 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @03:50AM (#9492969)
    On the MindCandy DVD, a collection of the best PC demos, the commentary mentions that when demos went hardware accelerated, the trend moved more towards style and combination of effects than clever coding. On a 486-50 a demo's code really had to be top-notch and use all sorts of clever tricks to achieve the seemingly impossible - plus the coders would write everything - including the music playback and graphics routines. On a 2Ghz PIV with a GeForce and with the ability to tap into either the OpenGL or DirectX API for graphics (and a third-party music player), it becomes all about style and combination (and procedural effects if size dictates).

    Farbrausch's tool is just another step in this evolution. Kudos to them - it just means more good 64ks :)

  • 629k (Score:2, Funny)

    by beef3k ( 551086 )
    Hey, looks like they prefer writing their tools in pure assembly too :)

    • Re:629k (Score:3, Informative)

      by kb ( 43460 )
      nope, apart from the softsynth and a few inner loops of the texture generator it's all C++.. without exception/RTTI bloat tho and only a few templates when it was really the best solution ;)

      The trick is not to include tons of megabytes of external libs when you can eg. load a JPG file with two WinAPI calls instead of using libjpg. The only libraries used are for deconding the sound files, and that's libvorbis, mimifmod and my softsynth/midiplayer, the latter two optimized for size like hell.

      kb^fr
  • In 2002 a group named exceed released a true 64KB demo (ok, it's 65536 bytes, close enough) called "Heaven 7" that was absolutely amazing for its time. You can check out their website here [demoscene.hu].

  • LAME tool for LAMERS! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ORg2000 ( 739927 )
    Anyone recall TRSI DEMO MAKER for Amiga or the numerous "demo/doc-makers" for C64? This is again the same type of tool for lamers who want to be "DemoCoders" by just clicking a few buttons.

    I've lost the count of all "Demos" I swapped in the old days thay just turned out to be another variant of the Pre-sets in TRSI DemoMaker. Even worse, I found an old VHS-copy of a movie where *I* had made an intro before the film, with a self drawn logo, crappy scrollertext and everything, all done on C64 with a crap
  • 64kb demo in an 8 meg download thats impressive

    The old 8 bit systems like the spectrum really showed what could be done in 64k I tried disassembling one once first thing it did was copy code to the old specky print buffer delete this loader code move everything down a bit and then proceeded to unfold itself up the memory incredible. pretty good to watch too as the primitive hardware started doing things which just seemed impossible.
    It was demo's like that which got me hooked. Wish I could remember who did

    • I tried disassembling one once first thing it did was copy code to the old specky print buffer delete this loader code move everything down a bit and then proceeded to unfold itself up the memory incredible. pretty good to watch too as the primitive hardware started doing things which just seemed impossible.

      I wonder how many of the demo and other assembly programmers from the old 65xx scene ended up in the virus authoring scene of the 90s? It's pretty clear from the badly-coded worms that few real pr

  • I like how someone finally came up with a way to make demos that look fantastic and are actually Slashdot resistant~!

    (you'll note I did not say Slashdot proof. Nothing is /. proof. Even a blank page gets PINGED. )

    That aside, I felt sad the day I ran the dynamic lighting/shadows 96k demo. Destroyed the GeForce 5200's in the lab...

    • Re:Slashdot-resistant~! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by kb ( 43460 )
      > Destroyed the GeForce 5200's in the lab...

      That's actually the best thing that can happen to a GeForceFX 5200. If you buy your next card, try to go for something that's NOT slower than a 4 years old GeForce2 :)

  • Role of demos has changed over the years. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by master_p ( 608214 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @04:36AM (#9493089)
    When there was no 3d hardware available and operating systems were open (for examples: Dos, Atari TOS, Amiga WB), demos had a reason to exist: they stressed the available hardware, doing things no one knew they could be done. Demos usually wrote to the bare metal, bypassing any operating system libraries (if they were any).

    For example, no one knew that Amiga could do 60-FPS sprite scaling, until demos did it (and the chance of having a good conversion of Outrun was totally missed).

    But what is the reason for a demo today ? a demo is limited by the O/S architecture (no direct hardware access) and by what the local graphics/multimedia API offers. Demos are no longer a demonstration of the programming abilities of their creators; at their best, demos show off the abilities of the video card they run under (of the lack of abilities).

    Demos are an indication that we have reached an age that technology in no longer important, and creativity is more important.
    • I still remember being amazed by Second Reality running on my 386 (which, due to having most of it's memory on the 8Mhz ISA bus, ran DOOM at less than 5fps).

      Of course, if you're looking for sheer amazement, try Smash Designs' Second Reality 64 [pouet.net], a recreation of Second Reality for the Commodore 64. Complete with fake PC bootup sequence.
    • This is something that actually goes back father than this. When the Amiga 1200 came out in 93 many demo authors said the same thing. After all the A1200 has 2 MEGS of chip ram (where the standard machine of the scene - the A500 only had 512K) and was as much as 8 times quicker than the 8 MHz A500. Thing is the A1200 was 14MHz and really pales in comparision to today's machines.

      The 1200 meant the same thing it does today - with better hardware programmers, music and graphics people can focus far more on de
  • It looks really nice, but I wonder if they could port this to OpenGL? This project seems like an ideal candidate for open sourcing... =)

    • Re:OpenGL? (Score:3, Informative)

      by kb ( 43460 )
      Of course we could, but there are SO many more important things for us to do ;)

      Honestly, OSS also exists under Windows, and since MS are giving out their compiler suite for free (as in beer) [microsoft.com] everyone can get the project and even work at it. So you want an OpenGL version? It's up to you then. Apart from the pixel shader stuff that should be quite easy to do actually.

      kb^farbrausch
      • I haven't looked too deeply into this, but is the source for your demos available? Because I would enjoy attempting a port...

      • Re:OpenGL? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Krunch ( 704330 )

        MS are giving out their compiler suite for free (as in beer)

        Why use free as in beer when there is free as in freedom [mingw.org] ?

        So you want an OpenGL version? It's up to you then.

        What about releasing the source ? That would help a lot. It would also be easier to port if you were using SDL [libsdl.org] and OpenGL instead of DirectX.

        Releasing the tool is nice but if you want people to get involved [slashdot.org], releasing the tool's source is better.

  • Old demos on new systems (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RichardX ( 457979 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @07:24AM (#9493630) Homepage
    here's another way to see those old demos without having to jump through all the compatibility hoops...

    If you have winamp 5 and a reasonable broadband connection, pop open the media library window, go to the internet TV section, and look for any of the Demoscene channels, or Yodel TV - basically, for anyone who's not seen Winamp TV yet, it's pretty much shoutcast-for-video.. and the demoscene channels, well, as you might guess, stream video of demos. Good stuff.

  • One thought (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pragma_x ( 644215 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2004 @08:17AM (#9494002) Journal
    To answer all the "real demos are coded on bare metal using raw assembly." and "r33l 3l33+ d3m0z @r3 13$$ Th4n 64k!!!111" flames: Demo music tracks were being composed in external editors since the Amiga. Anyone who was into the 'scene in the early 90's will remember Scream Tracker, since it allowed you to not only edit music for your own demos, but you could listen to other favorites too. There were even some kits floating around the BBS's that allowed you to 'plug in' S3M playback into your own work.

    This is really just "Scream Tracker for Graphics" (or "Shockwave for Demos" for the n00bs). Makes sense to me since most 3d engines use virtually the same pipeline; this just pushes the creativity away from the bits that are the same from demo to demo.

    • I'm a bit unsure what you mean by "most 3D engines use virtually the same pipeline" -- I've seen lots of different ways to do object/effect management, at least, and I keep on seeing new ways to wring weird stuff out of the existing OpenGL/Direct3D APIs. It sounds to me as though you're meaning "there's only 14 different effects anyhow, so let's just standardize this", which definitely isn't true ;-) (OK, if you watch some demos, you might come to believe it in the end, though... :-P)

      /* Steinar */

      • Well, what I meant by "virtually the same" is that the 3d engine probably isn't going to change as much from demo-to-demo as when desktop 3d graphics were an emerging technology (see: back-in-the-day). ;) You're still going to want to pull new ideas and effects out of the paradigm though, as that's kind of the point with demos. But those elaborations, from my perspective, are largely becoming more and more like filters on an already cannonical process.

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