Demoscene: 64k Intros At Revision Demoparty 207
An anonymous reader writes "Last week-end at Revision demoparty, demosceners have pushed further the limits of what can be done in a single 64kb executable file. Using extensive procedural techniques and compression, Gaia Machina (video capture) and F — Felix's Workshop (video capture) are realtime animations, featuring high quality rendering, sound, 3D models, and textures."
Re:The reason you haven't heard about it (Score:5, Informative)
I think I know why North American readers may never heard of it. (USA and Canada represent well over two-thirds of the population of industrialized anglophone countries.) From the article:
in Saarbrücken, Germany
For some reason they never have demo parties like this in North America. Why is that?
I'm Canadian, and I know of the demoscene and all the related terminology the GP doesn't. While I never had the opportunity to attend a party, I loved watching what some of these groups put out. The Amiga era was a few years before my time; I got into it in the mid-90's when names like Renaissance, Future Crew and Triton were the big guns.
There are caps of some of the big name demos from back in the day available on YouTube, with Future Crew [youtube.com]'s probably being the most popular. I still remember the awe I experienced when I first saw Triton's (later Starbreeze Studios) Into the Shadows [youtube.com] demo. I purchased their subsequent game, Enclave, because of that demo (and they were the guys who wrote FastTracker 2).
For those who don't know what the big deal is, way back when PC hardware was pretty crappy these groups were putting out some of the most demanding and advanced programs, stuff that put a lot of what the game companies were pushing to shame. The aforementioned Into the Shadows demo was released in 1995. This is long before 3D accelerators and hardware floating-point math were standard. It really was impressive at the time, and it was being done by groups of kids.
Wortbildung (Score:4, Informative)
I was wondering why it's "demoscene" and not "demo scene"
Because English puts spaces in its compound words more often than German does.
Re:Damn you kids, get off my lawn. (Score:5, Informative)
Newsflash; we haven't had OS-less demos on the PC, ever. Even in msdos days we were using bios routines to load in data, if not to initialize the videocard etc.