Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

Oh thank you. I thought their stuff was lost forever. Ever since Sonique and its hundreds of skins and visualization plugins where taken off the internet a few years back I no longer trust anyone to archive anything. I literally download my favorite YouTube videos as well, as many disappear over time.

IIRC, .theprodukkt is/was Farbrausch's commercial "arm."'

and the thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3843427

also a thread on Memon releasing the sources to Demopaja

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3847017

Ritz, 4k coder. But you probably knew that already.

Is it true what you said in the other thread, all the Dutch sceners are unemployed? :) Something in the drinking water at Bizarre, perhaps? :)

My releases: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=343 http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=291 http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=332 http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=333 (You might need one of those DOSbox tools to get sound or to run at all though. They were targeted at Win98/2k, Meuk completely stopped working with XP)

hello :)

Actually this comparison to startups can be extended. In case of demogroups PR was very important, there were strong brands, you had to apply for the positions etc. That was fun&learning not only on the technical side but also about teamwork, coping with failure on the party etc.

At Iguana we even had a QA department!

But yeah it was nothing like a startup because there were no responsibilities or requirements, everyone just did whatever they wanted, when they wanted, how they wanted, and if it gelled into a demo, then great. It was all about exploring shared interests and having fun.

I'd argue it's because they're universally rather dull.

On a technical level, demos are highly impressive and how they manage to overcome the limitations imposed by the scene to create the works that they do is ingenious, but it doesn't make the resulting product interesting from an artistic viewpoint.

For me at least, the glaring weakness is the lack of narrative - there's no stories being told, there's nothing that engages or challenges the viewer. They're akin to videos that show off the features of a game engine where they engender the "that's pretty" reaction, but little else.

To my mind, this is caused by two things - primarily, it's a side effect of the restrictions imposed by the artform. With the limitations of the scene in play, there simply might not exist the scope to create enough content for an engaging narrative structure to be based around and procedural generation only takes you so far when it comes to creating assets in a resource limited environment.

Secondly, I'd argue that the types of people who are primarily interested in creating narrative are going to gravitate to different creative areas - creating short films, or animations for example. As a result, the demoscene is likely to be made up of people who mostly interesting in the question of how pretty the output is, rather than how interesting it is. This is of course also related to the fact that people who 'grew up' in the scene are likely to have a relatively narrow view of what the scene looks like and are unlikely to buck that trend and break out into doing something completely different.

The above is naturally just my two euroyencent of course.

This is a very interesting question. I believe that demos didn't "take off" simply because most people don't find them interesting. If you ask me, the main reasons behind this are the inherent geekiness of this subculture (it's difficult to appreciate the craftsmanship behind demos for most people) as well as the fact that most of the active "sceners" are typically young people who don't necessarily have enough life experience or maturity yet to be able send a meaningful message with a lasting value that could capture the attention of a wider audience (this was definitely true for me). By the time they "grow up", they have jobs and families and other responsibilities and don't have time to produce demos.

Interactive demo-like things have been taking off lately, but mostly under the label "games" (which sells more), even in the case where the game-ness is pretty minimal. Not sure if they're explicitly inspired by the demoscene or not, but interactive-procedural-graphics-and-sound stuff like Proteus feels very much like a demoscene production to me (http://www.visitproteus.com/). Main difference imo is more focus on the procedural interactivity from an experiential perspective, and less focus on technical virtuosity.

Because people see them simply as computer animation with pre-recorded music. They don't understand the algorithmic beauty inside.

I don't think demos will ever have a wide mass-appeal, even while being one of the most demanding and beautiful of art-forms (in my opinion).

Culture. In fact, the GP answered it. Demos are all about awesome for the sake of awesomeness.

Sell it, and it wouldn't be "for the sake of awesomeness" anymore. And it'd be less fun.

There've been a small number of paid demoscene projects at some points, such as Linger in Shadows by Plastic (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50170), but even they were simply paid for the project by Sony, they didn't market and commercialize the demo themselves.

I guess it's simply that for most demosceners, once you not just doing it for fun anymore, it isn't really much fun anymore.

Somehow, to me anyway, it loses something if you just watch a video of it. If you have the hardware for it, you can download the binary from http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59107 and run it in real-time on your own machine, the way it was intended :)

F - Felix’s Workshop by Ctrl-Alt-Test the 2nd place 64K is also very very good, so much crammed into a small file http://thedemoscene.tumblr.com/post/20960247819/f-felixs-wor...