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Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine

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Re: Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine

#21

Most people who were a part of the scene in 2000 remember The Product (1). I remember it winning The Party and being struck by how impressive their work was. If you're on windows, I guess you can download the demo itself (2). At 64kb, it should be a pretty quick download ;-) Their impressiveness has only gone up since 2000, as you can see by watching Debris (3), which at 177kb beats the living crap out of most things…

Every time I see the this demo YT I want to teach myself C++ (despite I hate compiled languages) - this is great inspiration for me.

Nowa days this graphics is not really that impressive but back in 2000 that was jaw-breaking OMG

Re: Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine

#22
I remember trying to figure out how a certain lensing effect was done in the werkzeug a few years back. I really invested quite a bit of effort in this, and I never did work it out (yes, I did use all of the umm, obvious techniques for this). I'm really looking forward to finally figuring out this one thing that eluded me for so long. Farbrausch are the greatest. Long live Farbrausch.

Re: Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine

#23
post #6

Wow, I never thought VC++ and MFC are this extensively used in demoscene groups.

VC++ nearly exclusively. Some GCC'ers, but that's it, really. There's some more recent demos written in, say, Python, Java and C#, but they're pretty exceptional. Demoscene is also nearly entirely Windows-only. It's a good platform for games, and thus for demos. Plus, culturally, demos are about as closed-source as you can get, so there's this natural repellent force between the hardcore Linux zealots and the hardcor…

> Demoscene is also nearly entirely Windows-only.

Pardon, I meant the PC Demoscene. Don't want angry C64 demosceners here.

Re: Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine

#24
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PC demoscene started out on DOS and Watcom C++, and switched almost exclusively to Windows and Visual C++ around 1999. It was a natural choice at the time, as Linux wasn't ready for primetime and MSVC really was the best compiler around. The choice of platform had to take the majority into account: most people didn't want to write demos that ordinary people couldn't watch. The opinion of programmers was not the m…

Early demos were also frequently attached to warez, so they had to be on the same platform that the game/app being cracked was on.

That origin was really really early and not too relevant here.

Re: Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine

#26

Most people who were a part of the scene in 2000 remember The Product (1). I remember it winning The Party and being struck by how impressive their work was. If you're on windows, I guess you can download the demo itself (2). At 64kb, it should be a pretty quick download ;-) Their impressiveness has only gone up since 2000, as you can see by watching Debris (3), which at 177kb beats the living crap out of most things…

I imagined that demo skills would eventually die and the more recent stuff would just end up being bloated or lame. But it really has improved. Infeasibly improved. Debris is amazing. But it isn't the only more recent amazing demo. Someone once asked me whether there was a limit to how realistic demos can be made. I would normally prate on about Shannon information or something, but it was a very smart mathematician who asked me. I did eventually think of a reason though. A demo is never going to contain a model of a piece of paper on which its own source code (plus additional information) is written in the demo. So there have to be some limits. But the limits don't seems to have been reached yet, especially with better and better modelling in the hardware.

Re: Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine

#27
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PC demoscene started out on DOS and Watcom C++, and switched almost exclusively to Windows and Visual C++ around 1999. It was a natural choice at the time, as Linux wasn't ready for primetime and MSVC really was the best compiler around. The choice of platform had to take the majority into account: most people didn't want to write demos that ordinary people couldn't watch. The opinion of programmers was not the m…

Early demos were also frequently attached to warez, so they had to be on the same platform that the game/app being cracked was on.

This is also very true of the Amiga scene back in the day.

Re: Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine

#29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early demos were also frequently attached to warez, so they had to be on the same platform that the game/app being cracked was on.

That origin was really really early and not too relevant here.

There wasn't ever really a clean break afaik, and the association (some groups more than others) continued through at least the 1990s. Fairlight were active in both scenes for over a decade, for example, though from what I can tell the group did slowly internally divide in terms of who was focusing on warez v. demos. More to the point, though, I think the association with reverse-engineering culture had a significant impact on the technical culture and choice of tools/platforms. Unix culture had more of a C ethos, and less of a patch-asm-into-a-running-program type ethos.

Re: Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine

#30
post #11

Farbrausch is one of the few very good reasons to be very proud of german programming!

What does nationality have to do with anything?

From what I remember as an observer, nationality always was a point of pride in the European demoscene, even when tongue in cheek.
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