The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

In 2012, I created a live coding platform and spent a lot of time thinking about why live coding didn’t become more popular than traditional coding. Live coding came about 10 years before React, which became reactive because you no longer had to press F5 every time you updated the HTML (I worked on the first version of React Webpack, which was doing server-side rendering).

Later, after going through a startup accelerator, the puzzle finally clicked for me. Companies and businesses began making serious money from video games, discovering lots of talent in the wild indie dev and demoscene space. The best talents were like raw gems and this eventually scaled into an industry.

Now, the best innovations are being patented and presented at SIGGRAPH and the game engine market is massive. Of course, amid all the flashiness and white-collar presence, it’s hard to spot the demosceners, but they’re behind every game. They’ve just been hired by corporations and their talent no longer expresses itself in the same way.

Unfortunately, companies provide very little support for the demoscene, which is why we don’t see the same explosive growth here as we do in games, graphics or AI.

I remember one case where a guy was hired to animate King Kong’s face for a movie and he spent two years hand-animating every single emotion. I wonder what kind of demos he might have created during that time if the corporation hadn’t hired him and forced him into repetitive work.

The market.

Documentation is also in something of a state—the big video game consoles (NES, SNES, Genesis..) all have plenty of free, modern high quality guides teaching you how to program them from nothing, understand all the hardware, etc.. then look at the '80s computers (*especially* the Amiga) and it seems to mainly be scattered around old book scans and wiki articles assuming varying levels of pre-existing knowledge of the hardware. Strangely enough a lot of the best documentation seems to be from YouTube tutorials (I guess because you can see what they're actually doing). It sounds wrong to call it "stuck in the past" but I guess that would be the best way to describe it.

This isn't really about the scene specifically but it's somewhat related at least.

The stuff I've written for 64k intros:

- Rendering system (software renderers in the 90s and latest a non-RTX raytracing systems with global illumination), these alone is kinda what people write or wrote MSc thesis works on.

- SDF based effects/rendering (this is what 4k intros often focus on apart from music, here it becomes an addition to the above toolset).

- Often some keyframing/skinning systems, either customized or imported from Blender(now) or in the past 3dsmax, lightwave,etc. (and matching the keyframing maths of the tools), the kind of shit that made game industry companies adopt 3rd party engines because it's hard to get correct (luckily for demos with small teams we can avoid some pitfalls of the formats).

- A modular softsynth (with sequenceing, genrerators and filters) with a MDCT based compressor (think MP3 like compression)

- Texture and image via generators and filters.

- A few generations of visual editing tools to have visual editing of various things listed above.

(Yes, some people have created more abstract things in 64k intros but those don't push the envelope as much imho).

Oh and once all that is done, nobody will run it because...

- The exe compressors used to make things small have been adopted by malware writers and antivirus programs will flag everything because antivirus software just profiles the unpacker routines.

(4k writers have less of an issue with this because the 64k compressors are more drop-in whilst crinkler that's used for 4k's is a custom linker that will have less of a profile and requires custom build steps).

As for Raspberry PI's, there has been compos to target them and phones but the capability of a Raspberry PI and phones is close enough to a PC that you're not really constrained in any pracitcal way apart from needing to push it onto that machine.

On that tangent however Pico-8 and similar pseudoconsoles have been popular since they often provide a simple IDE environment that let's people get straight to it and have a clear recgonizable restriction level.