Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

datagubbe.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

#111

Post by account42 »

countWSS wrote: post #62

Perhaps its the lack of appeal, in the past, the idea that you could squeeze performance into an old machine was cool, but the gap between current hardware and "demoscene limits" feels like artificially crippling: if you have 64GB of ram, the appeal of 64KB demo is far less than if you have a 64MB 486DX. It would be far more cooler, that instead of ancient hardware and artifically limited PCs, they would run demoscen…

The point of the limits is the challenge though, not just nostalgia. I don't agree that a 64KiB demo is any less impressive on a modern machine than it was back then. On the contrary, moving to something like the latest Pi means there isn't much point in having the limit at all - and those competitions already exist, e.g. a PC "demo" (as opposed to "intro") isn't usually limited to a specific size.

Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

#112

Post by AbstractH24 »

itvision wrote: post #110

It's dying because the home amateur PC is on its last legs. And the cracking scene has now to grapple with hellish online activation. And then many workflows have become sort of professional or moved to the web altogether. And the younger generation, having received access to gigabytes of RAM and storage, simply couldn't care less about being super lean and fast. There's really no future for the scene.

> And the younger generation, having received access to gigabytes of RAM and storage, simply couldn't care less about being super lean and fast.

It's interesting I often attribute this to VCs and their desire for growth over efficiency (let alone profitability). I find myself having to reel in my desire to challenge myself to identify the most efficient way possible, even if it only saves a few dollars.

Never occurred to me it was generational and not related to VCs

Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

#113

Post by bradly »

endymion-light wrote: post #79
bradly wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently starting dabbling in live coding and found it to be really hard and fun and technical and creative. And while I'm not really that comfortable in Discord, I did find the community welcoming and helpful.

What discord's are good for live coding/creative coding?

TOPLAP is the one I’m most familiar with and it is nicely organized by live coding env/lang. There are some other servers listed here: https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding

Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

#114

Post by magicalhippo »

npteljes wrote: post #90
magicalhippo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The demoscene events are not for coding, although I'm sure it happens How to tell you've never been to a demo party without saying you've never been to a demo party. I jest, but scrambling to implement the last effect before the deadline, or fix some stupid last minute bug was certainly typical at the events I was at. And you see this in a lot of the prods which released post-party "proper" versions. There were als…

Guilty, I never have been! But, if you contrast it with a hackathon, the objective of the event is the showing off part, not the preparation part. Prep is at least months of work. Whereas the point of a hackathon is to create somethere during the event.

Yeah I was just reminded of the panicked coding I witnessed at the events I went to.

Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

#115

Post by MiiMe19 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #15

"The scene is dead" has become a meme by now. For example the "new talent" Meteoriks award is introduced with "For a scene that has been dead since 1999, our walking dead are pretty fresh". It is well alive. Sure, we still see some of the same people from 1989, and the average age is certainly going up, but it absolutely doesn't mean we aren't seeing new blood. Styles change, technical achievement is usually seen in…

The demoparty I help host is doing a "the scene is undead" theme this year since it is on Halloween.

Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

#116

Post by unleaded »

unleaded wrote: post #95

In my experience the old computer nerd communities don't do much to help get young people that would be interested into it. A lot of the discussion online mainly just consists of reminiscing about how amazing the '80s were. 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,…

I know you can't really cause a change in an online community by complaining about it in a hacker news comment but i do think if someone savvy with the amiga wrote a guide in that style (with things like "We press build, open the rom, and wow! We have a bouncing box on the screen!") it might start the ball rolling. Would love to see it either way.

I guess part of the reason was that the consoles never had public development kits or manuals, so when the homebrew scene emerged they had to bootstrap themselves (and in the process usually created better manuals/tools than the OEMs), compared to all the home computers where of course they were always available and nobody felt a reason to rewrite them all.

Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

#117

Post by jrm4 »

satisfice wrote: post #29

I didn’t know what the demo scene was before I read this. I still don’t. Is it hackathons?

A demo is basically "let me show off something cool and amazing that shouldn't be possible re: graphics and sound."

One great analogy I heard somewhere -- if videogames are prose, demos are poetry.

Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

#118

Post by selfhoster11 »

unleaded wrote: post #95

In my experience the old computer nerd communities don't do much to help get young people that would be interested into it. A lot of the discussion online mainly just consists of reminiscing about how amazing the '80s were. 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,…

Palm OS is getting livelier by the year. There's a number of younger folks getting into it, with some creating new apps, and it's been ported to new hardware.

My guess is that as time goes on, more development knowledge will be captured/OCRed into machine-searchable archives that will help the beginners. Using emulated/virtual development tool chains is also a lot less resource-intensive, and will help newcomers who don't know how to set these things up on their own.

Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

#119

Post by nonameiguess »

satisfice wrote: post #29

I didn’t know what the demo scene was before I read this. I still don’t. Is it hackathons?

I wanted to say earlier when first reading this that I got like 15 minutes in without any explanation of what this scene was, and it felt like that might be a reason for a scene to die, if someone like me who got his first Commodore 64 in 1986 and has been alive for nearly half a century with interest in what this sounded like had never heard of it, outreach and publicity to new folks must not be great.

But Wikipedia says this is primarily a European thing, so I guess that's why.

Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright

#120

Post by wiz21c »

moralestapia wrote: post #104
wiz21c wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the 80's were amazing :-)

I was there and they weren't. Much better times today, imo.

I was a kid and there were Tron, Star Wars, video games, personal computing, hacking culture, etc. Those defined new things and point of views.

Sure we had thermonuclear war threats and a bit of AIDS. But that was basically all.

But as far as my craft is concerned (coding) there's no question about it, everything is so much easier now !

Post reply on HN