Live data from Hacker News

Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

metafilter.com

21–30 of 53 posts

Re: Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

#21
post #7
post #2

I used to be the coder of a small demoscene team in the early 2000's. I never had as much fun writing computer programs ever since then. It was creating awesome stuff just for the sake of awesomeness.

What do you think is stopping demos from taking off as a serious commercial art form? Just culture, or something more fundamental?

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.

Re: Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

#22
post #7
post #2

I used to be the coder of a small demoscene team in the early 2000's. I never had as much fun writing computer programs ever since then. It was creating awesome stuff just for the sake of awesomeness.

What do you think is stopping demos from taking off as a serious commercial art form? Just culture, or something more fundamental?

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.

Re: Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

#23
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But strictly demos are non-interactive, right? That's the question I have: Is there a market for a pure-digital multimedia art form beside games?

There was a commercial demo released for the PS3 on PSN called Linger in Shadows(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linger_in_Shadows), sold for $3. Farbrausch also released a commercial PSN demo called .detuned. I'm surprised the demo scene hasn't released more productions for iOS or Android. It seems like impressive non-interactive or semi-interactive demos with no game play would do alright either ad supported or at the $0.99 price point. I'm not sure if the average person would really get the difference between a real time non-interactive demo and a video playing on their phone, though.

Re: Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

#25
post #24
post #3

This is a great collection of links. And it's extremely up-to-date - that last demo, Gaia Machina, just came out last week!

Wow. Just wow. 64kb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kx66_i3ue4

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 :)

Re: Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

#26
post #24
post #3

This is a great collection of links. And it's extremely up-to-date - that last demo, Gaia Machina, just came out last week!

Wow. Just wow. 64kb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kx66_i3ue4

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...

Re: Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

#28
post #22
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is stopping demos from taking off as a serious commercial art form? Just culture, or something more fundamental?

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…

> how they manage to overcome the limitations imposed by the scene

It's pretty telling that the scene adapted to the increased hardware by imposing their own limitations instead of anything-goes. If we can't be wowed by what they do on limited hardware, we have to be wowed by what they can do under their own very harsh limitations.

Re: Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

#29
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But strictly demos are non-interactive, right? That's the question I have: Is there a market for a pure-digital multimedia art form beside games?

There was a commercial demo released for the PS3 on PSN called Linger in Shadows( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linger_in_Shadows ), sold for $3. Farbrausch also released a commercial PSN demo called .detuned. I'm surprised the demo scene hasn't released more productions for iOS or Android. It seems like impressive non-interactive or semi-interactive demos with no game play would do alright either ad supported or at t…

Funny thing, someone tried to submit a demo to appstore. It got insta-failed approval for the use of the word “demo” in the description, because don't allow “demo versions” of applications in the store. He tried to explain the nature of the application, and in the end still didn't get through approval, exactly because it didn't have any interactivity, so there was no perceived use for users.

So the issue is distribution, if you can't put it to friends device without jumping through hoops, it gains less interest. I haven't followed android-scene that much, but I believe there are at least some ports of demos available. There the hoops are in supporting different kind of devices.

But asking for money? Not in the spirit of scene, how are you gonna ‘show off’ your mad skills if you are gonna ask for money? :)

Post reply on HN