I didn’t know what the demo scene was before I read this. I still don’t. Is it hackathons?
The very broad definition is people who write artistic shaders frequently limited to a binary size, sometime 4kb, sometime 16.
The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
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Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
#32"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…
Exactly; it’s like model railroads or stamp collecting. Never truly dead! (I mean this with deep sarcasm.)
I think one of the difference between stamp collecting and the demoscene is that while stamp collecting was quite big for a time, the demoscene has always been a niche thing.
For a time the demoscene looked bigger than it was, mostly because of all the cracks. But for the people who actually produced stuff or went to demoparties or even just seek out productions that weren't cracks, it has always been a small world, like a few thousands of active people worldwide.
Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
#33This saddens me. The idea of the demoscene really resonated with me, and I was curious about making stuff and joining.
Nothing stopping you! Keep the flame alive :)
Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
#34The best period of my life as a programmer. I've never stopped feeling nostalgic for the demoscene of the 80s and 90s. When we used to fight between Amiguys and Atarists. The Amiguys always won, of course. In fact, there was no real point to flamewar about. They had almost everything. And us Atarists? Well... we had a 68000 at 8 MHz, a MIDI port, a budget several hundreds of $ less... and even more ingenuity to get the best out of our machines (hey, let's defend ourselves as best as we can). But when the despicable PC reared its ugly architecture, suddenly we were the best of friends.
I must also confess my sacrilege, Amiguy: a buddy gave me his Amiga 500. Shortly after, the floppy drive on my STe broke down. So I took apart the one from the Amiga and put it in my ST... I wasn't even sure it would work, but it did. Now you can beat me up... but calm down. It's not like the Amiga's drive was its strong point, was it? I couldn't have done that with the Copper and its friends, and sure I wish I could have!
Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
#35I didn’t know what the demo scene was before I read this. I still don’t. Is it hackathons?
Wikipedia can probably explain it best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
#36Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
#37I would love more outlets for creative coding, I feel like neocities is a bit like that. That said there isn't really a scene or real sense of community (AFAIK). I mean someone liked something I uploaded once, but I never interacted with them again. Cohost had fun vibes like that as well, but I guess it's no longer with us. Same with Glitch, but admittedly I didn't use it in the last few years, but it was my go to op…
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.
Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
#38Dunno about state of the scene insights, but earlier this week this submission got some positive attention here.
Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr
Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
#39[deleted]
Re: The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
#40The demo scene inspired me to keep my next‑gen terminal [0] tiny: it is under 5MB (Mac download was once 900 KB) and my aim is to get all downloads down to ~1MB. If demosceners can do it, regular indie devs really have no excuse. This scene isn’t dead; we should just look beyond 3D glitter. See File Pilot [1] for another compact, clever example. [0] https://terminal.click [1] https://filepilot.tech
For me, one of the greatest examples of this style is Reaper[0]. A completely functional professional audio DAW in a 12 to 20MB download (depending on your architecture and OS). -- 0: https://www.reaper.fm/download.php
On one hand, seeing multiple megs described as slim makes me want to pinch myself, because that’s very far from my understanding of reality. On the other, today these apps always seem to include a bespoke toolkit of some description (as both File Pilot and Reaper demonstrate), whereas slim golden-age Windows apps leaned very hard on the GDI/USER/COMCTL one, and those libraries are quite hefty.
(Unlike, say, the Visual Basic IDE, which had two custom toolkits—the one the apps used and the one the IDE did—or Office, which AFAIU included three or four divergent versions—for Access, for Word and Excel, for VBA apps, and for the VBA IDE, with the last two being effectively identical to the respective VB ones, though I don’t know if the IDE and the Word/Excel ones were actually different. And that’s not counting IE’s toolkit, which basically displaced USER controls in HTML forms by the time of IE6. None of these count as slim, is my point.)
But what really makes me wonder here is how File Pilot manages to display what looks in the screenshot like a shell item’s (file’s) full context menu using its custom styling.
My impression was that the atrocious and discordant two-level Explorer context menu Microsoft is pushing in Windows 11 was because the traditional (Windows 95-era) way to provide context menu items with was to write a shell extension (an Explorer plugin, which would get loaded not only into the bloody system shell but also into every app that used common file dialogs) that would get called when the menu was being built. And that callback interface was built around the assumption of menu items being traditional HMENUs (and allowed the shell extension to set up arbitrary drawing routines for the items it added). So changing the toolkit that Explorer used for context menus away from USER was essentially impossible, and even styling it differently from Windows 95 was fraught (I do remember seeing the occasional flat-gray menu item on Windows XP with Luna enabled). There was an attempt to transition to more declarative context menus around (IIRC) Windows 7, but evidently adoption wasn’t good. And thus the Windows 11 Explorer was forced to use the embarrassing hack of initially showing the declarative context menu, drawn using its new toolkit, then grafting the real one, drawn using USER, onto it as a submenu.
And yet.
File Pilot draws the full context menu with a look very similar to Explorer’s preferred one.
How?..