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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.
group name, handles, id numbers please! in fact, there's plenty of active demosceners here on HN. -waves!-
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A lot of the members of .theprodukkt joined Farbrausch[1]. You can still find the productions by that team, including .kkrieger on the Farbrausch site[2]. [1] http://www.farb-rausch.de/ [2] http://www.farb-rausch.de/prod.py?which=114
IIRC, .theprodukkt is/was Farbrausch's commercial "arm."'
http://www.49games.de/ was the 'commercial' arm of Farbrausch (most Farbrausch members worked there) and they got bought by the german game developing company Bigpoint: http://bigpoint.net/2011/09/bigpoint-takes-over-the-entire-d...
Here's Kebby (FR) talking a bit about the demoscene at MIT: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17875473
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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…
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> 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.
I'm not sure what you are referring to. 4k/64k have been around for a long time, close to 20 years. Demos are generally "anything goes" and for anything else there are usually a "wild compo".
But when hardware stopped begin crap, when you started getting hardware accelerated graphics, when you could do mp3 playback in realtime, it got too easy to make something pretty, and less awesome.
If the demo scene had been about making pretty things, they would have just continued using the new hardware, but since the most important thing has been overcoming difficulties, making something pretty DESPITE the limitations, making something awesome, you know they value the challenge most.
And that is hard to communicate to regular people, because they can only value the prettiness of a demo, and that limits the popularity of it.
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What do you think is stopping demos from taking off as a serious commercial art form? Just culture, or something more fundamental?
Because people see them simply as computer animation with pre-recorded music. They don't understand the algorithmic beauty inside. I don't think demos will ever have a wide mass-appeal, even while being one of the most demanding and beautiful of art-forms (in my opinion).
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hello :)
knos, you change handle too fast.
It is harder and harder, and maybe it does not feel as relevant as before anymore, to preserve the pseudonymity the scene valued.
It's certainly something that always attracted me.
THIS ( http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/kkrieger-chapter-1/scr... ) Entire game (interactive demoscene) is only 96kb. It's all procedurally generated which is what demoscene is all about. Everything you see, sound, music, textures, models, is just code. No images or audio what-so-ever. Just algorithms that generate shapes within shapes, within shapes. Like fractals almost. I was devastated to find the group's we…