pouët.net

Coders rule the demoscene. Tool users are lame.

Message to all the toolsters: GET YOUR ASS TO MARS, GET YOUR ASS TO MARS, GET YOUR ASS TO MARS, GET YOUR ASS TO MARS...

Gargaj: yes, i can recall a game of life among the first nvidia shader examples.

blala: well, then one also needs one year of precalculation time, multi-megabyte (gigabyte?) executable size, as well as the ability to control all other buiding blocks from an image. btw, i cannot recall any effect using shaders from that old werkzeug, and you cannot specify your own shaders. Otherwise you would be back to the coding. (tm)

I think this thread has gone very pointless. so i will probably not post anymore even if i have to say something interesting.

eye: Going pointless is the curse for all threads on pouet...

Yes, I also want to state that I will not write anything in this thread right now, even though I have to say something.

Just look at Reflux to see how pure code can make a great demo in 2004.
The release of Werkkzeug will not make coders stop coding. Instead, it will motivate them to outperform people who make Werkkzeug-intros.

Seeing how the coder to the right of me is playing Sands of Time like nobody's business instead, that's an awesome illusion.

click n' play made gamecoders obsolete.

Back to the first words of stelthz in this thread:
As long as you have to cope with (technical) restrictions there will always be a challange. But those restrictions fade away on PC, as hardware used is always the most recent. So there are really a lot of things possible, that might be why people put more focus on the design stuff.
In my case it are the limits of the C64 that keep me eager doing thigs on it. So you think of an effekt and are sure you just can't do it at a first glance. But then you start to think how to fake it at least :-) And that is the challenge, let an effect look like more than the hardware could manage. Exactly this aim will be hard to achieve on actual PCs. You think of 3d stuff and you don't need to bother that the machine is able to do it, but you need your designer to make it look great.

Faker: as long as there is something deemed impossible on a machine X, X has restricitions and there is a challenge. And there are a *lot* of things one has only been approaching to doing in realtime yet on a fast PC.

The sad thing is, that it either takes the latest hardware to do it, or it seems "outdated" quite fast. So there are too sides: ones coplaining that it doesn't run on their Voodoo2/TNT/whatever, and the others looking forward. Stable hardware, like C64 or any game console for that matter, makes things better comparable.

Whoops, i posted. Well, like Italians say, laws are there to be broken. And besides i said "probably"

And there are a *lot* of things one has only been approaching to doing in realtime yet on a fast PC.

I'd really like to see an example that is not a "codereffect" (Lets say like real time turbulent fluid dynamics simulation) or something that it is indistinguishable from a faked implementation (Like global illumination).

Is there anything left that would even put a non-coder in awe?

gem: I just watched reflux. Great innovative demo, thanks for the pointer! Indeed, that demo may show some coder effects, however it is not really pushing the boundaries.

This demo reminds me also that there are hardly any demos utilizing high dynamic range rendering, I think there is still a source for nice "effects". Of course it would require a 3d card with float support or some good faking.

stenthz: why not put up a new thread: "Does Demoscene continue to amaze?"

FRs Popular Demo has a sort-of fake HDR.

As to coder/noncodereffects... i have to think for a while. However, i can't see why a coder-effect cannot amaze non-coders. Like, sceners have always been techy people, and should as such know more or less what are the limits... Or perhaps the scene public has changed? Lamerz aboard?

The ability to amaze isn't gone, things just turned more difficult. On the c64 or standard amiga the ability to amaze the viewer is easier due to the fact that it's quite limited platforms and everyone here knows what should and shouldn't be able to create on them. When anyone break those boundries people get amazed!
To be able to really amaze on the PC I think that we must let us use the hardware fully to it's full potential. Why try to amaze todays sceners with three ( or more ) years old hardware? Ok, people don't have the latest stuff but with videos out that's showing us what ps 3.0 can produce, ps 1.1 stuff doesn't look that amazing anymore.
Ok, even if the older hardware isn't exactly pushed to it's limits yet I think that people need more heavy shit to really be amazed. It takes time to make killer demos, time which the most of us doesn't have but hopefully someone has some spare time left.
Just my thouhts..

Why should PC sceners have to keep in mind what hardware the majority of sceners have? Just make everyone which makes advanced shit release videos aswell. How many out there have Amiga PPC's at home? Not that many but their releases reaches the masses as videos and I don't think anyone complains about not being able to run them on their standard Amiga's? Perhaps it's time to change the mentality or should we resign to the ones with older hardware?

I was really amazed with tech demos for new ATI X800 chip (hundred of soliders runing through canyon): far more impresive than any other demos here on pouet :)
ekoli: "The ability to amaze isn't gone!" True!

I think i have it: there is too much competition that Demoscene cannot easily hold against. Back in the old days, demoscene was unique in the stuff they made on slow computers. Universities used much more powerful machines. Game market was conserned with playability rather than visuals. And at all, advanced realtime graphics seemed so far off, that noone was interested. And scientifically it was probably not challenging enough.

Now that realtime graphics has been "discovered" by diverse industries, where they need visualization, also in surgery and so on, the industry and the universities became our rivals out of a sudden, and their side products, hitting the game market - they invest time and unbelievable amounts of money, we can probably not keep up. Our code cannot beat their code. Not even our graphics can beat their graphics. We are turning into a standard art community. The scene is dead. (well... i hope in fact not)

Like, what are the best effects? They are often brute-force, trivial, or else borrowed from scientific publications appearing in hundreds each year now.

Why would the scene be dead just because we aren't the "best" at what we do? Even though we cannot compete with what the game industry is doing the scene could produce vibrant, refreshing and top notch stuff. As you said, they invest time and money, they do this for a living while sceners do it for kicks, I still think that the scene could compete with that, it's all about enjoying the ride and keep innovative. A demo don't have to have a 100 meg data folder and ten's of millions of lines of code, in some cases 64kb is more then enough to blow our minds! With all the resources available and the impressive know-how some sceners have the scene could be anything but dead!

Message from the "Stop using bullshit words" association:
the words:
- industry
- to invest
- innovate
- to compete
- product
- art
have no place and no meaning in the context of the scene.

No really what sort of fantasy world are you living in if you are talking about the scene in economical terms?

knos: That was acctually the point I was aiming at, perhaps it's better to be more straight forward instead of trying to argue about it. :)

Hmm, i don't really think that universities and research is a real rival for the scene :-) I myself work at university and when i see the stuff people do here it is partly really poor compared to stuff done from sceners. So it is more like the universities can learn from the scene. Or better to say, sceners even work at university to support research, like it happens here (me or the AINC-guys) ;-)

Comparing the bottom performance makes no sense. Among countless stuff being done by the universities, effects which can compete with demoscene are perhaps few, but some of them beat what has been seen in the *best* demos by far.

I'll also be pushing the science forward soon.

there's no such thing as an "ultimate coder area"...
universities, game companies, demoscene groups, freelancers... we all saw cool and bad stuff from them.
these "communities" rather rely on each other than compete.

Just for reference, some nice HDR rendering examples:

http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/

faker: I take it you are at the wrong university then. There are universities with very capable people in the cg department.

Computer science is more than just a cg department :-)