Had couple of these on Holla Forums, now let's try it on Holla Forums Are you/were you in the demoscene ? Did you ever make rasterbars and borderless scroller ???
What's your favourite platform, what's your favourite demo ? All this kind of shit goes right in here.
There was one that had a forest and some comfy music that I cannot remember for the life of me, I spent ages searching youtube for it, but could never find it.
I used to do demoscene shit and cracking back in the early '90s. I did 1k and 4k intros, mostly what was known as VGA register demos (nothing as lame as color bars, though). All had adlib except the last one I never finished that supported soundblaster and had 100% identical mixing to screamtracker 3 because I literally reverse engineered it, copied the code to note paper (before multitasking), and re-implemented it. Those were some fucking fun times. I used to have some unreleased shit by Pixel of FC (alternate version of the bolts from Second Reality) and a song Leviathan never wound up releasing to the public. Also, Skaven's a furry.
Colton Thomas
Crystal Dream II has the best fuckign score in any PC DOS demo.
Do you still have those parts ? BTW, Second Reality is open source right ? I think i've read some article about how it was made.
Lucas Gutierrez
No, I lost all my old code, music, and email from my drives dying during several years of extreme health issues around 2000. Still hurts. I've not heard of that but I've not looked in like 20 years so maybe. They did have one with available code in the early '90s, I believe it was their starport intro. You'll think I'm full of shit here, but when I heard about this as a novice scenecoder I absolutely had to have it (PSI was my hero) but they had it on their ftp (probably back when what came to be known as hornet was at UFL) and I had no internet access. What I wound up doing was using WWIV mail to fidonet to an email gateway to a ftp-by-email service I'd read about in some magazine. It broke it into several encoded parts for some reason and probably pissed off a whole bunch of sysops on the way back since that involved long distance charges but I got it.
Also, Impulse Tracker is open source, and it's pretty damn fast(can play Karsten Kock - Blue Valley on a 486dx2/66).
Lincoln Turner
Koch*, fuck me.
Benjamin Davis
I'll have to check later if it includes the mixer from screamtracker as that was some impressively optimized code. Here's something that'll melt your head I learned from reverse engineering it: he actually used the stack pointer as a general purpose register in the tightest loop. You can't do that today as the CPU faults on invalid address load rather than on use.
Jack Gonzalez
Yeah someone pointed that out in the first demo thread we had on Holla Forums
Blake Barnes
Was probably me, I span Holla Forums, Holla Forums, and Holla Forums.
Sebastian Hill
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Levi Morales
Demoscene... It is awesome that even today nice Amiga and C64 demos are produced..
Highly recommended are the Ghostown productions :)
Jason Cox
Indeed. This demo was released last year and it has at least 4 new effects.
I miss when latency in programming was as low as a microcontroller. You're familiar with vertical refresh, but many of the effects you'll see required catching horizontal refresh (the classic being 24 bit color on a 256 color palette-based VGA card). There was no event from the hardware when that happened and it would only last a very short time (a few microseconds), there had to be no unexpected delays. Code like that today on a normal OS is impossible even though hardware is thousands of times faster, but what many of you don't realize is how it affected algorithm choice. Look at the worst-case of malloc for example, you can't use algorithms like that in code where timing matters.
Levi Reed
Swedish demoscene coder here. Been in the demoscene since the early 90s. Still active on the Amiga and C64. Going to 3-4 demoparties every year.
The demoscene is truly the best tech-related phenomenon I have ever been a part of.
Matthew Rodriguez
A relatively recently emerging concept similar to Demoscene is Arbitrary Code execution from memory. You can essentially program in assembly on, in theory, any platform without any kind of memory protection, without any programming tools of any kind.
The way it works is values are naturally written into memory starting at a particular address in video games, simply moving, changing an internet step counter, life counter, points counter.etc you are able to manipulate memory values in such a way as to load simple programs and executable headers into memory and load them
Video related is someone using tool-assist to perform such an exploit in Super Mario World for the SNES, keep in mind that while this video is tool-assisted, people have also easily done this by themselves on actual SNES'
Not to be mean, but I'm calling LARPing on this one.
Julian Sullivan
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Easton Wilson
IN FACT, THIS DEMO IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE. IT WAS NECESARY TO CHANGE THE TIME-SPACE-CONTINUUM TO MAKE IT RUN. IN SEVERAL SESSIONS WE ESTABLISHED A DIRECT LINK TO A BLACK HOLE TO GAIN PROCESSOR-TIME. THE CODE CONTAINS SPECIAL PATTERNS THAT FORCE THE INTERGALACTIC WORM-HOLES TO OBEY OUR WILL.
DURING ONE OF THE SESSIONS GOD GOT ACCIDENTALLY CAUGHT IN MY DF1 AND WAS FORMATTED ---- SORRY GUYS.
I'd also like to encourage everyone to try coding for the C64. I never coded anything for 8 or 16 bit, but I was familiar with x86 asm, which helps. The C64 assembler is way easier than I expected. You can get an IDE like KickAssembler which comes with VICE emulator, so you just press one button and you can test your code.
Some resources :
25c3: The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk An hour long talk about the C64. He talks about the features and limits of the machine, some common tricks (opening borders, sprite multiplexing etc.) youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRRCnque2E
27c3: Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU The same guy as above talks about the C64's CPU. There's a lot of overlap in both of those talks, but this one has a bit more details about the CPU itself. youtube.com/watch?v=fWqBmmPQP40
Behind the scenes of a C64 demo [28C3] A talk about C64 demos by Ninja from The Dreams. You won't see much code, but he explains a lot of small tricks, self modyfing code, code generators etc. youtube.com/watch?v=So-m4NUzKLw
codebase64.org propably the number #1 site related to C64 coding. Has a lot of tutorials, most of them DEMO related. codebase64.org/doku.php
csdb.dk - The C64-Scene Database You'll find all your favourite demos, cracks, intros, notes, and all other shit there. You can comment, there are forums, worth checking out. I like reading comments of some demos I like, they point out some stuff you might not have noticed before.
I can't believe this 16 year old demo is still more advanced than any commercial game today, even though fully programmable GPUs shipped just a year afterward.
Don't get me wrong, it's an impressive demo, but to say that no modern, dx11/12 1440p game with all the latest developments in the industry has bested it is simply wrong.
Juan Lopez
I want to see a demo scene for the propeller c3, don't ask me why but I've got a massive hard on for this system.
Why do we need more memory than that for a god damn simple text document or image?
It's pretty expensive, even with its advanced features, but I still can live with my custom ATMEGA328P-PU @ 20MHz with only two kilobytes of RAM and heavy assembly required :)
Austin Rodriguez
Assets, definitely, but not on a technological basis. The use of shadows, reflections, refractions, volumetrics, and radiosity in currently typical Gouraud renderers is all done through idiosyncratic tricks which require the use of texture maps and shaders, which accumulate to a computationally punishing burden when used in great amounts, especially for higher orders of interaction, without a lot of prebaking. Dynamic light is also very punishing in complex scenes for similar reasons.
On the other hand, while raytracing is much slower for basic rendering of geometry, textures, and extra lights, you get all of those other effects pretty much free, in unlimited amounts, calculated with high accuracy, to very high orders, all in realtime, without any special wangling. The state of realtime raytracing has of course advanced considerably since then, but no commercial game I'm aware of has even taken the first step yet.
Raytracing aside, there's also the issue of being stuck with polygons. While that demo used very primitive quadratics (cubes, spheres, cylinders) instead of a fuller range of more complex and versatile spliner surfaces, it demonstrates that direct rendering of quadratics offers far smoother detail for less computational power than the current compromise method of tesselating them into polygons for render. Beyond splines specifically, the use of a renderer that isn't dependent on triangles also clears the way to efficient use of other types of geometry like isosurfaces, voxels, and fractals.
Thomas Perry
Plus/4 has 16kb of ram
Jacob Robinson
You got any evidence that they didn't use any 'tricks' either? I mean there's nothing stopping need from making a unity scene where I spam REAL-TIME RAYTRACING all over it and post the video
Mason Green
I'm talking about the demo size itself.
Blake Perez
Because FAN released quite a few demos with a lot of detailed descriptions of how they worked, then made a brief swing at commercial development (like Future Crew has with FutureMark/MadOnion) as RealStorm and released a bunch of benchmarks before evaporating around 2006.
The only significant gimmick they used was interpolated edge sampling, which is completely automatic and doesn't interfere with any of the special effects I described, unlike the GPU rendering pipelines of today's games. See the following article (I also recommend part 1, since it offers an excellent, concise review of raytracing's fundamental differences from and unique advantages over Gouraud) for details: mpierce.pie2k.com/pages/108.php
And here's decent coverage of the current state of the art (although the assets rendered now are mostly just recycled boring GPU-friendly triangle geometry with bitmap surfaces): raytracey.blogspot.com/
Grayson Rodriguez
neat, thanks for the links.
Charles Davis
The music from "nature still suxx" is stuck in my head.