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-------- WHAT 'OLD' SCENERS THINK OF THE CURRENT SCENE -------
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Before we start diving into another article mixed with various people's
thoughts, I'd like to say that 'old' does NOT mean 'antiques' or is in any
disrespectful. This is the only adjective I could think to 'target' long time
sceners who were mostly active on ATARI for its first decade. I also avoided to
call them 'former' sceners since most if not all of them are still active.
Here and there we've had raging talks on IRC or via messages posted on DHS
and lately the release of the record breaking screen by The Spice Boys created
a huge thread of responses of all kinds. Of course this intro was meant as a
joke and most of us took it as such. Still some of our beloved 'old' sceners
felt attacked and mocked. I'm aware that they don't _really_ like our modern
demos which can't run fx in 1 vbl. Sure I'd love to see 1 VBL mapped tunnels or
env. mapped objects but it is just impossible ! Does it make our effort
worthless ? I don't think so as we're trying new things and I LOVE these demos.
That doesn't stop me from loving older productions like VIRTUAL ESCAPE (not so
old release wise ok :) demos from DUNE, HEMOROIDS, SYNERGY and so many others !
To clear things up and balance things right, I've decided to mail some of
these 'old' sceners and asked them to rate 'new school' stuff. There will be
slashing tonight, but I don't care as this is called Freedom Of Speech ! Btw as
I write this, I've already sent some mails and had few answers back but I hope
that decent number of these 'old' sceners will grab this chance to kick some
youngsters butts :) Btw, I gave them -as a guideline- two questions you'll find
below :
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Dbug said :
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1. what is YOUR definition of a demo ? (content, requirement, whatever)
Whaou, that is some question, that even today most people are still not ok
with the definition. Some will say that this is the computer equivalent of
"pushing the limits", some others will say this is the computer equivalent
of "video clips", some other will say this is art, some thing it's a way to
deliver underground messages, ...
On an Atari ST, C64, or Oric, we can definitively say that a demo HAS to push
the limits... and that on the PC the technological demos made by 3D chips
makers and 3D engine creators are generaly far ahead technically speaking than
the demo scene so this is not the case here.
In summary I would say that for me a demo is something that has no particular
interest or purpose, but that most computer geeks will look anyway because
that's cool :)
The fact it's correctly coded, has nice graphics, good music, has impressive
effects, and fits in 1kb are _implementation_ details, the things that will
make you think it's a good or bad demo. This means there is absolutely no
imposed contents in a demo. You do not need to put 3D cubes, rasters,
greetings, credits or anything else to make a demo. If I push it, I would say
that the visualisation pluggins of WinAmp are kind of single effects demos.
Perhaps that the only requirement is that it has to run in real time, and
should work correctly in non interractive mode.
2. do you like or dislike ST modern demos and why ? What we call modern demos
are of course demos released back in the late nineties up to now. We can't call
great demos like Virtual Escape a modern demo tho :) Examples of ST modern
demos are Sweetie/DHS, Do Things / Cream, Suretrip/ Checkpoint, Breath/ Mystic
Bytes...
I managed to find sweety, do things and suretrip, but was unable to locale
"breath", so I will not comment on that one.
Some basic facts first.
* The "do things" has a very nice chunky to plannar code, and some nice
tunnels and plasmas, but well, I think it's borring even if it looks it's
running @50z.
* The "sweety" is a really nice one. It has nice logos and pictures, the
musics rules, variety in effects is a plus. The freedirection tunnel, bump
mapping, the final ray traced logo is quite nice. I like it.
* The "suretrip" is for me in the same category than "sweety", but looks
technicaly a little bit better. Unfortunately I think that the colors basically
are... hum... well :) I give a special mention to the oldskool/newschool mix in
the part with the vertical raster made scrappy scrollers incrusted in the dark
parts of the tunel, nice idea. The rotozoom is great also.
Now if I have to compare old and new demo I think there is a first distinction
to make: I will base the comparison on the _effects_ not on the _organisation_
of the demo. Traditional ST demos had menus, and each demo was a single effect
screen that fit in the memory of a 520 STF. New style demos (trackmos ?) are
simple effects linked together by transitions, are are loaded from disk on the
fly, or require a 2mb atari to run.
Ok, concerning the effects. The oldskool motto was "it has to fit a 160256
clock cycles", so all effects have to be @50hz, and it was not supposed to work
on something else than a 8mhz 68000 on a STF/STE machine. New school demos are
working on almost all the range of atari machines, from the STF to the Falcon,
so it means that some effects have to be coded differently on some of the
machines (I guess it, because I do not think that the fullscreen part of the
suretrip was made using the "fullscreen" register of the falcon on the atari
ste :)), so it means some more work.
Now we have settled the basic "conceptional" differences, we can analyse what
the result is quality wise :
On the old scene, we had logos, scrolls, programmed fullscreen and hardware
scrolling, lots of raster based effects, no one use the system, most interrupts
were disabled, and we also used a lot of preshifted things to deal with the
bitplan problems and so beeing able to move things at the maximum speed. We
were also using a lot of things at the same time using bitplan tricks,
redefined partial color palettes localised to some parts of the screen, and so
on... result is generally screens with lots of overdraw lots of colors, and
moving things everywhere.
New demo scene generaly use "chunky 2 planar" routines, that eat a lot of clock
cycles. The result is that it's possible to achieve complex pixel based
effects, but it will not fill a 320x200 pixels screen, so in general we get 2x2
pixels on a reduced screen if the one vbl speed is the objective. Another
consequence, is that in general those demos are less colorfull that old one,
simply because it's hard to put rasters to add colors to a free directional
tunel or blob (metaballs) effect...
In conclusion, all I can say is that this is not a "better/worse" relationship
that exist between new and old style demos, because there are very _different_.
I think the best of both worlds can be reached, by mixing when possible two
different kinds of effects on the screen. Some examples ? Well, you can make a
c2p based effect appear in the middle of two graphics using raster to increase
the number of colors. This way you have more colors on screen, it only takes a
little bit more cpu time, and it reduce the size of the infamous black border I
saw in most new school demos.
Another example: do you remember the old moving carpets effects, the one with
mountains scrolling in the background ? You could do the same kind of effect,
but replacing the carpet by a perspective projected picture using the c2p on
two bitplans, and adding other things on the top (3D vector balls ?) using the
two remaining bitplans... that's simply an idea.
Basicaly, what's is bothering me, is that since the c2p things appeared on the
demo scene, people stopped using what the hardware was offering. No more
rasters, no more hardware scrolling or split line effects. The poor 68000 is
alone to do most of the thing, and since the music department moved to SID
sound, it's even worse (for the cpu).
Personally, for the future I would ditch the STF machines, considering that the
STE is the lowest common denominator, so no more STF color palettes, and you
are sure that all those machines are able to play digisound, can have hardware
scrolling, they have all a blitter.
Sorry for the long post :)
Dbug^Defence Force (was Dbug II^NeXT)
<http://www.defence-force.org>
<http://next.atari.org>
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Cih wrote :
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I'm one of those rare people who has stuck with the scene both when it is
"new", and also back when it was fresh and young, and too new to be called
"old"!
The thing that makes both old and new scene cool, isn't the dry and technical
coding side to the argument. Apart from those strange people called
coders(grin!) who truthfully gives a f*ck whether a particular screen is drawn
in a single VBL or not? The constant factor that has kept me interested all
this time from the first days of the B.I.G demo, to the most recent limit
smashing brainblaster, is an elusive quality in seen only in a few exceptional
demos, which I would describe as the "Hey Wow! factor."
When you say "Hey Wow!" on first seeing a demo, you know that you have just
enjoyed something very special, no matter what era it comes from. "Hey Wow!"
means that some serious technical and/or aesthetic limit breaking has been
going on. The height-bar of excellence has been cranked up several notches,
daring the next crew coming along to "beat 'dis!" So it was with the Union
demo, the first 'proper' multipart demo, and so on to the Cuddly demo's,
where the humble STfm was taken to the heights of contemporary Amiga demos.
It goes right through, many years later, to the likes of the Checkpoint EIL
demo and the 'Hmm' demo at the other end of our story, taking in a whole
load of Lost Boys and Lost Blubb, somewhere in the middle.
The real secret of the long life and continuing appeal of the demo scene, is
the eternal hope, occasionally realised, of that next "Hey Wow!" production
coming along, which lives in the hearts and minds of the members of the demo
scene community. I think that the arbitrary division into 'old and 'new'
needn't apply, as both sides have had their fair share of thrilling
productions. After all, limits are always there to be broken, it's just the
methods that change over the years.
"What is your definition of a demo?"
Hit me with the hard ones first mate ! A "demo" can be called accurately a
"demonstration" of the audio and visual capabilities of a computer, often
intended to give the effect of exceeding the 'official' capabilities of the
target machine. It can possibly be considered as the ultimate technical and
aesthetic act of expression possible when exclusively using the computer as
the medium of delivery.
In my own view, getting the stuff to the screen and your ears in a pleasing
and exciting manner is the important bit. *How* people choose to do it,
technically speaking, is up to them. I don't really have any criticism to
make of a coder who chooses 'x' newschool over 'y' oldschool method, or
vice-versa. Life is too short to be hemmed in by self-made restrictions.
(Which is how I also feel about a lot of other things, not necessarily all
computing related!)
"How do you like or dislike new stuff and why?"
Oh I really like the newschool stuff ! I like it for various reasons. First
part is to do with our coders being able to keep up comfortably with the
mainstream people on the PeeCee and Amiga, especially with the more 3D
related productions. Any reasonable emulation of the demos made on the
mainstream machines is praiseworthy from the point of view that the other
people have much more powerful hardware, vastly faster cpu's, *and* graphics
cards with firmware boosters, and we (mostly) don't.
The second big reason is to do with the idea of continual progress in the
art of demo-making. Most people who are into demo-watching and demo making
look for that rare and difficult to get "wow!" moment. This is when a demo
comes up with something genuinely new, or with an unprecedented standard of
craftsmanship, or even both of these. We all went "wow!" when we first sat
through the 'Hmmm demo' at the second EIL, and ancient pie-encrusted sceners
like myself remember the first time that they set eyes on the Spreadpoint
Screen in the venerable and legendary 'Cuddly demos', by those 1989 (or was
that 1898?) school people, TCB. Now I'd call that a moment of equal but not
greater "wow-ness".
A favourite party trick of mine, for some time after, was to show people the
Spreadpoint screen, and watch their jaws drop in amazement when the many
lines of text scrolled into view. Worked every time, that did !
The whole point of demo making is to improve on what went before, both
aesthetically, and technically. (Remember "Beat 'dis!"??) It may get to a
point where the bleeding edge is commonplace onscreen, and creating new demo
effects holds no interest, but I think we've still got some way to go here.
So with "new" stuff, I'm all in favour, it implies people are still interested
in the subject, and passionate enough to make code for it. Same goes for those
folk who want to make the perfect oldschool demo too. Maximum respect goes to
you all !
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Grazey wrote :
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I still prefer the old scene, mainly because in those days there seemed to
be more innovation. This was probably due to the fact that computer demos
as an art form were in their infancy. I started in the demo scene in 1983
on the Commodore 64 in those days a simple Koala 16 colour picture of King
Tutankhamun with a 1 colour scroller seemed amazing. Then as the months
went by coders came up with techniques never dreamt of before e.g.
Multi-plexed sprites, full screens, rasters, sampled music, etc. People
were pushing the boundaries back with each new release.
The early days of the ST continued the trend, with Alyssa & The Union
pioneering amazing visual and sonic effects. A lot of the wizardry I admired
related to things ST specific, such border removal, sync scrolling and making
the Yamaha sound chip produce semi-decent music. To be honest most of the more
general stuff was ripped (ideas not code!) from the Amiga. It was at about this
time that new techniques dried up. Also the coders un-written rule of making
things run in a frame ceased too with coders copying ideas from more powerful
machines such as the A1200, PC and to some extent Falcon.
I admit that design has improved dramatically but nearly all effects are
re-hashes of old ideas, albeit with added bells and whistles. I probably
prefer the current scene for it's friendship which is down to the birth of
the internet. But demo-wise there's just not the same "wow" factor when
loading up modern productions, I feel the same with games by the way... Maybe
it's me getting old! but nostalgia is a strange beast! I should crank up my C64
and view Circlesque or watch an episode of Space 1999 and then realise what a
pile of crap it all was.
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