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Now, I'd hate to say it makes a world of difference to me, but I'm a little curious. Isn't it becoming too easy to fill up your demo with prerendered "impossible" effects? Do high-resolution textures really matter that much?

And here go with another discussion.. In the right corner we have Dr.Doom of Iris...... Let's see how this tread developes in another special bulletin live here at pouet.net ;-)

Demos have been full of pre-rendered effects since the beginning of time.

It's good that they can now be done with better resolutions and frame rates.

it's not like the c64 scene for example are using animation in quite a few demos... and yes high resolution textures makes difference. especially if you wanna show your demo in some high-def resolution.

this also means that if you want you could prolly include a FLAC encoded version of your soundtrack ;)

and it's not like people are newing new and impossible effects on pc anyway.

i think this is a good start and that that bp2007 will have to speak for if it was a good choice or not to have this sizelimit.

coding new effects..

I don't want to discuss it. ;) Geez.. I would just like to hear what the PC scene has to say about it. I mean, it's an obvious question that's very relevant if I were to, say, switch to making PC demos one day. It's also a very old question: why have a size limit at all if you consider the size limit to be a problem?

It might sound like an argument, but it's really just a question. ;)

woohoo! I never need to upgrade my PC again. Now all demos will come in DivX version anyhow, filesize will be smaller.

we want 4GB demo limit please (packed)

Why do you care?

.. if I were to, say, switch to making PC demos one day..

Anyway, I don't need a reason to care.

code a 64k instead.

How do you push limits then you don't have the same fundamental possibilities than for instance the game industry? Sure one can argue that the size blends in with the impression, but size limits can always be there too.

"size doesnt matter, it's how you wiggle the worm" :D

said the liar to the fool

It doesn't really answer the question, though. Why is there a size limit, be it 20 MB or 64 MB, if the reason for going from one to the other is that size limits are bad for demos.

Why not a limit which only relates to hosting the releases after the party, then? It's not much harder to distribute 256 MB demos than 64 MB ones, and 256 MB demos make it easier to "push the limits".

And don't you reach a point where any kind of coding becomes irrelevant? 64 MB gives you something like 3 minutes of HDTV-quality animation. Doesn't that risk turning it all into a graphics contest? And wouldn't that put the games industry in the lead, defeating the whole point of trying to push the limits?

And again, I'm not saying, I'm asking. :D Cause I wonder.

Doom check out the 30sec compo from intel, it features 30MB/minute demos with cool stuffs

On January 1st, 2007, I'll release the source pack of the 64b Hugi Xmas Compo 2006. That's 64 bytes instead of 64 MB, and you'll see how cool it is :)

If Adok died, would it really matter?

256MB is hard to distribute. We would fill up scene.org servers pretty fast :).

I guess the sizelimit in the democompos was never about the "challenge" of the limit, but to have the same rules for everyone. Fair play, if you will.

But I think those who care will continue doing demos around 10-15 megabytes, and those who don't will just put those oh-so-detailed textures into their dull flybys. Like if the quality of demos was ever determined by texture resolutions.

some notes:
- as for pure animation players, those are forbidden anyway. and if the rule change helps in that regard, i'd REALLY like to see some more creative uses of videos in demos (e.g. evolution of vision by asd).
- why a sizelimit at all: we considered ditching it altogether. the main reason for this particular limit is distribution, not "we need a limit". i doubt that we're going to see a lot of demos bigger than say 30mb, but we don't want to have to distribute a 650mb demo either ;)
- even one highres normalmap is pretty huge. i'm not particularly fond of pure 3ds players, but i think effectively preventing people from using zbrush etc. properly isn't the right thing to do either.
- finally, a lot of demos (e.g. relais and apparently also track one) have had highly-compressed JPEGs in the past just to fit inside an arbitrary size limit. i'm certainly the last one to encourage space wasting :), but this has really only hurt these demos (more work for the coder on problems not having much to do with the actual demo, lower graphics quality, longer loading times).

i think some people have gotten the whole issue backwards here - it's not about encouraging sceners to do 3ds players, it's about allowing groups which *have* a lot of artists to make art-heavy demos. because as it stands currently, the rules heavily favor groups that emphasize coders, not artists - in *every* compo, not just the intro compos.

feel free to disagree :) - but i'm convinced it's worth trying out.

Well. Dr. Doom The Coder thinks that line of reasoning defeats the point of realtime demos, but Dr. Doom The Graphician is curious to see how it turns out.

If you embrace the whole "evolving scene" idea, I guess you can't argue with it, though. At least it's no big loss if it kills the PC scene. \o/

Ryg, very well put. May I suggest adding this explanation to the "what's new" compo section on the website?

Actually the size limit may even be a trap for the coder, if you have more space, you have more freedom with your engine/effects thus leading to more work. The smaller the production the less work it is (toolcode excluded).

That's why IMO it's easier to pull out a 4k intro than a demo. Feel free to disagree of course, but I tried out coding in all categories on pc on my side. For the other bits, let's say that i second ryg. :-)

So 64mb prods.. If it enables higher resolution to look better why not.. on another side i don't see the reason for the 20mb size limit in the amiga demo compo.. why using more space when the resolution and hardware are now fixed? pc hardware is evolving.

Another possibility would be to have a low (5mb) democompo limit and an unlimited size realtime demo compo aside.

well, Starstruck almost exceeded this boundary with an archive size of about 17MB (BP 06 rules were 16 MB at that time IIRC) and draining the FastRam up to 50+ MB.