pouët.net

Ports are skewing the top10 results

category: general [glöplog]
 
Well, on non-windows platforms anyway.

What happens: You make an amazing demo on some other platform, say linux or osx. It's the best demo on the platform by a mile. Then somebody ports say the popular demo to that platform - now your masterpiece is a distant second.

Evidence:
Linux top 10
OSX top 10

So, should ports be counted in the top 10? Or should they only count on the original platform?
added on the 2008-10-30 12:45:09 by psonice psonice
no, that just means those platforms need better demos :)
added on the 2008-10-30 12:47:17 by Gargaj Gargaj
better demos won't necessarily help.. even if you do something to equal the best pc demos, the number of people watching and voting will be lower because it's a less popular platform, so it still might not beat the ports of windows stuff in the charts.
added on the 2008-10-30 12:52:30 by psonice psonice
Or does all this porting between Windows, Linux and OSX really just mean it's about time to stop distinguishing so much between those platforms?
added on the 2008-10-30 12:52:38 by doomdoom doomdoom
YAY! Planet Hively is in the Mac top 10
BOO! Planet Hively is not in the Linux top 10

Also.. i didn't know linux even had 10 prods ... ;-)
added on the 2008-10-30 12:57:33 by xeron xeron
That's another thing: a pile of shit like planet hively will beat a decent prod on only one platform, because if it's on 10 platforms it has 10x more potential audience to vote for it.

(ok, so planet hively is great and I'm just jealous because it's placed higher than my mac-only music disk ;D )
added on the 2008-10-30 13:15:57 by psonice psonice
psonice: indeed it's unfair towards prods that take the best out of one specific platform, but globally this is a fair game : the more you do ports the more people are able to watch your prod, the more viewers you get! besides it's not as if there were too many ports around... the more ports the better :)
added on the 2008-10-30 13:23:38 by Zest Zest
zest: the way I see it, there's 2 kinds of demo for platforms like mac + linux: the ones that use all the stuff that makes the platform different, and the ones that just use pretty standard code + opengl. The latter ones are pretty portable, and yeah definitely the more ports the better :)

For the first lot though, they're the 'real' platform specific demos, and they're generally either not portable or really hard to port. I guess the directx stuff on pc is the same.
added on the 2008-10-30 13:44:52 by psonice psonice
Quote:
Or should they only count on the original platform?

yeah! great idea! let's remove desert dream and second reality from the c64 top10 RIGHT NOW, and also all cracktro rema... oh wait, those are never in a top10 anyway :)

uhmm without the silliness, this is just a plain stupid idea. how will we define "original platform"? what if a prod is released initially for multiple platforms? what if a prod was initially released on platform X, but the most recent version does not run on platform X anymore? etc etc. in the end, the guy who will get to decide about all this shit will be hated even more than the average preselection jury member... thanks, but no thanks :)
added on the 2008-10-30 14:05:05 by havoc havoc
actually this issue is linked to the fundamentally warped issue of pouet which is the blurred thumb : people are thumbing up/down either for coding or design reasons (beside other reasons like friendship, hate, admiration, irony, egotism, hype, etc...)

in so far as best multiplatform demos are prone to be design demos whereas best specific plaform demos are prone to be coder demos...

but as far as i remember top10 are also based on popularity (hits on the prod page) so it counterbalances the warped thumbs :)
added on the 2008-10-30 14:21:02 by Zest Zest
Fair points. But on the other hand:

Desert dream 64 isn't a port really, it's a complete remake, so stuff like this shouldn't be affected.
'Multiplatform' stuff - most times, it's a windows demo that gets ported, so it's a windows demo. For the 'proper' multiplatform stuff, it'd have to either have multiple original platforms, or a separate 'multiplatform' category.

But yeah, technically it'd be a nightmare, and it'd be a nightmare job to sort out, so I guess it's a complete non-starter.
added on the 2008-10-30 14:23:21 by psonice psonice
Uhm. Why do you even distinguish in the first place? The operating system is just a user preference. It's nice to know if a demo will run on your operating system of choice, but it's not like coding a demo for OSX is a different sort of challenge from coding for Windows or Linux (as long as it's PC/Mac Linux), it's all the same hardware anyway. It'd make more sense to divide PC/Mac/Linux demos into OpenGL and DX categories, and even that would be silly.

Also of course, having "Linux" as a platform is plain ridiculous, precisely because it isn't associated with a particular hardware platform. I can run Linux on a 68k Amiga but that doesn't mean it'll run Variform, does it. If you want to compare demos in technical aspects, the only thing that makes sense is categorising them by hardware platform, ignoring software platform.

So it's not really a non-starter I think, you'd just need to define a range of hardware platforms and get someone with time to kill to associate each demo with the proper platform, and then you'd get fair charts.

You're welcome.
added on the 2008-10-30 14:46:20 by doomdoom doomdoom
Quote:
Why do you even distinguish in the first place?


Doing a size-optimized prod on these different OSes does have differences that are worth discriminating.
real men size optimize their boot sector. the OS is for nuskool youngsters only :P
added on the 2008-10-30 15:03:21 by havoc havoc
C64 top 10

psonice theory even holds true for c64, where the first 2 Demos are Conversions :-/
Quote:
psonice theory even holds true for c64, where the first 2 Demos are Conversions :-/


not for long ;_)
added on the 2008-10-30 16:20:01 by ___ ___
Funny how different that is from the list on CSDB.
added on the 2008-10-30 16:25:58 by Spenot Spenot
Actually I'd say software platforms are just as important as hardware platforms. The stuff I've written on osx lately would run just the same on pc hardware, sure, but the software frameworks I'm using don't exist at all on linux or windows.

A plain opengl demo isn't too hard to port, but one that uses core image/audio/etc. or quartz is - you'd have to port half of the os, or rewrite it from scratch.

Captain: not really, those 2 prods are 'remakes' rather than ports. I doubt there is any code from the original versions, and the prods in the c64 top 10 list are for the c64 versions only. I can't see any problem there at all - the c64 versions are more popular than the other c64 demos.

What I wouldn't be 100% happy with, is if the amiga version of desert dream and the pc version of 2nd reality were listed there - the original versions are so popular, that they would have been 1 & 2 in the chart even if the c64 versions were really bad. Or perhaps EOD would only get to no.3, even though it was the highest rated and most popular c64 demo, because it still wasn't as popular as the amiga + pc demos?
added on the 2008-10-30 16:36:56 by psonice psonice
spenot: csdb is only about votes (and a rather different method at that), pouet also takes page hits into account.
added on the 2008-10-30 16:57:21 by Gargaj Gargaj
What's wrong with Variform being the best OSX demo around? It is.
added on the 2008-11-13 18:14:26 by gloom gloom
gloom: no, xmix is.
added on the 2008-11-13 18:54:54 by psonice psonice

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