pouët.net

The third issue of the retro-, gaming- and scene related diskmag "Amiga Rulez" by 2nd Moon is out. You can download it for OCS/ECS Amigas in German and English from here.
[Submitted by Ghandy]

Latest news on the active demoscene community. This week in particular we take a look at the releases from AmiParty and Alternative Party. Watch on youtube!
[Submitted by ps]

SceneCity: Demoparty stream ambassadors wanted

After some talks with sceners there now is an alternative idea to shutting down SceneCity due to it being irrelevant: Making it relevant again.

For this, we see the need for the three key ingredients:

• Have our stream encoder at a lot of demoparties
  
• Therefore no longer depending on a SceneCity admin having to be at each party
  
• Besides hosting, no involvement from scamp

To do the "outreach", we are looking for "Demoparty stream ambassadors". It's basically sceners carrying a stream encoder to demopartys and back.

Provided we find a couple of these ambassadors, instead of shutting down SceneCity at the end of October, it will be kept running for another half a year to see if usage of it gains traction. If we see that it is used during this "trial time", SceneCity will stay permanently. If it turns out there is no interest, it will be shut down mid 2025.

To increase acceptance by demoparty organizer, SceneCity will support re-streaming, which means: In addition to its own streaming platform we system optionally can send a copy of the Stream to Scenesat, Twitch or YouTube.

You should be:

• Going to demoparties often, at least 4-5 times per year
  
• Either often be part of a demoparty orga team, or be the kind of sceners who is one of the first visitors arriving
  
• Willing to acquire some minimal knowledge in regards of managing a stream
  
• Be somewhat trustworthy and "proven". Like: For example typically not losing half of your equipment on the way back from a party

What you will be provided:

We will send you a Plug&Play ready to use SceneCity stream encoder. It's a tiny MiniPC running OBS and having two HDMI capture inputs, and two HDMI video monitor outputs. As the tech area of demoparties often is very hot, we have added an external ultra-silent fan.

Here is a picture of the device: https://scenecity.site/scenecity_encoder_minipc_small.jpg

With a size of 12x12x8cm and a weight of below 1kg it's easy to take it with you, even on a train or in the hand luggage on your flight.

We will send you the device free of charge, and you can keep it as long as you are going to demoparties on a regular basis.

We right now have three units available. Should there be additional demand, we will produce more.

Independance

You will be able to create and manage streams yourself using our stream management web interface. You may ask SceneCity admins if they are available for support during a demoparty weekend, but in general should be able to handle, test and troubleshoot things yourself.

Also, you can configure your stream to have people auto-join a party chat channel on SceneCity's chat platform. Such a channel must created by a SceneCity admin, and that should be done well ahead of the actual party date.

Tech info

The encoder will use the H.265 coded and send out the stream via the SRT protocol. This is ideal because SRT can handle packet loss much better than outdated RTMP, and can adapt to the upstream bandwidth available at the party. Ideally you will be streaming at 8-10 MBit/s.

The Mini PC while encoding has a pretty high CPU load. There is enough CPU capacity to have two video input sources (for example a camera and beam output) in OBS running on the MiniPC, and some text etc. It's not powerful to run any sophisticated effects or plug-ins, though.

Bigger demoparties typically will be running their own video mixer chain and/or OBS. In this case you would be receiving a ready to send mixdown, and only use one of the two HDMI capture inputs provided.

Re-streaming to Scenesat/Twitch/YouTube

As indicated depending on what the organizers of a demoparty want, SceneCity can re-stream to other platforms. This is happening on our transcoder chain backend in the SceneCity data center, so it does not use additional bandwidth at the party. For the re-streaming, the stream will be re-encoded from H.265 to H.264 and then send out via RTMP. You can configure the stream key the party organizers get from those platforms in the web management portal.

Also, you can configure your stream to have people auto-join a party chat channel on SceneCity's chat platform.

How to apply

Contact us on SceneCity's chat channel #SceneCity:

https://chat.scenecity.net/demoscene/channels/scenecity

[Submitted by scamp]

untergrund.net will become read-only from December 15h 2024

If you have an account there, here is what you need to do:

1.) If your site is purely static, meaning it does not use PHP nor MySql or server-side-includes, you don't need to do anything. Your site will be archived and will still work.

2.) You no longer can FTP to your site from Dec 15th. If you would like to delete stuff so it's not archived forever, or if you stored stuff there outside of the webspace you wish to backup, do that before Dec 15h.

3.) If you have a site that is mostly static, but still uses PHP for minimal things like updating a counter, convert and rename your *.php to *.html.

4.) If you have a site that is dynamic (PHP/Mysql) and have the skills to do that, please make it static.

5.) If you have a site that is dynamic (PHP/Mysql) and you do not have the skills to do the conversion yourself: There is an archiving project run by some sceners who may be able to help. You can ask here:

https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=9917

6.) The email system will stop working. As it's POP3 you probably have all your mails. If you absolutely need a redirect from your old untergrund.net mail address to a different one, tell us before Dec 15th.

7.) Everything that is on ftp.untergrund.net, no matter what protocol type it was linked to will stay intact and you don't need to do anything. This applies if you have linked your downloads on your website to "https://ftp.untergrund.net/users/..." or "ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/users/". If you have stored downloads inside your pubhtml dir, see above.

8.) However, the FTP also will turn read-only. If you wish to add or remove files from there, please do it before 15th.

If you do NOT run a site, but know of a site that is important to the scene but know the account holder is gone (for example: deceased), see 5.).
[Submitted by scamp]

[ Demoparty.net News ] !tum 2024: !TUM cancelled

It is with a heavy heart that we need to announce that !TUM 2024 cannot happen after all.

Even after several inspections and planning meetings with the location before the announcement, we have now found several showstoppers that wouldn’t allow us to party with you the way we all expect.
A big thank you to all the organizers and helpers that stepped up to make !TUM happen, the support by the TUM-organizers, and the many excited and kind messages from everyone planning to visit the party.

We will see each other at one of the next upcoming demoparties, and hope that we can pull things off in a future edition of !TUM.

[Submitted by BitBot]