pouët.net

dipswitch not sure about the vinyl part but the track (either 1in10's remix or Irschtas' original) does get played at parties (ref http://www.irschtas.com/)

Irschtas should update his website :)

I like how Deities is a 'music video' on the site though :)

yeah, he should.. and it was agreed that its a 'music video'

For the ones asking for who's to blame on the nominations, the jury composition is now public as well: http://awards.scene.org/info.php#who.

I'll try to find some time to insert previous years juries, Awards staff and other extras to the archive page in the near future as well.

Ahem.

[big][blink][scream][yell][generally get basehead's attention]BASEHEAD[/continue to get basshead's attention][BASS][/scream]

[big]YOU ARE ON THE [oblique]SCENE.AWARDS JURY.[/oblique][/blink]
GET YOUR ASS TO BREAKPOINT.

THIS ANNOUNCEMENT WILL KICK YOUR ASS IF YOU DO NOT SHOW UP.
[/big]
[/big]

also bring me several arrogant bastards when you come.

I was quite surprised to see my little baby there in the nominations. Never expected to just be there! It really motivates me now to work on new and better demos and I think that's the meaning of the breakthrough category, to motivate the non-elites to reach to higher levels.

Breakthrough performance can mean a lot, yes. My personal winner is Solaris and that's because it's more of a true breakthrough of a single coder not much of the group brainstorm itself (has released other cool demos before), writting a quite ok demo in 100% pure assembly/pure software rendering as his first work. That's A breakthrough for someone to appear with such an impressive very first demo in the scene out of nowhere. I had to finish more than 15 mediocre stuff and code more than 8 years in the scene to be there (and only reach a quarter of the quality work of this guy). So, the breakthrough is there for various reasons, either for newcomer coders, for new groups or maybe old mediocre not as known people/groups that climbed up the ladder.

For Led Blur, I feel that it maybe was in the list as a breakthrough mostly because it's the very first (good?) production of a new group called Mindlapse, not known before. I don't feel it as my big breakthrough (oh, there my doubts :P) and I was (positively) surprised to see it there and I'd say I am flattered now!

Well, Thank You :)

p.s. And yes, no 1995 in the best demo category. Oh well, at least the public choice did it..

For what's it worth: The Deities soundtrack sends shivers down my spine everytime I watch it, so I'm very glad to see it nominated. Maybe I just have bad taste, or wait, just wait, maybe taste is just personal and you don't seem to understand that :-)

you are now on the path to eliteness.. *holy light glowing down on you*

lol, time for a threaded bbs? ;-)

j00 no n1d thre4dz when j00r l337

I never did blame the jury this year, although it still does look a bit slengpung-incestuous, but only half as much as in the earlier stage of the awards.

However, the problem with the awards are imho the descriptions of the different competitions. It seems today that no good production with a few mind blowing effects (but nothing else) can make it into the "best effects" compo. Maybe the problem is the "balanced" demoscene jury. Maybe you should only have coders for that jury.

I think maybe this goes for most parts of the awards, but I am not sure since I don't really care about best direction or art.

i have some issues with best effects too (and hey, we have 2 of the nominations) - but the fact is, as a coder i cant think of hardly _any_ demos with standout effects this year - even less so than previous years.
if that's the case it's always going to be a tough category. the 4k category has similar problems. there's a bunch of people who could feel hard done by right now, but there's nothing so good it screamed that it had to be in there.

scene idols!

as for best fx, just count the number of shaders used? :D

At risk of repeating what I've said in previous years - the thing about the "best effects" category is that it was clearly intended to honour the individual contributions of coders in much the same way that "best graphics" and "best soundtrack" honour those particular contributions. However, it misses the point that the typical demo coder of today is not necessarily spending his time just coming up with better and better effects. OK, I'm hardly an authority on newskool coding, but the way I see it, a lot of the cutting-edge coding work in recent years has been on things like creating demo tools, optimisation, compression algorithms, and mastering limited hardware. Focusing on "effects" is too narrow - it's like having an Oscar for "best hats". I'd be strongly in favour of broadening the category to something like "technical achievement".

Most demo coding nowadays only consists of expanding/optimizing a small set of routines to death and re-use them in each production, a little bit like the way franchises are built in the gaming industry, you found a good formula, you stick to it (see tbl, see farbraush, see fairlight, see asd, etc.).

especially because all farbrausch demos look the same :)

yeah, candytron and 828 are so alike.

nosfe: both are made of pixel after all...

A bit like in the gaming industry, there will be maybe 4 or 5 groups (maybe less, maybe even several groups working on a single product) developping demos engines which will be used by the majority of the other "coderless" groups to create demos focusing solely on the visual & audio aspects, in that case demos won't be made for demosceners anymore but for a larger public of consumers.

I like gasman's idea of a "technical achievement" category.

The idea of broadening "best effects" into something like "best techs" has been around for some time already. I remember discussing it with Kusma at last BP at least... I still support the idea.
A best "tech" category could also include productions with outstanding mesh generation, animation compression or softsynths, which now hardy find place in the available slots.

oh really? what about 'best intro'? :D

Nah, "best intro" refers to the production as a whole, quite like "best demo".
The idea is to give a recognition to coder's work, like you do for musicians and graphicians with "best music" and "best graphics".
From that standpoint, "effect" is not a really comprehensive definition, as opposed to e.g. "techs" or even "code".

I would prefer having the best effects as it should be - best effects. Maybe if the category was used correctly people would care to spend some time on a effect or two per demo. Then again, I doubt any people care about the awards at all while producing stuff.

Considering some of the reactions after the nominees are announced, I'd say some definitely do :)