pouët.net

The 64 MB limit at BP07

category: general [glöplog]
hitch: i dont use a machine _without_ ps3.0.

actually ok, i have some old ones around here. but the 3 i use mainly are:
- dual p4 3.6 with gf7950 and 2gb ram (work machine, pretty new)
- p4 3.0 gf6600 gt, 1gb ram (home machine, nearly 2 years old)
- centrino duo 1.8, 1gb ram, gf7600 (a year old)

ps3.0 cards have been affordable for 2 years or more. ps2.0 cards have been around for what, 5 years now? also, about cpus, dual core being commonplace is a relatively new thing i guess, but clockspeeds have been at around the 3ghz mark for a few years now. similarly a gb of ram has been standard for over 2 years.

my old pc that i replaced is a amd 1800+, 512mb and radeon 9700. i got that in 2002. that's 5 years ago. :) if you were in the pc scene in like 1997 and you wanted to run a demo on a 5 year old machine, you wouldnt have a chance. :) pc hardware was changing so fast you needed to upgrade every year. it's slowed down so much since then.

personally i do avoid ps3.0 because people bitch so much about it, and there was a crappy radeon series that came out 2 years ago (x800 or so) which didnt have ps3.0. otherwise i pretty much aim at my home machine.

added on the 2007-01-05 15:56:19 by smash smash
Use more PS3.0, include a fallback for older shader models where instead of the effect it displays a plane with a "ha-ha you can't see this effect" texture.
added on the 2007-01-05 16:21:59 by noouch noouch
Guys, comparing demos and videos, why you're talking about 1280x1024 at 60 fps? Almost everybody have a TVset, which shows only 640 rows, 25 fps interlaced. Do you mean, demos looks better then "The Lord of the Rings" or "Matrix" on your TV? Guess, old "Lawnmower Man" and ancient "Tron" can beat most of modern demos, easy. Yes, even with 25 fps, 640 rows resolution, interlaced.
I'll give you a few Scene viseos as examples:
The Week (25 Mb fullsize)
Galaad & Les Ptipois (34 Mb)
Now, let's pack following with modern H.264 codec and we can have it in 64 Mb:
Animacja
Egon and Dönci
Egon and Dönci 2

Now, imagine "Egon and Dönci" in democompo. First place guaranteed, even for low-res version. That's what I talking about: if you allow 64 Mb demos, be ready for video-based demos. What is most important, you can't forbid prerendered visuals because prerendered audio is allowed.
added on the 2007-01-05 16:43:31 by Manwe Manwe
@hitch: the first paragraph was sorta a reply to what you said, mot all in the all the post was just a general outburst of frustration.

@Manwe: I don't understand what you are trying to ask me.
added on the 2007-01-05 16:47:36 by lug00ber lug00ber
manwe: because the rules still say "pure animation players are not allowed".
added on the 2007-01-05 16:56:04 by smash smash
In case Hitch's answer was aimt at me, I told about sceners owning PS 2.0 cards (that have been released ages ago, I would not call that top notch hardware...), not PS 3.0 and I fail to see where I mentionned dual cpu as well...
added on the 2007-01-05 17:02:56 by keops keops
Manwe: get a clue.
added on the 2007-01-05 17:07:03 by bzz bzz
keops:
Of course no one wants to go back to 1998 for that matter, ease down ;).

It was more a general remark, i was talking about the compo machines used nowadays which aren't john doe's machine a practise i don't find entirely honest.
added on the 2007-01-05 17:17:16 by hitchhikr hitchhikr
honest -> fair
added on the 2007-01-05 17:18:22 by hitchhikr hitchhikr
ok :)

Mind you, I don't like those demos that run on 10% of the machines and requiring high end HW, I'm certainly not the one encouraging the use of top notch or latest hardware either since our next prod will use OpenGL 1.1 again. We are soooo 1998 :)
added on the 2007-01-05 17:21:15 by keops keops
Quote:
Now, imagine "Egon and Dönci" in democompo. First place guaranteed, even for low-res version.


*cough*bullshit*cough*. What if it was up against The Popular Demo? The evidence here on Pouet seems to indicate that the average scener can tell the difference between a realtime demo and a video. If Aenima ever tried to fool people into believing that their stuff was realtime, then yes, you might have a point. And in that case Aenima would be being fucking lame. But they've never done that, so they aren't.

But let me go further than most other people in this thread: If Egon and Dönci were allowed in a demo compo (which it isn't), then I reckon it would have a good (but not certain) chance of winning. And you know what? I for one would be completely happy with that, because a) Aenima are fucking good at what they do, and b) what they do is entirely legitimate scenish activity.
added on the 2007-01-05 17:26:58 by gasman gasman
smash: And pure = 100.00%?
added on the 2007-01-05 18:31:32 by doomdoom doomdoom
gasman: what, making animations commercially and entering them into compos?
added on the 2007-01-05 18:35:27 by Gargaj Gargaj
gargaj: No, starting fights with the security team while those try to give them first aid ;)
added on the 2007-01-05 18:39:03 by scamp scamp
Quote:
because the rules still say "pure animation players are not allowed".

Smash, it's just a question of time, I thing: since size limit is growing, graphic artists can demand to allow prerender, because musicians already has such privilege. Remember, 10 years ago every demo has tracked (read: realtime) music? Now, it's artist's time comming.
As Gasman said, it's Ok for him. It's Ok for me too. But doesn't it reduce coder's role on the Scene, in final? Look, it's already happens with all that demotools...

I think, if you increase demo size to 64 Mb (128 Mb next year?), but ban video usage, it'll just cut some creative ways. All that words today's musicians said, will be repeated by graphic artists in nearly future.
Really, we have such demos as "Gerbera" (2001 )and "Bleam" (1998!) and many more, which shows: video is good.
added on the 2007-01-05 18:49:47 by Manwe Manwe
Pure animations belong to the *wild* or *video/movie* categories, I don't even understand why there would be anything to debate on that matter...
added on the 2007-01-05 18:57:04 by keops keops
Manwe: Oh please.

Demotools don't really reduce a coder's role (even if we fr coders like joking about how "little" we had to do with our own releases ;): Producing a demotool still means coding everything that's in the demo PLUS coding a tool around it. And ppl using others' demotools do so mostly for one reason: They want to express themselves and don't know a coder. Many of the former WZ users have started baking their own stuff.

Then, to reiterate Gargaj's point from x pages ago: Demo coders never gave music any priority. If every demo not only featured a selfmade graphics engine and effects but also a custom music player with own format, capabilities etc, your argument would hold. But guess what - from the earliest days of the scene on 95% of demos used OTHER'S code for music playback, simply because the coder in question a) didn't know how to write an own music player or b) more probably just didn't give a fuck and only wanted to play music and sync to it.

Besides: An mp3/ogg decoder is a quite sophisticated piece of math compared to stretching and amplifying a few mono samples and adding them together.
added on the 2007-01-05 19:00:02 by kb_ kb_
Heh, this discussion has been quite funny to read. Personally I don't really have an opinion if 64mb is too much or enough but I believe the BP organizers know what they're doing.

Please continue the discussion :)
added on the 2007-01-05 19:06:07 by dairos dairos
Quote:
from the earliest days of the scene on 95% of demos used OTHER'S code for music playback, simply because the coder in question


Ryg: indeed, if not 99.99% :)

On Atari it took years before people eventually created their own player (Big Alec, Scavengers, Count Zero), instead of using Jochen Hippel's, Rob Hubbard's or David Whittaker's.
On Amiga, everybody can thank Karsten Obarski, even if tons of music formats were created later on (delta music, FC, MON, TFMX, etc...)
added on the 2007-01-05 19:13:21 by keops keops
Oh, that was kb, not ryg, tricky "FB is DEATH" icon ;)
added on the 2007-01-05 19:14:14 by keops keops
Adding to what kb said. Coding anything having to do with sound requires a tad more knowledge as doing misstakes can add alot of REALLY ugly noise in the form of clicks,etc. Really small misstakes with sound can make people half deaf/really annoyed.
added on the 2007-01-05 19:14:47 by whizzter whizzter
Kb, I just saw a lot of demos/intros made with no coder's participation at all (some of them are even not so bad). You, Farbrausch guys, made a code for every new demo, Doomsday coded a lot to upgrade Moppi's demotool, well. But not everybody goes this way. If you say demotool users need to code something, I can say 3DMax users often write smart scripts as well. So... I don't know what else I can add to show that difference between demomaking and videomaking become smaller and smaller every year.
For me, it's quite strange to see such people who vote for 64Mb size demos but afraid any mention about video in democompo. Guess, a few years later the same people would gives "hearts" on pouet.net for MTV-like clips, mostly based on video, partly realtime rendered (remember "State of the Art" on Amiga?).
added on the 2007-01-05 19:48:31 by Manwe Manwe
Quote:

You, Farbrausch guys, made a code for every new demo,


Man, they're the numero uno in code recycling.
added on the 2007-01-05 20:09:42 by hitchhikr hitchhikr
Manwe : are you a complete idiot? The ASD demo you linked to does the post-processing of the video in realtime (ie it will work with any video). Quite differnet to a pure animation. I'm guessing you're not a coder?
323 posts for such a bullshit issue? my god...
added on the 2007-01-05 20:29:44 by rmeht rmeht

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