pouët.net

Oddly, this debate sounds very much like the debate in my other hobby: juggling. There was a heated argument is between 'art' and 'sport' camps: should juggling be judged based on its technical merits, or should juggling be judged how it just looks; how we subjectively feel about it? The sports camp is very big on organizing juggling competitions-how many balls can you keep in air, how long can you keep on juggling etc.-while the art camp is busy organizing wacky performances. And the sports camp thinks certain jugglers are lame, because they are using props that are too easy to juggle, while the art camp disses the occasional contact juggler, because he is copying Michael Moschen. Both camps used to hate each other, and both camps hated the occasional entertainer, who juggles three apples and delivers the performance with accompanying jokes, to earn more than both the artist and the sportsman combined.

But... unlike in demoscene (?), in juggling, the fight has pretty much died out. The two camps have very much reconciliated: it is entirely possible to judge a performance on multiple axes of merit. We can have technical jugglers that just wow us with "that's physically not possible", while we can have artistic jugglers that mesmerize us with performances bordering contemporary dance, sometimes literally using no props other than their body. Both people can come to juggling conventions and have a good time; to find like-minded people, and quietly sleep through the performances that they don't find interesting.

So coming back to demoscene: I value demo productions on multiple axes of merit: technical, music, visuals, direction, "novelty"... To really bring this back to the point of this discussion, I think productions using Unity or Notch will certainly affect my technical assessment of it. But there's plenty of other dimensions unrelated to these!

The analogy could probably be extended to many, many different arts/sports. Ice-skating, dancing, singing... Eurovision using backing-tracks is kinda lame, but I can still enjoy the crazy stage visuals! Which were, at least in 2014, partly made with Notch ;)

I sense some Juggler jokes coming in....

it's only tehghey when the balls unite!

Certainly. Can't watch snowboarding anymore when it's all about how many degrees one spins with some lame grab, where a simple big, tweaked to the bone method air looks thousand times better. Ugh.

Go juggle some balls about it.

well put analogy imho!

Bollocks, there is no artistic side to ice skating, all that matters is who skates fastest, and that the "Wilhelmus" is played when medals are handed out. \o/

i wonder what the spacepigs hello kevin of juggling would be :)

Before internet

>i want to fuck toasters
>dont be a fucking retard
>grow up

After internet

>I want to fuck a toaster
>google
>find an online/social media community with 1000+ members about people wanting to fuck toasters
>fuck up your life, the cops break down your door to find you fried to a crisp with your dick stuck in a toaster.

that was... very educational?

yeah, clearly pouet isn't the online/social media community for you, ringofyre! have fun with your toaster though!

it's only gay when the dicks in the toaster touch

It's BALLS, what are you some sort of bagel-setting fucking nonce?

I just wanted to butt into this thread and say that while I agree with the main sentiments provided by e.g. Keops, Gargaj and Smash, and while I also agree with Britelite and Uncle-X and others that this very same discussion pops up every time some kind of paradigm shift seems to have happened in the scene, it also warms my heart that so many of my old friends actually care enough to participate and glance over the history of the scene every now and then. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I might not care quite enough at the moment, but I'm glad you guys do, and I promise I'll be back as well :)

reed <3

pestis: dunno, I feel that most *active* people are perfectly capable of adapting to the times, and *are* judging demos on multiple axes of merit. OP is entitled to his opinion, but they're probably in a minority. I don't think it's as much as a "fight" as you make it out to be, pouet thread notwithstanding.

Also, what Havoc said.

I put the question mark there in my assessment of the demoscene, because even though I counted at least three persons making anti-commercial engine comments in this thread, I was not sure how widespread the sentiments actually were or if they simply are overrepresented here at pouet.

4ks-raymarch is where the coder-centric people have gathered (because you can't get as impressed as back solely by big demos these days), is not a proof that scene went more code-centric rather than the last resort for coder-obsessed people (unless you go oldschool platforms). In fact, it can be a bit more friendly for newcomers to start by writing simple shaders in shadertoy (even if mathematically more advanced) than back in the past with x86 assembly DOS 4ks, where you need to type some more obscure things to even light a pixel.

What a sad train-wreck of a thread.

Here's a question then, would you rather ban Unity/UE/etc. in demo compos?

Good question.

First of all let me emphasize that I like a good unity/ue demo as much as everybody else (dying stars/orange is a great example).
And I understand the arguments for keeping them in the same compo. Maybe after all pros and cons are considered we will come to the conclusion that it might be the best thing to do.

However, let me answer with a counter question:
- Would a demo running inside a 3d package like blender, 3dsmax, maya allowed in the pc demo compo? If no: What is the difference to using unity/ue?

Blender already happened: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=61889

Ok, I was not aware of this being allowed.
If PC demo compo rules allow this, also unity/ue4 demos should be kept.

Thanks gargaj for some constructive input on this matter.

Would Notch be banned too? And how about other third party code, like open source projects? 4klang, wavesabre, etc.?

Recently, I started fooling around with the idea of a windows 4k demo and very quickly I discovered that all the hard stuff is solved already by free / open source tools. And they are so much better than I could ever write myself. 4klang, crinkler, various frameworks to put these together for (iq's and leviathan etc.), even compofillerstudio so you don't have to compile them yourself... just compose music, write a shader and you're good to go*! Not to mention that you can do the whole shader in shadertoy, right until the final byte wanking phase.

So I now believe that, relatively speaking, 4k developers have much more powerful tools compared what e.g. Unity is for PC demos, because the 4k tools are carefully handcrafted by some of the craziest madskill coder wizards for the very purpose they are used for, and they do so pretty damn well. So well that anyone, who competes without them, will be at a serious disadvantage. I would wager that the Revision PC4k compo had no entries that did not use any of such tools.

This is a serious question: if Unity and others were actually banned from PC democompo, could some of these 4k tools be considered too much 3rd party code and thus banned from the 4k compo?

* = I composed music. It sounds like shit. I wrote shader. It looks like shit. So at least for me, compofillerstudio did not solve all the problems.