NVision 08
category: general [glöplog]
probably coz your troll buddy tried to tell us that the scene is the best and leading the world while its not the truth?
iq: Indeed. At least I know that we (Shitfaced Clowns) used all of those techniques on the GBA in 2005, and neither of these techniques was considered new to the scene then. xeNusion might be a bit biased due to his employer, who makes a fair share of their money convincing people that these techniques are harder than they really are.
just to clarify, ASD demos have used AO "Baked" in non-realtime. Which is cheating (but cheating is good in graphics).
For real AO have a look at the works of Fairlight and rgba.
For real AO have a look at the works of Fairlight and rgba.
I think Navis has a good point: it isn't black and white. Sure, on some levels the gaming industry has an advantage, but in other (more niché areas, like procedural generation of meshes, sounds, textures and environments) there are many key players in the demoscene.
No one is the right answer, but I would definitively not say that either party is massively ahead of the other. They simply choose different areas to focus on.
..and also; very, very few game coders/designers have the luxury to put their personal touches into the final product, while demos are almost a textbook definition of personal expression. :)
No one is the right answer, but I would definitively not say that either party is massively ahead of the other. They simply choose different areas to focus on.
..and also; very, very few game coders/designers have the luxury to put their personal touches into the final product, while demos are almost a textbook definition of personal expression. :)
Isn't the demoscene just a really creative, fun and maybe a bit outdated hobby?
I'm probably thinking too simple again :(
I'm probably thinking too simple again :(
buzzword compliance is a pretty worthless criterion to judge demoscene productions by.
for a game, you need to make sure that everything interacts properly with everything else, which makes supporting a large bag of rendering tricks an order of magnitude harder, but also immensely more interesting from an engineering standpoint (and certainly more satisfying when you get it to work). in a demo, you can pretty much ignore this kind of difficulties because you're completely in control. at the same time, you usually lack the amount of artists (or artist time) you'd need to fine-tune art to make the effects look good.
you simply get a completely different process and different goals. when you have three times as many artists as you have coders, the coders are going to give the artists a lot of screws to turn (even if that turning takes a lot of time), because they know they'll have enough time and manpower to get good results. if you have twice as many coders as artists, the coders are going to a) focus on amplifying the productivity of the artists and b) do a lot of things with code that would be done completely by artists in most game companies.
both chaos and me are rubbish at the latter, hence our reliance on tools - pretty much tailor-made to fiver2 and gizmos needs because that's who we're working with. the single most important thing i contributed to debris had nothing to do with the 3d engine, shaders or effects (or mesh/texture generation or compression either); it was a redesign of the werkkzeug3 caching/memory management logic in february 2007, which significantly increased stability and speed when working with large scenes and putting together the timeline.
for a game, you need to make sure that everything interacts properly with everything else, which makes supporting a large bag of rendering tricks an order of magnitude harder, but also immensely more interesting from an engineering standpoint (and certainly more satisfying when you get it to work). in a demo, you can pretty much ignore this kind of difficulties because you're completely in control. at the same time, you usually lack the amount of artists (or artist time) you'd need to fine-tune art to make the effects look good.
you simply get a completely different process and different goals. when you have three times as many artists as you have coders, the coders are going to give the artists a lot of screws to turn (even if that turning takes a lot of time), because they know they'll have enough time and manpower to get good results. if you have twice as many coders as artists, the coders are going to a) focus on amplifying the productivity of the artists and b) do a lot of things with code that would be done completely by artists in most game companies.
both chaos and me are rubbish at the latter, hence our reliance on tools - pretty much tailor-made to fiver2 and gizmos needs because that's who we're working with. the single most important thing i contributed to debris had nothing to do with the 3d engine, shaders or effects (or mesh/texture generation or compression either); it was a redesign of the werkkzeug3 caching/memory management logic in february 2007, which significantly increased stability and speed when working with large scenes and putting together the timeline.
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Isn't the demoscene just a really creative, fun and maybe a bit outdated hobby?
It is, as long as you live up to meet your own expectations and not others'.
i have a question: how can games be ahead of demos or vice versa technically, when a lot of people are involved in both? do i suddenly forget everything i know about graphics the minute i turn off my ps3 devkit and leave the sony r&d office, get on my pc and start coding? course not.
of course, lirauna is about 3 lightyears off the mark when he says demos somehow contribute advanced technology nvidia could be after, because the scene as a whole has generally been quite resistant to adopting new gpu tech, not at the forefront of developing for it. the people at the forefront are generally in graphics (or in a few cases games) r&d teams - although game coders are often too busy+stressed with deadlines to develop really new stuff. that said, there are democoders in some of those teams so again there's an overlap.
if the demoscene has brought something it's been in sizecoding (basically useless, unless you can show me a machine with 50k of storage space but 2gb of ram and a cutting edge gpu), or in using quite simple things in clever ways - e.g. the we-cell particle effects. im leaving out generation because lets face it, most of it was already in 3d packages by the time we started, and it was never particularly complex in the first place - it's just that various sceners, who were forced to use it, used it rather well. it's more that it was impressive you can do all that shit with a bunch of warped cubes and noise textures, rather than the technology behind it being magic and world-changing.
and thats what IS good about the scene. the scene is a rare place you find a few coders who can also handle art and make things look good, which is the one advantage sceners have over most gamecoders and gfx researchers (as both often appear to be myopic - believe me, ive worked with plenty of both), and maybe thats what nvidia finds interesting about the whole thing. the ultimate gfx coder is probably one who's also a great artist, and the scene has more people close to that ideal than most other places.
which brings me to one other issue. hermes said "sceners might get jobs out of this!!" - well, newsflash - most of the people at the higher end of demomaking on pc these days are 30-something-year-old professionals who are doing very well, thanks, and if they wanted a job from those companies they'd just send in their cv and ask. we arent a bunch of teenagers who'd pimp their own mother for an internship at nvidia anymore. now if one of those companies said "here's a hundred grand to make us a demo" that'd be another story and i bet a lot of us would jump at the chance, but the prospect of becoming a junior engineer in a californian code factory doesnt fill a lot of us with delight anymore.
which is, i suppose, the downer about outreach. a lot of us are already involved in the industries the supporting companies are in, or even involved with those companies themselves. we do demos in our spare time to get away from that shit. having those companies involved again means its all starting to feel a bit too much like work.
i think the reason a lot of us are doing demos in the first place is a) the joy of creating them, and b) the joy of seeing the results live on the big screen with 1000 of your friends, rivals and random computer nerds sitting around you. the intel compo, which seriously lacked b and also sort of diminished a, reminded me how important those are. i cant help thinking nvscene will again pretty much rule out b, because most of us wont be there and those that are arent going to be surrounded by all the ones that couldnt make it, if you see what i mean.
if it's a choice between e.g. entering evoke or assembly with a big demo and watching it with your friends in a big packed hall, or entering nvscene a few thousand miles away and watching it on a live stream at home (a choice which seems pretty likely some of us have to make, because of the proximity to those parties and the time needed to do something decent), it's pretty likely the former is going to be a more attractive proposition in the end.
of course, lirauna is about 3 lightyears off the mark when he says demos somehow contribute advanced technology nvidia could be after, because the scene as a whole has generally been quite resistant to adopting new gpu tech, not at the forefront of developing for it. the people at the forefront are generally in graphics (or in a few cases games) r&d teams - although game coders are often too busy+stressed with deadlines to develop really new stuff. that said, there are democoders in some of those teams so again there's an overlap.
if the demoscene has brought something it's been in sizecoding (basically useless, unless you can show me a machine with 50k of storage space but 2gb of ram and a cutting edge gpu), or in using quite simple things in clever ways - e.g. the we-cell particle effects. im leaving out generation because lets face it, most of it was already in 3d packages by the time we started, and it was never particularly complex in the first place - it's just that various sceners, who were forced to use it, used it rather well. it's more that it was impressive you can do all that shit with a bunch of warped cubes and noise textures, rather than the technology behind it being magic and world-changing.
and thats what IS good about the scene. the scene is a rare place you find a few coders who can also handle art and make things look good, which is the one advantage sceners have over most gamecoders and gfx researchers (as both often appear to be myopic - believe me, ive worked with plenty of both), and maybe thats what nvidia finds interesting about the whole thing. the ultimate gfx coder is probably one who's also a great artist, and the scene has more people close to that ideal than most other places.
which brings me to one other issue. hermes said "sceners might get jobs out of this!!" - well, newsflash - most of the people at the higher end of demomaking on pc these days are 30-something-year-old professionals who are doing very well, thanks, and if they wanted a job from those companies they'd just send in their cv and ask. we arent a bunch of teenagers who'd pimp their own mother for an internship at nvidia anymore. now if one of those companies said "here's a hundred grand to make us a demo" that'd be another story and i bet a lot of us would jump at the chance, but the prospect of becoming a junior engineer in a californian code factory doesnt fill a lot of us with delight anymore.
which is, i suppose, the downer about outreach. a lot of us are already involved in the industries the supporting companies are in, or even involved with those companies themselves. we do demos in our spare time to get away from that shit. having those companies involved again means its all starting to feel a bit too much like work.
i think the reason a lot of us are doing demos in the first place is a) the joy of creating them, and b) the joy of seeing the results live on the big screen with 1000 of your friends, rivals and random computer nerds sitting around you. the intel compo, which seriously lacked b and also sort of diminished a, reminded me how important those are. i cant help thinking nvscene will again pretty much rule out b, because most of us wont be there and those that are arent going to be surrounded by all the ones that couldnt make it, if you see what i mean.
if it's a choice between e.g. entering evoke or assembly with a big demo and watching it with your friends in a big packed hall, or entering nvscene a few thousand miles away and watching it on a live stream at home (a choice which seems pretty likely some of us have to make, because of the proximity to those parties and the time needed to do something decent), it's pretty likely the former is going to be a more attractive proposition in the end.
unless you really need that computer because the one you currently have won't even run "medium" full speed.
smash has so bizarrely much leading that i'm scared he is actually IN my head!
smash: i agree on the count of not being able to be there - and as someone who does demos i can also see why's that a downer. that said, i always did remote entries just for the sake of making stuff while i wasnt able to go to a party..
and also, you're forgetting several factors about nvision/nvscene:
- it's a new US demoparty - which i can see is fairly irrelevant for EU sceners, but think about the cultural impact it may have on the long run when panamericans finally start to hear and see more about the scene (since nvidia backs it) and eventually it will be a lot easier to get your way as a scener in sponsorship, jobs, partygoers, references, etc.
- a very good basis for a long-term partnership with a large company that already sponsors our largest event (cf. scamp's post above) and currently intends to continue that, perhaps even going to lower levels (= smaller parties)
it's not just about the demos themselves, don't disregard the cultural aspect as well.
and also, you're forgetting several factors about nvision/nvscene:
- it's a new US demoparty - which i can see is fairly irrelevant for EU sceners, but think about the cultural impact it may have on the long run when panamericans finally start to hear and see more about the scene (since nvidia backs it) and eventually it will be a lot easier to get your way as a scener in sponsorship, jobs, partygoers, references, etc.
- a very good basis for a long-term partnership with a large company that already sponsors our largest event (cf. scamp's post above) and currently intends to continue that, perhaps even going to lower levels (= smaller parties)
it's not just about the demos themselves, don't disregard the cultural aspect as well.
Just take a look at the last Smash Designs pc demo. It's more than enough to end this discussion ;)
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=25861
It actually has a better rating than I was expecting (0.00 at the moment).
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=25861
It actually has a better rating than I was expecting (0.00 at the moment).
what's the correlation with smash designs' last pc demo ?
guardian: that makes the two of us wondering? :O
I'm with you two wondering and with okkie about smash having leading. jsyk.
Thinking that a bunch of hobbyists can surpass a billion dollar industry as a whole is about as sensible as thinking that parallax mapping is worth anything outside of stone caves, but that's another story :)
Thinking that a bunch of hobbyists can surpass a billion dollar industry as a whole is about as sensible as thinking that parallax mapping is worth anything outside of stone caves, but that's another story :)
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a) the joy of creating them, and b) the joy of seeing the results live on the big screen with 1000 of your friends, rivals and random computer nerds sitting around you.
<3 smash <3
spot on. but there's a but. being a lazy creature i need deadlines to produce. gargaj summed it up quite nicely
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i always did remote entries just for the sake of making stuff while i wasnt able to go to a party
Having more options is gold, im more curious if this will do anything at all to the american scene.
smash: well and between the pimple faced teenagers (: and the 30 something "professionals" there still is a large crowd of 20 something ppl.. and I didn't exactly have sweat-shop style companies in mind. you might be astonished how hard it is to get *good* developers who know their way around e.g. opengl and low level hardware coding..
btw, I fully agree on
"the ultimate gfx coder is probably one who's also a great artist"
with all the demo tools being written today it just might happen that
graphics artists become coders :) (probably not for the lowlevel stuff but
I think that tools like werkzeug might even be considered a kind of computer language for demos, albeit a graphical one.)
btw, I fully agree on
"the ultimate gfx coder is probably one who's also a great artist"
with all the demo tools being written today it just might happen that
graphics artists become coders :) (probably not for the lowlevel stuff but
I think that tools like werkzeug might even be considered a kind of computer language for demos, albeit a graphical one.)
I think smash got my point when I said the scene is a step ahead the game industry. I didn't mean it in the technology way, of course, but as explained in his 3rd paragraph.
I was mostly talking in algorithmic way for procedural data generation (as "introduced" on GDC this year...), the game industry starts using that now (mostly for sky, trees (speedtree), sun and environment in general) what the demoscene takes for granted.
I was mostly talking in algorithmic way for procedural data generation (as "introduced" on GDC this year...), the game industry starts using that now (mostly for sky, trees (speedtree), sun and environment in general) what the demoscene takes for granted.
I meant 2nd paragraph.
LiraNuna: smash still has a point -- procedurally generating stuff has been the norm for years and years already, it's just that the demoscene usually does it on runtime, and not in 3DStudio Max or Maya etc.
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Thinking that a bunch of hobbyists can surpass a billion dollar industry as a whole is about as sensible as thinking that parallax mapping is worth anything outside of stone caves, but that's another story :)
and the bricks, don't forget the bricks!
and I'm with smash+gloom too; sorry to bring bad news, but what did we sceners invent regarding proceduralism/generation? nothing so far that I know off...
but hey, iq: look at the bright side of things, It's Realtime! ;-)
Smash / iq : so true.
Some people seem to think they are ahead of their time because they implement Siggraph / GPU gems stuff on one scene with a few objects having a predetermined motion and behavior, all this usually with almost all the RAM / VRAM available for this effect alone :)
Some people seem to think they are ahead of their time because they implement Siggraph / GPU gems stuff on one scene with a few objects having a predetermined motion and behavior, all this usually with almost all the RAM / VRAM available for this effect alone :)
hermes: explain me what's so amazing with that? Like Iq & smash & gloom said. Sceners didn't invent anything useful outside of demos. What we invent is trends in demos. And that's enough for me to be satisfied. I also agree with smash that the best what scene has to offer is a magical breed of artist-coders - individuals that are mostly wanted in CG industry. I think it would be best to talk about the topic on BP while having a beer or two, or dozen.
surpassing isn't possible, but keeping up (relative, of course) is rather respectable.