I have this firm belief that demo writers are literal gods amongst programmers. Nothing comes close to their knowledge and craftsmanship and the resulting art they create. To me it is the purest form of programming bar none. I'm in constant awe and have the utmost respect for these guys. Just had to get it off my chest. Thanks for reading!
Same here, bro. I sincerely cannot even start to fathom how could 0x4015 create that amount of interaction, data, audio, shaders, engine, etc and just pack it into 4 measly kB. Damn!
I know they employ algorithmic composition for basically everything, still... 4kb wouldn't hold a single frame of anything to today's standards. It surely is impressive.
I used to feel like you. Having done some mediocre demos myself, I looked up to some of the best democoders a lot. Until I met them (hey, demoscene is tiny - just show up at a demoparty and meet your heros in person). I noticed that the top democoders were invariably:
- extremely nice
- better than me at graphics programming
- worse than me at X
For example, at some point long ago I wrote a tool to synchronize effects to music. A famous democoder wanted to try it, I said "here you go", he said "shit, the API is in C++. I don't know C++". Turns out all these amazing demos were written in C and this guy had never bothered to learn classes, templates, etc etc. Of course there's nothing wrong with that, but, well, it's just different skills. I mean every programmer I knew at that time knew C++. It's like working in web dev and not knowing any JavaScript at all. It was very surprising to me :-)
tl;dr I'm sure I make better scalable realtime backends than some top democoders would.
> tl;dr I'm sure I make better scalable realtime backends than some top democoders would.
Exactly; some make magic happen in 4K, others can spin up 4000 high performance GPU servers in a matter of minutes, out-performing the supercomputers of just a few years ago while costing a fraction of it. It's amazing how much power some can squeeze out with the tightest of constraints AND how much power others can summon with the biggest of credit cards. These two overlap, too.
> I have this firm belief that demo writers are literal gods amongst programmers.
If they were considered gods there would likely be no scene.
> Nothing comes close to their knowledge and craftsmanship and the resulting art they create.
Subjective, but sure.
> To me it is the purest form of programming bar none.
Definitely wouldn't say it is a pure form of programming. The demoscene is on the one hand about community and on the other about producing something. Pureness doesn't really fit into that too well. I would probably even say that the scene has a bias towards the unpure. Just like a lot of other scenes, like in music.
For those on the East Coast who are interested, there's a small, but long running demoscene competition and hands-on retrocomputing museum every year at CMU called Demosplash.
It's great fun and one of the engineering professors (who's originally from Japan) participates in both. He and the retrocomputing club bring tons of old computers, including Japanese and European only machines and even write demos on them.
An enlightening post indeed, but the title reads oddly - "Who is Demoscener?" suggests that there is a single person called "Demoscener" that your article is about, whereas as it's actually about multiple people in the demoscene I suggest you should rename it to "Who are demosceners?"
Grammatically speaking, you're absolutely right! But I had some personal reasons to name it that way :) Thanks for pointing it out! And thanks for reading!
so happy the demo scene is still happening... my first taste of this was the future crew's unreal demo from 1992 (yes, i just aged myself a bit): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxGtPAhkEQU
Future crew seems to have reached a lot of folks... I watched it for hours as a teenager in Croatia,looped on computer store's monitors. I still check it out every now and then - though watching it on YouTube just doesn't seem as satisfying!
Not at all. Many demos these days are either built on in-house engines which abstract things away (a group of tool devs builds those, while the actual demo devs/designers just work with the tools), or they're built on a premade engine. There are plenty of folks somewhere in-between, too, doing WebGL and the like.
I was just a kid coding his first space invaders game on a bbc micro when I saw my first demo on the Amiga.
It was like seeing in color for the first time, blew my tiny little mind and nothing was ever the same again. Kind of like when I went online the first time.*
*via compuserve dialing a London number (as it turned out, 12 year old me didn’t quite get that) for hundreds of hours and no free calls in UK, even local calls, calls to London were expensive. I got my arse tanned for that I tell you hwat!
