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Introduction
to Demos & The Demo Scene: Demos are cool. They exist to move you, just as any other art form moves you. But demos are built by programmers, artists, and composers who live and breathe technology.
I’m describing a scene demo, which is not a demo of a game; it is a demonstration of programming, art, and music talent. A scene demo is a non-interactive executable that presents real-time music and graphics. Demos are created by young programmers and artists who are mostly located in Western Europe. They gather at hundreds of ‘demo parties’ a year, where competitions for demos are held. This article will:
The relationship of the demo scene to the game industry is similar to that of the game-mod community or the machinima community (ultra-low budget computer generated film-making). Demos are computer graphics hobby work. Working on real-time, cool looking, computer graphics projects gains members experience that is perfect for the game industry. Many members of the demo scene have followed their passion straight into the computer game industry. There they continue to work on real-time computer graphics and sound. Early sceners had extensive experience with ‘everything in assembly’ programming, 8 bit coding, et cetera, which has turned out very useful for programming things like the Game Boy and the new wave of WAP games (cell phone games). Saxon Druce, from Australia, believes he was hired to his first game job because of his experience coding demos. However, he mentions that, “at the time I did it for 'the love of the code', not because I planned to get into the games industry. Being part of the scene you also get to discuss your ideas with other people, and show off, which all helps improve your skills. Also, you get some experience with building something through working with a few other people, both other coders and 'arty types', which is just like the real world.” Ten years ago the difference between the technology used in games and in demos was very small. Demos often displayed superior ability in very isolated and focused applications. It was common to see demos displaying graphic quality far beyond current in game graphics. The beauty of demos is that they need not be robust. They will not be sold and do not need to meet the requirements of users. Rather, demos at that time were notorious for making many demands of the user. Specific sound cards, video cards, operating systems, and memory managers were required. Literally half the demos I would download would not run on my PC.
Importantly, demos are not interactive. This allows a demo coder to make many optimizations unavailable to the game programmer. Demos are much more like a technical sketch in that sense. They allow novel concepts to be focused on, without the enormous amount of work that would accompany making a full game production. Additionally, demos are artistically free. They need please only the authors. This empowers them in a way similar to many independent films. They provide a medium to explore, without the constraints of economics. Demos in this sense are an artistic sketch. As both technical and artistic sketches, demos exist as an excellent source of inspiration. Origins of the Demo Scene: A Brief HistorySoftware has been copied illegally for years. In the 1980’s games and other software packages were the target of crackers and couriers. Groups formed to break copy protection and distribute the software among ‘elite’ bulletin board systems. Many cracks involved a loader, which would launch the software. Small advertisements for the cracker, and or group, were placed in these loaders, often with flashy computer graphics. At some point many programmers found it more rewarding to focus only on creating the flashy computer graphics. They released graphical demos, which often showed a series of graphical effects, and fancy scrolling text. They soon teamed up with artists and musicians, and thus demos were born. Those people copying software often gathered at weekend parties to trade files. (Bandwidth was even worse back then than it is now…) The demo scene carried this social aspect over to demo parties. These continue today.
Recipe for a demo party:
About 100 demo parties were held in 2000. Most of these occur in Western Europe. Many of these parties are quite large, attracting hundreds of attendees. (Which is quite a lot when they all bring computers and require network access.) During a party, groups will work hard producing much of their content. However, considerable amounts of time are spent in preparation before a party. Some of the most fantastic demos have been created completely at a party, but existing code and engines are often used. What is a Demo?A demo aims to display cutting edge real-time programming. Graphical effects are synchronized with music to drive the ‘cool’ factor as far as it can go.
Teams generate demos. Teams are made up of
Let me do a case study on a demo released at the Takeover 2000 Party, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. After you read the case study, I encourage you to download and run the demo This Is, by Orion, which answers the question, “What is a Demo.” (This demo is rendered in black and white intentionally, it’s just part of its particular style—do not attempt to adjust your monitor). [Click to read the This Is Case Study] In addition to the challenge of producing a compelling demo, competitions are held for intros. An intro is a demo that fits in a size requirement of 64 or 4 kilobytes (including all compiled code, art, and music). Shockingly these produce animation and music from a source smaller than just a single screen shot. One of the most notable intros released in 2000 is .the .product, by farb-rausch,which uses DirectX/D3D8. Another fabulous intro from 2000 is Heaven Seven, by Exceed. Real-time ray tracing blended with hardware accelerated polygon rendering, a wonderful score, and an elegant design and flow of narrative. In the image you can see constructive solid geometry, shadows, and environment mapping. This is a 64 kilobyte intro.
Because I know you’d love to see what can be crammed into a 4KB intro, I’d like to present to you with two great examples. Stoerfall by freestyle is an OpenGL intro. Never Bored by revolution is an excellent software only intro. These are great feats of work, with each entire piece fitting in just 4,096 bytes. The text alone up to this point in this article is over 8KB!
Demos have changed appearance dramatically over the past decade. Most influential has been the advent of hardware accelerated polygon rasterization. Also influential is the changing style of the demo scene. Sadly, it is often very difficult to run old demos, as they are very specific about hardware and execution environment. Older demos showed slightly more variety, due to the flexibility of coding everything in software. The platform of demos has varied over time as well. The C64 and Amiga computers were once widely used for demos. Today the main platform is a high end gaming PC. The Playstation PSX console has also been used for demos in recent years, as well as browser based Macromedia Flash and Java demos.
Demos at SIGGRAPH Because I find demos so inspiring, I feel it important to introduce them to others whom I think will enjoy them. This category includes computer graphics fans, mostly. But importantly, it includes people who enjoy visually stimulating work. The music, as well, draws many people to demos. SIGGRAPH is the worlds largest computer graphics conference, drawing members from academia, the film & game industries, and the art community. All the right people are together for a week, and so I am striving to bring demos to them. This is a call for your participation. If you create demos I strongly encourage you to submit your work to SIGGRAPH. If you are interested in demos, I encourage you to attend the planned session at SIGGRAPH devoted to demos. The Computer Animation Festival at SIGGRAPH is, as the SIGGRAPH web site puts it, “… an invitation to all animators, scientific visionaries, interactive performance artists, software designers, and visual effects magicians.” The animation festival contains the best of the year’s computer graphics work. All attendees of SIGGRAPH attend the Electronic Theater, a two hour presentation of the best of the best from the animation festival. This is the place to submit work, clearly marked and described as real-time graphics on PC platform machines. But hurry! The deadline for submission to the Computer Animation Festival is 21, March, 2001. A special session will be held for demos at SIGGRAPH this year. This is being organized by myself and a group of demo scene devotees. We will present the best demos of the year, a brief history of the demo scene, a speaker from the demo scene, and a panel discussion on real-time graphics and demos. Arrangements are not yet finalized, and we are still in need of support. Please contact us if you would like to become involved. For more information about Demos at SIGGRAPH please see: http://www.scene.org/siggraph/ We also encourage you to join the announcements mailing list found on that web site, or to contact us directly at siggraph@scene.org. Must See Viewing Tips
If you only look at one or two demos, take a look at one of these: Demos: Intros 64k:
Intros 4K:
More recommendations: http://www.scene.org/viewingtips.html Websites: Discuss this article in Gamasutra's discussion forum ________________________________________________________
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