April 20, 2001

9:32 AM

.the .product will make you happy.It might make ya cream yer pants. .the .product "demonstrates 'realistic' and detailed graphics are possible even within the limitations of the 64kb competition." Over a gig of data compressed into this small a space? The potential is frightening.
posted by ZachsMind (9 comments total)

yeah, this demo is amazing. i saw it a few months ago, but i didn't want to install dx8 - i had heard so many bad things :)

i ended up installing it just to watch the demo, and didn't regret it.
posted by pnevares at 9:40 AM on April 20, 2001

I miss the PC demoscene. Ever since the Hornet archive closed down, there hasn't been a central repository for demo fans and creators.

I think it was shortsighted to give up, based on the mistaken idea that advanced technology has made demo creation obsolete and unoriginal.

"Unable to stay; unwilling to leave...
A bleak future awaits us:
Effects, while technically impressive, that are unoriginal;
Long sequences of ripped MP3 music instead of original tracked music;
Boring pre-calculated keyframed sequences that aren't even rasterized in realtime;
And worst of all, commercialism. The scene is unwilling to produce a demo if it can't make money off of it in some way.

My demoscene is gone forever. Goodbye."

Looks like a case of the "good ol' days" syndrome.
posted by waxpancake at 10:23 AM on April 20, 2001

Runs better than Tribes 2.
posted by capt.crackpipe at 10:35 AM on April 20, 2001

Given that DirectX 8 is 11,208KB, that means this demo is actually 11,276KB. Not so impressive anymore, eh? It's easy to write a demo in 64K when someone else has already written the code that actually does all the work.
posted by kindall at 10:56 AM on April 20, 2001

Scene.org is still trying to preserve the demoscene, and is doing a pretty fine job of it.

I've been meaning to write a huge manifesto on demos and the demoscene. It truly is the only form of computer art I know of, from the graphic level to the music all the way down to the programming level. Games and online art just don't compete.

Have a look at this demo (Windows only) and let's hear what you think.
posted by Succa at 11:07 AM on April 20, 2001

Agree with you Kindall. It's easy to make a piece of software look tiny when it only runs with a freaking huge piece of middleware that you wouldn't use otherwise. The fact that all it gave me a five second black screen under Win2k was also less than impressive. Pah.
posted by DiplomaticImmunity at 11:12 AM on April 20, 2001

Succa: The URL seems to be:

ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/demos/groups/tbl/pc/tbl-contour.zip

and the readme is at

ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/demos/groups/tbl/pc/tbl-contour.txt

it's cool, but a 6mb executable isn't anything to brag about, is it?
posted by milnak at 11:15 AM on April 20, 2001

Well, it IS a Windows demo...what'd you expect?

I think the days of squeezing demo code into 12k are behind us. Windows impedes it. Even Windows coding at the assembly level yields fairly large executables, relative to DOS days. There's just no getting around Win32.

Although you're right, 6 MB is a bit much. But it's definitely worth it for that incredible infinite-complexity zoom at the end. Whoa. I also recommend "Moral Hard Candy" by the group called "Blasphemy". It should be there on scene.org, under the "viewing tips" section. Excellent stuff.
posted by Succa at 12:25 PM on April 20, 2001

There's Tranzmit, which is currently moving but should soon be found here. I've gotten a lot of really cool stuff from this site.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 1:11 PM on April 20, 2001