Demoscene

[View page with inline references]

Demo programming (no, not game demos, `underground' demoscene demos) is an art where creativity and programming skills meet. To make a good demo, you'll both need programmers, graphics artists (also often referred to as `pixelers', due to the classic `pixel pushing' where one draws the image using a computer only -- no scanning or photography involved), musicians, 3D modelers (provided that you want 3D in your demo -- most everybody does these days) and people who know good design.

Now, I'm definitely not an experienced `scener', but at The Gathering 2001 at least I released a demo in the fastintro competition (you get a theme and have 4 hours to make and hand in your demo/intro), so I can now officially claim to be `elite' (ahem ;-) ), since it actually won first prize (says something about the other entries, too, perhaps :-) ). The party version was for Linux, but a few weeks later I ported it and released an (otherwise unmodified) Windows version. Now, since I'm non-creative, and there really was very little time to get things done, the demo is called `There wasn't time to make up a better name'. Doh. :-) As you can probably see from the demo, I wasn't exactly an experienced coder at that point, but it was a lot of fun :-)

Later, I've joined forces with a couple of friends under the name `Excess'. Coding demos together with others really is a lot more fun than doing it alone (except, of course, that you can't always do all the decisions by yourself, but as always, it's give and take), but the problem is (naturally) often finding those persons. Oh well, so far we've released two productions (called aRISe (for Xenox XL 2001) and Shine (for Kindergarden 2017-16)), both done in quite a hurry and thus not of the quality we'd like (but I guess that's how it always is, for even the most experienced sceners). We intend to release final versions of both of them (both are quite buggy, and a lot bigger than they really need to be), but lazy as we are, we haven't quite gotten around to doing that yet :-(

At the bit less serious (but no less fun ;-) side, neon (of nocturnal/bafh), lug00ber (of kvasigen) and I made a quick adtro (called "sekr-17: .dead .sea .scrollers") for demoscene.no and handed it in to the 64kB competition at Dreamhack 2001. It only came 6th (out of 8th -- shame on the weird Swedes, it wasn't that bad), but the party was still quite cool... We only got 17 hours there, though (out of four days), and spent about as much time at the bus ;-)

At The Party 2001, we released yet another in-a-hurry production, called Conspiracy. A little better on the deadline this time, but still over ;-) It placed 7th.

For Underscore 2k2, we finally got ourselves together with respect to deadlines :-) What was originally supposed to be an invitro for The Gathering 2002 became an attempt for a demo at the same party, but we simply didn't reach it, so after a lot of modifications it became Amoeba. It actually won the demo competition, and we won a useless old SPARCstation I still haven't managed to get up and running. :-) (The link is to the final version which we released a month later, as our first final -- it runs on just about everything that exists of cards, plus it's a little less ugly (or just different) in a few places.)

At Scene Event 2002, we were back in the deadline hurry (10 hours? 12 hours? I don't really remember, I wasn't there :-) ) was back, but we finished on time, handed in Shapeshifter and won again, surprisingly enough by quite a good margin. I'm still undecided on which is better of Shapeshifter and Amoeba, but people seem to like Shapeshifter, so, well. You watch and decide. :-) (For those of you not having capable enough 3D cards to watch it, I've made a rendered version (50MB) available -- it's solid rendered to 50fps with no frame drops, and encoded with DivX 5.x. The quality of both the picture and the sound should be a lot better using the realtime version, though, so if you can, run it realtime. :-) )

In between releases (still not sure when the next one is coming), I made a Linux port of the demo/invitro "VIP 2" by Popsy Team -- they were kind enough to release the source to the public, and the demo is way too good for me not to port it when I have the possibility to do so. :-) (I gave the port its own web page for easier updates, news, etc., so it's not directly linked from this one, or really a part of my home page at all.)

After over a year and a half of silence, we finally got our act together, did some intense hurry-design (and hurry-coding) and released (together with Kvasigen again) Nemesis, which won the 64kB competition at The Gathering 2004. Like the invitro we also made for the party (released five days before the party this time :-P), it's unfortunately rather slow and buggy at times, but OK, you can't get it all :-)

If you're interesting in learning more about demos, I'd suggest a visit to pouet.net, or perhaps scene.org, one of the biggest scene archives around nowadays. The single most convenient way to get into it all would probably be buying a copy of the MindCandy DVD (formerly known as the `DemoDVD'), though -- it's dirt cheap ($16 if you live in the US, and that's including shipping and handling) and contains over 40 PC demos, both old and new, excellently captured and readily playable. Seriously, it rocks. Go buy it. :-) (No, I don't earn anything on their sales ;-) )