[adhoc32]

The demoscene has always been about real-time graphics. It never sought to compete with video animations. Many demosceners were, at heart, game developers who valued and appreciated real-time code, often considering animations to be "lame".

[vidarh]

But that's the point. Today this is a big distinction that makes it more difficult for many people to appreciate.

When we saw Commodore 64 demos for example, they often impressed even relatively non-technical people.

But today a demo that pushes the limits technically will often only look impressive to those who understand the technical limitations.

That has significantly changed the potential audience to a diminishing subset even if relatively technical people.

[1000100_1000101]

Anyone who plays AAA games knows the currently state of the art and technical limitations. Sure it's not everyone, but a large enough non-technical portion of the population will be able to appreciate it, to some degree.

[vidarh]

This is assuming that they'll look at a non-interactive demo and get why someone would insist on not pre-rendering everything in the first place instead of comparing it against pre-generated video. That was becoming a problem already 20+ years ago in explaining to people what made a given demo impressive, because most people aren't interested in the technical limitations.

[smokel]

I totally agree that this was the opinion of many demosceners. However, my point is that this would seldom be the opinion of the general public. The demoscene grew organically, and trying to define what it should be about seemed a bit silly. The artificial limits, such as 64K or 4K intros sure were fun to compete with, but they make little or no sense to the uninitiated, and were pretty much arbitrary.

It was actually what put me off a bit -- I enjoyed the demoscene to learn new things and to experiment with computers in total freedom. I had no need for artificial limitations set out by competitions, and never really cared much for the gatherings of socially less developed boys who smelled pretty bad (even though I exactly matched that profile myself :).

I really liked the contrarian groups who faked a lot. In Nooon's "Stars" (1995) a 3D bee is rendered with a complete wing missing, to fake a high poly count. "Transgression 2" by MFX may also be a good example of what I am trying to convey here. Obviously it was not real-time ray tracing, but what was it? It puzzled me for weeks!

[bane]

The major category for demoscene competition has always been a more or less "no constraints" category. The restricted ones are really just so that smaller teams with fewer resources or different angles have the ability to compete as well.