[royjacobs]

It's probably good to know that the focus in the demoscene has shifted away from 64k more towards 4k/1k intros and 'regular' demos. The amount of work required to do a high quality 64k is so huge that, especially now that the demoscene is not as big as it used to be, a lot of people don't think it warrants the time investment anymore.

(Btw, the best way to prove me wrong is to write a 64k intro about it)

[laurentlb]

It's also worth noting that the expectations around 64k got higher. We can do so much more in 64k than it was possible in the past. Compression tools have improved. If you take the famous fr-08 intro from Farbrausch and recompress it with modern packers, you would get back many kilobytes. So I think the time investment needed to make a top 64k has increased.

The source code of all my 64k intros has been shared (the last one was added two weeks ago): https://github.com/ctrl-alt-test/demo-archive/ and my plan is to share more code to help people get started. Creating demos using procedural generation is incredibly fun.

[whizzter]

Actually a bunch of people that do still like them... it's just that we don't have the infinite time we had at our disposal in our teens that makes us not ever be finished :P

[jsheard]

Isn't that the same issue really? The demoscene seems to be in decline because there's hardly any new blood coming in, the teens who would have time to commit to a big production today just aren't interested.

[llmblockchain]

Teens have been so accustomed to immediate gratification and short form content they don't possess the willpower to focus on something truly difficult. You can't watch a few shorts and bust out a 4k demo over the weekend the same way you can "make minecraft in 24 hours".

[jsheard]

Maybe that's part of it, but I think not having any personal experience with the constraints of early computing is also a factor. The demoscene does try to keep that spirit going on modern platforms with artificial constraints like "Windows exe limited to 64kb" but I think it's harder for someone coming in fresh to appreciate the appeal of that handicap. They definitely won't appreciate the actual retro computer targets like the C64 and Amiga, why would they, those systems came out before they were born and unlike early game consoles they have almost no lasting appeal outside of nostalgia (sorry Amiga fans).

[whizzter]

Teens addicted to only instant gratification were never the ones to produce really good stuff in the demoscene anyhow, they will put countless hours into other arenas.

Also back in the mid 1990s maybe the demoscene _was_ instant gratification to get started? You could start doing graphics with "mov eax,13h / int 10 / mov ax,a0000h / mov es,ax / mov di,0 / (loop with stosb).. ".

To get started today with graphics you either setup openGL/d3d with their weird API's with decades of legacy, use something third party (and learn linking/libraries) or write a 3000 LoC hello-vulkan (Or use Unity,etc but then up until 5 years ago you'd get shouted out of the scene due to elitistic attitudes).

[immibis]

Now for instant gratification there's Shader Toy.

[immibis]

Sure you can. I made a 4k demo during a demo party over a weekend. I think people in this thread might be conflating demos with great demos. The quality bar is entirely in your head. Go and watch any live or recorded party and the good demos are only a small percentage. Most are quite average.

[immibis]

So far I've made a demo that maybe could have been 8k, but it was 32k (fits in 64k category but didn't contain enough content to use more than half).

I know I can't make anything that competes with .the .product or Chaos Theory (at least not yet), but it just feels like a good limit. 64k is plenty of room for code as long as you don't write a huge amount. You can write all sorts of procedural generation; you can use OpenGL and C++; you can compress it generically with xz (at least on Linux) without worrying about ultimate size efficiency. But it's still small enough that you can't include raw texture or sound data - you're forced to generate them with code. It's still code-based art, not "download a bunch of assets from the internet"-based art that might as well be a video file. A lot of >64k demos spend a lot of the size on content files, which doesn't feel like what a demo should be.

To write a 4k you have to actually make it small, but to write a 64k you just have to not make it big.

[whizzter]

With 4k most people use pre-made startup (crinkler, win32 minimal window, glSetup, audio often 4klang) and without the audio you are at something like 300-900 bytes(was a while ago since i last fiddled), then add the music (1kb-2kb or so) and then you know what you have to work with in terms of shader code (usually a single pixel-uber-shader for 1-2kb compressed)

Making them is for most more about reaching the upper limit in size and then tweaking until you're happy (more experienced people might have an budget idea from the get-go and might overshoot slightly with their idea and then cut).

64kb can (and often did in the 90s before Jizz and Stash, fr-08 was mostly an well produced evolution) include raw images,textures and samples, and raw data can still be an viable escape hatch today. The killer for 64kb is that you can spend almost infinite time on writing generators and other tools.

[immibis]

Of course you can include smallish pieces of data, but you can't make the demo mostly data. Look at some unlimited size demos. "Sisyphus Unchained" (Andromeda Software Development) is a 220MB zip file. Uncompressed, it's got a 60MB OpenCV DLL for some reason, a 37MB 3D model of a crab, 68MB of JPEGs and PNGs, 120MB of "MVX" which appears to be the animated silhouette from the 4:15 mark, stored as 442 separately compressed frames. The music is a single 11MB MP3 file.

Is that even a demo? I suppose. The EXE file seems custom made for this. It doesn't feel like a demo, though. It just feels like they made a music video in some tool like Blender with no constraints, and writing their own playback tool doesn't "really" make that into a demo.

By contrast, anything you can do in 64k that looks demoey is demoey.

The winning entry, "Rainmaker" by "Byte[censored] & Doomsday" was 450 megabytes. 2 different versions are included in the download, making it 900 megabytes, but that doesn't count. It's packed in one EXE, without as easy visibility as the other one which had all its resources in separate files. Running 'strings' shows fragments of RDF, JavaScript. It's made with some tool called "Notch" and the 'strings' output makes me think it might have a whole web browser in it as well as a whole copy of Notch. It also happens to be a valid zip file, where we can see there's an 80MB WAV file of music, and at least a hundred megabytes of textures and objects.

My first demo had a music wave file. That's because I ran out of time and couldn't replicate the way I'd made it in the DAW program. That was a noob thing to do. But the #1 winner at Revision has the same thing? What is this? I don't like it. Demo-making isn't supposed to be about shipping an mp4 video alongside an mp4 file.

[whizzter]

It's a matter of perspective, when I started out it was news when 10mb demos was allowed and it's just continued from that point until they said screw sizelimits. My main point is that 64kb more or less doesn't restrict you in terms of amount of code and you still have a fair bit of latitude for an artist to do whatever they want.

My reference on non-generated is that what is nowadays called chip musicians used to do 10-40kb mod's with regular tracker tools that would easily be compressed with an exe-packer to work out of the box for a 64k, logotypes,etc were commonly just palettized images (wasn't much of an issue for mode13 graphics and even early hi-color things).

But more than anything, the top-2 64k's (And some oldschool prods) at Revision probably were the ones with most experienced man-hours put into them.

As for Notch, it's basically the commercialized version of the Fairlight demotools. Also appending Zip's to .exe files is one of the oldest tricks in the book to package datafiles "nicely", works well since the central directory of a zip file is found from the end of a file and you can compile the exe separately and then just insert data-files by making a zip and appending it.

[whizzter]

I don't think that the time investment (per-se) is the biggest issue for the demoscene, 64k is the most time consuming category in many ways but also becoming a niche _again_ today.

It'd be easy to write an essay on it, but pirates games and cracktros not being as visible in the days of cheap games, copy/lan parties as focal points of computer usage in the 80s/90s, lan party consolidation and separation of demoscene from lan parties, _lack_ of funding for commercial graphics programming (games) before y2k in Scandinavia compared to available talent, inflexibility of early 3d accelerators were all factors in making the demoscene a thing and later it's decline.

[royjacobs]

My point exactly :)