Anybody interested in a well written history of the scene that really helps explain it as a cultural phenomenon should probably read the demoscene chapter in "The Future Was Here", a book about the Amiga. It's probably one of the best written synopsis of the scene I've ever read and really places it well as both a technical and artistic movement and helps provide context for this kind of work.
Also, a fantastic visual guide is the documentary film "Moleman 2" (2011). It's freely available to watch on YouTube; highly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU
And today, I was reading that facebook's mobile messenger has 18000 classes, and is about a 100mb, this doesn't take into account other dependencies it has on the OS. These demos are 100% standalone, no external libraries. Progress is a funny thing.
This is a Javascript demo. So let's not discount the browser, Javascript engine, JIT, 3d acceleration libs, sound libs, and everything used from the OS that is involved here. Still it is a great effort.
Your argument fits better to a machine like the C64, where demos are really going directly to the hardware and the OS is basically inactive.
Well most of the things you named are inactive. It's using a very tiny bit of external 3d code, and external decompression, but almost everything else out of browser, javascript, libs, and OS is passthrough. The javascript engine exists but does not serve to make it smaller; the code is simple loops and subroutines that would probably be better as native code.
Different use case. Facebook is a communications application, with user inputs and networking, focused on getting the information to you as fast as possible for the best user experience, and being always working 24/7.
This is a one-off deterministic demo, without inputs or networking.
Still, a 1k demo like this is impressive. And 18000 classes is too much for a messenger. But you can't compare them.
Ah, I suppose. I like the performance aspect of it though. It feels like something my computer is doing live, as I watch it, instead of a recording of something done in the past.
Not sure the point of the comparison. Yes, some of our encoding technology beats some algorithmic generation of content in performance. If the goal is size of encoding, though, it doesn't come close.
Tricks like this can help show how less than a gig of data is enough to encode an operating system. Or a person.
I really hope you are right about encoding a person in less than a gig, but what about the associated genome (3000 megabases), episodic memories and/or neuron connectivity?! Surely this is data that would be essential, yet very hard to algorithmically encode?
The demoscene started out of the software piracy scene. An intro was a short thing like this one, that people put into the boot sequence of games they cracked or otherwise made available to the scene. Over time these got more elaborate and people started making them separate from the games to show off their prowess in coding, called demos. Nowadays the names serve to differentiate the runtime length and size of the program. Intro = short thing, demo = long full effort thing.
> Intro = short thing, demo = long full effort thing.
The problem is that that's not true anymore either. Many intros are equally "long full effort" as your average demo. Intro simply means "demo with a size limit", these days (and by "these days" i mean "the last 15 years")
A wild demo can be pretty much everything. Some possibilities:
- It's any kind of film, usually available as divx/avi file
(music videos, shorts, comedies, trash, prerendered animations...)
- It's a demo that requires very rare/strange hardware to run
(c64 with SCPUs, for example)
- It's a demo that simply does not fit in any other competition (and the
applying rules) of a given demoparty.
- Sometimes, live performances count as 'wild' demos too. ;)
However, in most cases, it IS a short movie (clip), either tradionally filmed
or CG/animated.
Nowadays megademos might be put into the wild demo compo, but from what i know parties put length restrictions on those as well. The primary purpose of wild demo compos however is to allow platforms that do not compare well with the classic demo platforms, such as the various ARM mini computers, game consoles or really old computers.
Ha, I love that you are so condescending about what he made, and one of the first comments on the video you linked to was "Yawn. We did better in 256 byte microcode strings in 1986."
^^^ Now you're just showing your age! No but seriously, "Second Reality" by Future Crew in 1993 was voted one of the top 10 hacks of all time by Slashdot.org. I remember watching this thing on a very low end 386, with something like 4MB of RAM and maybe 512K of video memory and I was mesmerized. They might as well be showing you this demo in 3D holography today, you'd be just as impressed as I was, it was borderline magic back then. It gets hella good after about 1:50.
SECOND REALITY - BY FUTURE CREW, '93
iTerm is also pretty great, because you can split terminal tabs into panes and there are some new neat features allowing you to click on filename strings etc in Finder!
