Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine (opens in new tab)

I imagined that demo skills would eventually die and the more recent stuff would just end up being bloated or lame. But it really has improved. Infeasibly improved. Debris is amazing. But it isn't the only more recent amazing demo. Someone once asked me whether there was a limit to how realistic demos can be made. I would normally prate on about Shannon information or something, but it was a very smart mathematician who asked me. I did eventually think of a reason though. A demo is never going to contain a model of a piece of paper on which its own source code (plus additional information) is written in the demo. So there have to be some limits. But the limits don't seems to have been reached yet, especially with better and better modelling in the hardware.

Fantastic tiny demos are truly the closest thing I've seen to magic. You know it's really a bag of tricks but it's simply so good.

It's amazing how they can fit that much detailed demo in 64kb along with sound. Feels magical :)

Every time I see the this demo YT I want to teach myself C++ (despite I hate compiled languages) - this is great inspiration for me.

Nowa days this graphics is not really that impressive but back in 2000 that was jaw-breaking OMG

The PC demoscene started out on DOS and Watcom C++, and switched almost exclusively to Windows and Visual C++ around 1999. It was a natural choice at the time, as Linux wasn't ready for primetime and MSVC really was the best compiler around.

The choice of platform had to take the majority into account: most people didn't want to write demos that ordinary people couldn't watch. The opinion of programmers was not the most important factor anyway, simple because most people in the demoscene were not programmers -- there were musicians, graphics artists and all sorts of non-productive members besides.

Demoscene and open source were distinct worlds.

Demoscene started on the 8bit world and as the PC world started focusing on MS-DOS, so did the coders.

As one of the goals of the demoscene was to see which groups were able to push the machine to the limits while minimizing the amount of code, the used algorithms were worth gold and thus kept secret.

So open source was a foreign word in the demoscene universe and everyone was happily coding the latest demo, instead of getting alternative OS to run on their PCs.

VC++ nearly exclusively. Some GCC'ers, but that's it, really. There's some more recent demos written in, say, Python, Java and C#, but they're pretty exceptional.

Demoscene is also nearly entirely Windows-only. It's a good platform for games, and thus for demos. Plus, culturally, demos are about as closed-source as you can get, so there's this natural repellent force between the hardcore Linux zealots and the hardcore demoscene geeks.

For a demo you need every ounce of performance. http://willus.com/ccomp_benchmark2.shtml for a modern take on this.

I imagine that having a solid set of system libraries, useful abstractions, and a fixed ABI helps a great deal.

Having 28 members isn't really considered a big accomplishment in the demoscene :-)

I can get together a group with 28 members in a single demoparty. We'll all be drunk idiots who forgot we signed up the day after, but we'd be 28 members.

Many of the Farbrausch guys work or have worked in the game industry. In fact, for a long time .theprodukkt (FR's somewhat more elitist and commercially feasible spinout) was planned to become a game company, but it never really did.

The same holds for most other good demomakers currently active. The entire Finnish demoscene makes mobile games, the Norwegians all work at ARM to make mobile graphics chips, and p01 works at Opera winning js1k competitions.

Meanwhile, the only somewhat active Spanish demoscener left codes Three.js at Google.

The Dutch are all unemployed.

ryg has been at RAD Game Tools for a while now, and mentioned yesterday on Twitter that he's been doing contract work on Valve's hardware experiments. [1]

  [1] http://twitter.com/#!/rygorous/status/190907866037760000

A good place to start looking around is here:

(http://www.pouet.net/index.php)

Remember that a youtube capture of a demo will be bigger, and not as good quality, as the actual demo.

What does nationality have to do with anything?

For the longest time, my favourite was Prophecy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1tUfIbqKl8