Posted by tetrisgm 15 hours ago
More about Razor 1911 and Future Crew for the young readers of HN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Crew
P.S. Too many groups to mention, but these two hold a special place in my mind ;-)
P.S.2. Extra mention to the most famous Greek demo group - ASD (Andromeda Software Development) - https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1317
Razor, Fairlight and some others became more of continious groups with evolving memberships (I was briefly a member of the demoteam back in 1999 and did one production in association with the people that moved over to Fairlight).
Funniest thing perhaps is that Smash was a musician back then for 2 things where I did the code (one musicdisc and one joke intro), Smash then went on to become a damn accomplished coder of quite a few famous Fairlight demos, Sony tools and made the commercial Notch visual toolset/editor/player that has roots in the Fairlight demoeditor codebase (Notch startup logo often pops up in democompos for those that haven't followed the scene).
Should out to TheBlackLotus, Fairlight, Orange, CNCD also for those of you who want to look up epic demos.
Along with Skidrow and Paradox crews
https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/bad-teeth-data024
https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/dirty-nails-data038
Having not seen anything from them since 2014, so I am very happy for another track.
Most of that was before my time though, so 1995 by Kewlers[1] hit harder for me, since that was when I really got into the demo scene and with it my drive to learn programming.
Glad the demo scene is alive and kicking, though I get why a lot is oriented around old hardware, modern hardware makes things too easy almost.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mtctbodNXY (20 years old this year, now I feel really old)
With file size, most democoders go all the way, both ways. By that I mean that if they choose a sizelimit category, they squeeze out every last byte, and if they don't, most don't care about filesize at all. There's demos these days that are many times bigger than an acceptable video recording would be because nobody bothered to eg compress the assets, it includes an entire game engine, etc. Like 800MB for a 3 minute audiovisual show. Kinda ridiculous but it's just.. well, call it either laziness or focused pragmatism :-) Gotta get that prod out before the deadline!
The Razor1911 zip[1] is 30MB, which actually is very much on the small side for a current-day demo.
[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 has a download link
> and music is probably a significant fraction?
For the Razor1911.exe in the ZIP which ends up being 31MB on disk, which is almost entirely made out of a compressed 145MB executable, whose size is mostly 48 PNG files (11MB), 69MB of zeros (nice?), 329 compiled DirectX shader blobs (DXBC) totaling 6MB, One large MP3 of about 17MB and finally like 34MB of what seems to be other types of runtime data like asset tables, font and UI data,
Idk what Revision actually enforces but that used to be the rule at Assembly.
For the 1k, 4k, retro systems etc it’s specified!
I used to use TheDraw for doing ANSI art, but I also ended up making my own ANSI drawing tool back then. It's stupid to think of now, but one reason I made it was because I had a monochrome monitor, so I couldn't "see" color. I wanted a feature where I could put the cursor over a character and it would tell me the color there when I was drawing so I could still use color in the work.
I wasn't prolific, but did do a handful of ANSI art pieces for local BBS SysOps who liked them well enough. Only later on I realized when I got an actual color monitor that I had a few color mistakes in them and they never told me. lol
https://hlnet.notion.site/text-art-tools
I recommend Moebius for traditional ASCII and ANSI art.
Nice to be reminded that Revision is still active, on my bucket list to visit at least once in my life.
such a nice way to remember their fallen teammates at the end there.
PS: I never knew Westbam (of Love Parade fame?!) was involved.
There's a lot of push back against AI-generated graphics and music. For code, it's more difficult to know. AI is used by some people to automate the boring tasks, so that they can focus more on the artistic side.
It makes sense that a creative medium with a long tradition of pushing boundaries of what people can create, frowns on use of generative tech unless you have created it yourself. Back in the day the pushback was against using AMOS, or a PC, or programming in C, or using a GPU, or using MP3, or using Photoshop, or using another group's demo engine, or using a commercial game engine, or... AI is just the latest. And like its predecessors, it will gain legitimacy if people create genuinely interesting experiences with it.
Demos are now often using Unreal engine Unity Godot