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Comment by kyled

10 years ago

Back in the day demos were more impressive imo. A lot of them now use direct x or opengl. For the most part the stuff you see isn't written by hand anymore AFAIK, they just have programs to generate the actual demo. Basically they use modeling programs.

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kyled

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kaoD  10 years ago

There are all kinds of demos: some of them use models, some of them do not, some are technical feats, and some are artforms. Many are both.

Models are just serialized polygon meshes. We've been using models for demos for way longer than DX/OGL have existed. They're just another tool in the box which you can use (if you want to).

Using DirectX or OpenGL nowadays is like using the CPU: it's just part of the stack. They are probably lower level than you think: using DX/OGL isn't just doing something like drawModel(model, x, y, z), it's way lower level than that.

This demo in particular is not very different from old school demos. Back in the day we had interruptions, now we have API calls, but in the end shaders are just code. Elevated uses D3D to execute them in the GPU but that's all. And the synthesizer is apparently coded in ASM.

Even if you really miss the old school platforms there are still demos produced for them, often pushing the limits of what can be done.

Check http://www.pouet.net/ for lots of impressive demos.

  • kyled  10 years ago

    Ah, so yes I appreciate demos which pushes hardware to the limit or create some new effect which hasn't been seen before. I feel most demos on older hardware falls within this category then newer demos.

    Additionally, please correct me if I'm wrong, older demos didn't have nice graphics apis to call. They had to create and store what's given for free by Apis these days into their binary. I think the Amiga did have some 3d stuff?

    With opengl with a handful of lines you could get a spinning cube with lighting. So much more work had to be put into older demos to get to the same point. On top of that, the demo writers really had to know the hardware well, and diving into undocumented behavior. A lot more was being calculated on the cpu back then too.

    I haven't been on pouet.net in a while but I will look at newer demos.

csl  10 years ago

While true for large demos, the 4kb — perhaps even 64kb? — are still written very much by hand.