Comment by jasminz

9 years ago

Future Crew and their Second Reality got me into demo scene back in 90s! Those were the days when we coded proof of concept demo effects which we later optimized using inline assembly in Borland C++. Shouts go out to Asphyxia for great demo-programming tutorials.

To stay on topic, what is the true news value here?

2 comments

jasminz

tripzilch 9 years ago

Anyone know of some good/great demo-programming tutorials of similar quality for the modern age? I teach kids programming (and math and stuff) at a youth centre, and some of them are wicked smart and would dig this like I digged it when I was their age.

But I can't really expect them to go pixel-bashing in the ancient Turbo Pascal IDE (regardless how great it is), nor do I believe that `mov ax, 13h; int 10h` still even works on modern OSes, without an emulator ;-)

I got one of them coding a cool interference circles effect and a Mandelbrot-zoomer in Processing. It's Java without the boilerplate to get a window and gfx primitives, which is just great. But afaik nobody in the scene uses it. It is used by digital/generative artists, but they often have the hardware power to get away with inefficient Java implementations (nor is their work always as "shiny" as demoscene productions, demoscene always[0] aims to impress, digital art can have diferent motivations).

BTW--just to gloat a bit here--I saw .kkrieger at the big screen on BP04 when it was released whoohoo ahem

[0] yes there are exceptions but no they don't win parties :-p

aerique 9 years ago

Oh, you young ones.

Back in the day on the Atari ST it was all assembly because C was just too slow.

https://youtu.be/cpezr7puRFo

None of my stuff was included because it really wasn't good enough.

Also the guy who did most of the music for the Synergy Megademo, Joris de Man, went on to do music and sound effects for Killzone and lately Horizon: Zero Dawn. So proud of him.