Comment by whizzter
1 month ago
Kinda, it all depends on platforms and eras. As a demoscener I see more of techdemo, indiedev and "game-mods" vibes in much of it (especially certain kinds of jankiness feel of visuals in some parts that demosceners doing more high end in general try to avoid but is more meme-worthy in game-mods/indiedev circles). Demos often aim for a bit more clean visuals (and palettes), blurriness is often tuned in another way.
Sadly, much of the demoscene is in a bit of a navel-grazing retro computing phase, many active ones today are "returners" from the C64 and Amiga eras whilst PC sceners of the 90s either dropped off for money, games or kids.
It's also the sheer work-effort, demoscene in the 90s and early 00s could focus on rendering while visual art pipelines didn't matter as much, as graphics cards got better it was obvious that the scene was falling behind the cutting edge games (both in asset due to workload and hacks required for graphics cards to render realistically).
The introduction and early popularization of SDF rendering turned the scene a bit more relevant again, but it's also been masking a certain lack of good artists since programmers could create nice renderings without needing assets.
However, to match something like this video in creativity would require a lot of asset workload (and non-trival rendering), and that combo is not really that common today sadly.
Funnily enough, I was actually discussing just Gaussian Splatting as a solution for more "asset heavy" demos about a year ago with another scener friend, but sadly there's a tad of a stigma culturally as NN/"AI" methods has been fairly controversial within the scene, aside from programmers there are both visual and music artists, and among those camps it's not really a popular thing.
It's still mostly a method though, and SDF rendering + GS could in the end be a saviour in disguise for the scene to go beyond just rendering and bring back a bit more story-telling to the scene.
> but sadly there's a tad of a stigma culturally as NN/"AI" methods has been fairly controversial within the scene
The scene has always been a ridiculously conservative bunch. Back when 3dfx was new, using 3d acceleration was similarly controversial. The Pouet comments were scary similar to those today. All we need is a few demos that actually use these technologies with great results (instead of for laziness/slop), and the majority opinion will shift as it always has.
I consider the early years of 3d acceleration to be pretty bad days for the demoscene on the "high end" side.
Problem was that fixed pipelines were seriously limiting. Most of the cool effects of software rendering couldn't be done, and the lack of direct access to the hardware meant that you couldn't do many of the hardware tricks the demoscene is known for. It doesn't mean people couldn't be creative, but it was mostly limited to doing interesting 3D geometry and textures. Things started changing with the advent of shaders.
About AI, I think thing the demoscene is rather welcoming of "AI" as long as you use it creatively instead of doing what everyone else does (slop). In the topic of Gaussian splatting, look at the Revision 2025 invitation [1], there is a pretty cool scene featuring it, people loved that part.
[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=103537