One of the best PC demos, ever

[Piru]

@justthatgood

I ran it "okay" on AMD Athlon 2400+, 512MB ram and Radeon 9600.

Choose 800x600, Texture quality: Normal, No shadows.

Well, it doesn't look as good as it could with high end system, but it does run somewhat faster.

[Karlos]

@Cymric

You should know by now that I'm really a very simple person and correspondingly easy to amuse :-D

[lopos]

Cymric wrote:
Pardon my ingnorance and cynical disposition, but apart from the compelling surreal 'storyline' (which in the end has a hard time going somewhere), what is so great about the demo?

Yes, it's small, but farbrausch always was good at procedural textures, so no points there.

It looks nice, but hey, we're talking a heavy DirectX9-based application here powered by a not-so-slow CPU. That's like being amazed over a car that can break the sound barrier, and then learning it is powered by two jet fighter engines. Definitely far from easy to control, but once you do, well, 'obvious'. This means that a lot of 'wow'-factor is actually in the design of the demo, but:

There's tons and tons of little cubes and prisms flying over the screen (requiring streamlined coding), the lighting is done with attention to detail (espcecially the fence in the beginning, and the reflected sheen when the cubes pass a noticable distance in front of a window), and the volumetric shading near the end gets a thumbs up. But apart from that, it could have been a playable game demo, where these things also pop up from time to time. So what is its 'wow'-factor?

I'll concede: it looks nice, and the beginning, where the city is being run over, is captivating. But 'the best ever'? Certainly not. I think farbrausch's earlier 64k-efforts are better, despite their limitations from the underlying DirectX API. 3D Mark 2001, 2003 and 2005 have beautiful landscape scenes which make this demo look drab, blocky and very mathematical in comparison.

Sound like sour grapes to me.  :-D
Shows us your demos than. Let see what you can do.  :rtfm:
I personally like the demo. Wish I could do something like that.

[GreggBz]

@Cymric
Like High Level Shader Language?

I know little of this stuff. :-p
I have big books, but have just read the introductions lol.

[Cymric]

lopos wrote:
Sound like sour grapes to me.  :-D

No, just trying to understand the appeal as I personally know prettier examples.

Shows us your demos than. Let see what you can do.  :rtfm: I personally like the demo. Wish I could do something like that.

Yes, I would too. I once created a demo for the Amiga, but that is long gone now.

[justthatgood]

I know this is going to sound really really stupid, and it's going to make me look n00b as hell...

Does anyone know if they coded this in C/C++, or did they go through the nightmare that is trying to code in assembly in Windows.

If i sound stupid I'm going to blame it on the lack of sleep from Easter celebrating.

[Karlos]

Probably C/C++ (or similar high level language), possibly with specific components optimized using assembler.

Does DX even provide an assembler level API?

[Piru]

@Cymric

I personally know prettier examples.

Such as?

[Kaminari]

It's a neat piece of code with nice effects and cool visual flair, but I have to agree it's pretty boring. As a demo, it totally fails to provide any sense of awe. I don't feel any urge to rewatch it any time soon. The Popular Demo was a much, much better production from Farbrausch. And it doesn't require a Dual Core to run decently.

[Piru]

@Kaminari

As a demo, it totally fails to provide any sense of awe.

Breakpoint disagrees. The crowd went totally nuts.

I haven't heard such reaction to PC demo in years.

[Piru]

@CannonFodder

Anyone got a video link for us non Windows users?

farbrausch - debris (kkapture).avi

[countzero]

Piru, are you there or are you watching online ?

[Piru]

@countzero

Piru, are you there or are you watching online ?

Watching online, but the yells and applauds were clearly audible even thru the stream.

Though, nothing compares to seeing such thing live on big screen... Say for example I saw TBL's Starstruck live, and the experience was quite awesome.

[Cymric]

Piru wrote:@Cymric

I personally know prettier examples.

Such as?

Like I said, some of the parts of the 3D Mark suite are far prettier to look at, especially the nature scenes. The 3D Mark 2005 nature scene with the green twinkly light fluttering through the dark forest is just asking for a fantasy background story. Not so debris. Of course, even on my not-so-slow machine (AMD XP3200+, GeForce 7600GS, nForce2-chipset), it renders at about 4 to 5 FPS :crazy:. But there a genuine democoder could show off his skills in ultra-efficient programming.

Piru wrote:
@Kaminari

As a demo, it totally fails to provide any sense of awe.

Breakpoint disagrees. The crowd went totally nuts. I haven't heard such reaction to PC demo in years.

That can either mean that the crowd doesn't know better (unlikely), or that the average quality of PC demos over the past few years was lousy (likely). :crazy:

[Piru]

@Cymric

Well, the debris demo is set in a urban city. It works for me.

the average quality of PC demos over the past few years was lousy (likely).

Well, that bit is true. :-) Nothing spectacular has come out on PC front in years.

This doesn't make Debris any less amazing, though.

[Karlos]

IMNSHO it comes down to entertainment value and the fact there are two kinds of entertainment as far as demos go.

First of all, there's the audio/visual aspect. Lots of pretty visuals and slick music. Of course, most ordinary PC users are more than used to this from the current generation of games, which is why they may feel a demo like this is not that special (despite the fact the kkreiger engine's renderer is technically as advanced, or moreso, than many current game engines).

The second form of entertainment appeals only to coders and that's the appreciation of the technical feat and speculation on how various things were accomplished. Sure, it uses procedural textures that get generated on loading - but what sort of algorithms were used to generate them? How are the scenes described in such a small space?

3DMark may have scenes that are prettier to look at, but then it has megabytes and megabytes of images, models and animation data created by professional artists, fed into an engine that's designed to give a hardware shakedown and frankly little else (the reason it runs at 4-5 fps is because optimizing the code is not the aim of 3DMark, rather the aim is to utterly ravage your systems resources to derive a benchmark value).

Technically, there is relatively little to admire in comparison to a demo like this one.