One of the best PC demos, ever

[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.

[arkanoid]

I don't think people just dipping their toes into the demoscene will fully appretiate the awesomeness of this production. the sheer sense of magnitude, energy and power that this demo creates through its superb direction is spine-chilling. honestly, this demo is a true milestone. you cannot compare Debris to The Popular Demo by Farb either, they are in a totally different category. Debris is Ghost in the Shell dark-anime, The Popular Demo (which I found totally boring) is Walt Disney. Quality of themes and direction is _all_ in PC demos, nobody cares about technical details (except maybe in 4/64k intros).

also "Amiga scene is better than PC scene" blady blah blah! So boring. They are worlds apart. I love the Amiga scene because it requires that coders MUST understand their system and routines at a low level...which I think is a great virtue. But with abstracted h/w APIs and awesome CPU/GPU power these days, that is not important on the PC scene. Different scenes with different ideals. one is not better than the other but until very recent demos like Debris, the PC has never used its true potential i dont think.

[skurk]

arkanoid wrote:
also "Amiga scene is better than PC scene" blady blah blah! So boring. They are worlds apart. I love the Amiga scene because it requires that coders MUST understand their system and routines at a low level.

Exactly.  That's why I, as a coder, find the PC demoscene boring, and I've been on the scene since around 1988.  The PC scene has been boring for many years, and I don't bother following it.

Now it's time for me to apologize.  It was not my intentions to ruin this thread with my {bleep}in' and whining

[arkanoid]

:-D definitely no need for appologies! i think most "coders" will know where you are coming from and it's taken me _ages_ to appretiate that the PC scene could maybe have something to offer the scene, just something different to what we're used to. they seem to be getting their act together (about time!) but the quality PC prods are still VERY thin on the ground that's for sure.

[hooligan]

When some of you pull your heads from the amigahole, you will see that there are lots of excellent pc-demos around, demos which are not only good because they run on a modern hardware, but because there is good design, music, graphics and coding on them.

At least the other oldskoolers *should* know better than to judge a release based on what hardware its run on.

[RWO]

No this is no one of the best demos every if you ask me..

Its impressive that they have managed to put so high qulity gfx and 7 minute music into a 171kb file archive..

but its was a borring, one time watched demo for me.

I do prefere a old school demo, like the remake of Desert Dream, that was impressive.

RWO

[Damion]

Personally, I like dark atmosphere "cityscape" type demos. (F.e, Point Blank on PC, Impossible on Amiga.) I'll agree Debris isn't necessarily "deep" (along the lines of, say, time index), but the "mechanical perfection" aspect does capture my interest. Some may find the technical achievement itself deep or moving. Then again, I'm the type who can listen to Art of the Fuge or the Goldberg Variations over and over, and never tire of it. Must be the German in me, LOL.

On the flip side, I also enjoy bright, colorful, "pretty" demos. Most ASD releases are like that. In fact, after watching both, my brother and I came to the conclusion that it's almost unfair to compare noumenon with debris, they're such radically different styles... both artistic/beautiful in their own (very different) ways.

(Actually, I wish I could have recorded my brother's mock "german accent" commentary during Debris... it was absolutely hilarious.)

As an aside, the demo runs almost perfect on my aniquated rig (2.5 GHz Athlon XP, 1 gig RAM, Radeon X800XL). Normal texture size, 1024x768, 2x antialiasing and shadows on. My box is like four years old and it runs well at medium settings, so that's just fine IMHO. (re "needs latest dual core" comment.)

hooligan wrote:
When some of you pull your heads from the amigahole, you will see that there are lots of excellent pc-demos around, demos which are not only good because they run on a modern hardware, but because there is good design, music, graphics and coding on them.

At least the other oldskoolers *should* know better than to judge a release based on what hardware its run on.

Well said. TONS of great PC productions out there. A good demo is a good demo, who cares what it runs on. Look at it this way... it's a perfect use for a PC. :-)
 

[motorollin]

I have to be honest, I wasn't that impressed with this demo. The music was not exactly exciting IMO, and although it's probably very impressive that all the code for the video was less than 200k, I though the video itself was pretty dull. Also, as others have pointed out, it unpacked for ages before running, so it's not actually 180k...

Let me make it clear that I'm *not* opposed to non-Amiga/C64 demos. In fact I'm not really in to the demo scene at all, so would be impressed by a demo on any platform which had exciting and/or original graphics and music. But consider that this demo had a 1GB OS with a complex graphics API to help it, and those high requirements... I think it could have been a lot better.

I was much more impressed with Starstruck...

--
moto

[hooligan]

...it unpacked for ages before running, so it's not actually 180k...

haha :-)