One of the best PC demos, ever

[Cymric]

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.

[Cymric]

GreggBz wrote:

I think farbrausch's earlier 64k-efforts are better, despite their limitations from the underlying DirectX API.

Short of talking directly to an NVidia card, which of course would likely make this demo only compatible on said hardware, Direct3D is the closest you'll get to the hardware. It has one less layer then OpenGL (OpenGL being a state machine) and at this point, especially with Direct3D 10 now, it has more whizbang features.

I'm afraid you misunderstood me: I wasn't implying that DirectX was bad or not being sufficiently hardware-banging. I was thinking of all the pixel / vortex shader models that evolved over the years.

[Cymric]

Hardeeharhar. I'll not correct the speling mistayk so everyone can have a good laugh at my expense. It's been a while, anyway  :crazy:

[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.

[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: