More from the demoscene: perhaps the best 4 kilobytes imaginable

Argh, terrible linking there. The first link should be the screenshot.

The video link wasn't picked up for some reason, so I'm going to try it 2 different ways, wish me luck!

http://capped.tv/quite_orange-cdak

wow that is so impressive. that crew makes such nice camera shots. its like the never ending track.

now im not sure if the glitch is intentional as i thought at first the video feed was bad but now i think it was intentional.

i actually enjoyed watching it in low res more than the hi res.

about half way through there is some pretty sick meta balls that seem to be morphing into each other. very slick.

i loved the tech style textures.

when you first mentioned these demo's psonice i was very intrigued.... the 64k demo links on wikipedia made this whole demo thing seem like any application could be submitted.

so i had some crazy dumb ideas of encapsulating all the ipv4 addresses into some sort of executable server type of thing, but come to find out the demo scene is more about the art, the sound the technique and pushing the limits of realtime graphics.

i only imagine what you where thinking when i was rambling on about some cool 64k idea i had without even knowing it was about graphics etc...

what is baffling me and what i don't understand is that the binary is 4k compressed ?

i mean 4k is like 30 lines of code max, how in the hell could someone program something like this if the source file is only 4k ???????

either way nice share.....

impressive :-)

That's easily the most impressive demoscene art I can remember seeing. In fact it's probably the only one I will remember for a quite a while. Sophisticated aesthetic and high production values — all in 4k: incredible.

Yeah, the demoscene is very tightly focused. A demo really has to be:

1. realtime
2. graphical, showing some effects

That means it has to be coded, although regular graphics, videos and music are always there too. They're kind of a side show to the demos though. The small sizes like 4k + 64k are popular, but full size demos are probably more common.

By the way, most people from outside the scene tend to see these really amazing demos and think the scene is some kind of super-elite club :) It's not really true. Demos like this are the top 1% that get the publicity. As a rule, you get the biggest parties like breakpoint and assembly where the best groups release, plus a bunch of average groups with their best demos. Then you get a ton of smaller local parties (maybe 100 people attending) where everyone else releases a demo. The standard isn't usually anywhere near this level, it's a lot easier to make something that will please a crowd at a local party.

There's been a lot of discussion about all this in the scene recently. And a good discussion about how the scene interacts with all the other scenes out there (the QC scene is one :) in the last issue of zine (a scene 'magazine', or 'diskmag' as we like to call it since they used to arrive in the post on a floppy :D )

Speaking of zine, it's a good read and there's a mac version of the latest one \o/ There's a good article on GPU texture generators people here might like to read.

Download zine

The only other 'demo' I remember is your 80's inspired QC demo, the one with all the cold war imagery. That was good. The soundtrack of which used to randomly play for a bit and then stop on my Mac (which was kind of spooky at 3am) but I finally worked out it was a Finder preview being generated in column view b/c it was the first file in the folder or something like that. Took ages to work it out but was a nice ghost story up to that point.

Yeah, that "short clip of sound" used to get me regularly. Working on these things, I frequently had 10 versions of the demo on my desktop, often with different music.. every time I logged in it would play a bit of each as it did the preview. Really annoying! :D