SNERD talks demoscene

[Sadler]

I'm working my way through the presentations at this year's GPU Technology Conference and I ran across something I didn't expect:

Thinking Outside the Cartridge: Modern Ideas Applied to Archaic Devices

I'm a sucker for demos. I remember being speechless after seeing Second Reality in highschool. I know very little about how these demos are created though and I found this talk pretty interesting. How he uses high level languages like C# and F# still wasn't clear to me by the end of the talk. Thinking of a demo as a sequence of deltas in hardware state though struck me as pretty cool.

I'm guessing those that know enough about coding demos probably won't get much out of this and those that don't probably don't want to sit through a 45 minute presentation, but I really enjoyed this.

[xelement5x]

I only watched a part of it but I've bookmarked it for when I get a bit more time, seems interesting so far.

[Joe Redifer]

Just posting here to add a bit more Colorado to this thread. CO represent yo!

[ccovell]

He certainly is a SNERD, and it's heartwarming that he's rediscovering delta encoding techniques from the late 1980s...   

Well, on the one hand, he's taking a modern "effect toolchain" approach to making demos, same as PC demomakers have been doing for a while, but applying it to old systems.  On the other hand, the result of this toolchain is pre-baked effects and a video streamer, which causes some controversy.  Hardcore demosceners want all/most effects to be realtime (done by the CPU), not precalculated & optimized by a PC.

I see this as a "demomaker" / SEUCK vs. code a demo/game from scratch sort of tension.  You can choose how admirable it is that this guy coded up his own SNES-demomaker video production toolchain.

[Sadler]

Just posting here to add a bit more Colorado to this thread. CO represent yo!

Now we just need an uncomfortable couch and Blue kicking ass at every multiplayer game!

He certainly is a SNERD, and it's heartwarming that he's rediscovering delta encoding techniques from the late 1980s...   

Well, on the one hand, he's taking a modern "effect toolchain" approach to making demos, same as PC demomakers have been doing for a while, but applying it to old systems.  On the other hand, the result of this toolchain is pre-baked effects and a video streamer, which causes some controversy.  Hardcore demosceners want all/most effects to be realtime (done by the CPU), not precalculated & optimized by a PC.

I see this as a "demomaker" / SEUCK vs. code a demo/game from scratch sort of tension.  You can choose how admirable it is that this guy coded up his own SNES-demomaker video production toolchain.

Thanks for the links! When he talked about his first SNES demo and how it was just compressed video, I was pretty disappointed. The second demo he talked about where he went beyond just writing to VRAM the changes in frames, and instead wrote to all hardware registers and memory (potentially, at least that's what I thought he was saying) changes per frame, I found a lot more interesting. I'm curious how that works with per-scan line changes though. If you are changing your x offset every scan line, then the deltas aren't per frame deltas anymore? I guess it depends on how that's mapped. Perhaps he has an array of scan line offsets and that's what changes, not the value of the register itself.

Anyway, I stand by my claim that I know nothing about this. Are there any good links that describe how a lot of these effects are done? The twisting thing is obviously just scan line effects. The rotating, textured blocks I'm sure are scan line effects too, but I don't understand how they are doing perspective with it.

EDIT: This is the effect I'm talking about

[Arkhan]

He said megabyte instead of megabit, then he said pixel processing unit instead of picture processing unit, he then made a comment on how dumb CGRAM is named (like he's fit to comment on it) and then he said "SNESS", which made me cringe.   There was also some sorta janked up, glossed over explanation of why the 65816 is bad.

and then he said some more dumb things, and I stopped taking him seriously after that.

he said Clayfighter sucks. 

he equated making a doofy webpage when he was like 12 to programming.

So, basically, to me, this is someone who needs to have a nice glass of shut the f*ck up.   

The video just sounds like some a$$hole that wanted to spend 45 minutes jerking his own ego off to a room full of people who probably don't realize he's sort of spewing nonsense. 

I couldn't even watch the whole thing.   the 15-20 minutes I did watch were a waste of time.  He didn't talk about much other than himself.

If he's talking about applying a bunch of prebaked crap to old consoles or computers, he can get f*cked.

The coolest shit is done in real time.


Anyway,
That block twirly effect is still just scan line stuff, and just requires careful use of art+scanlines to get it to have that depth effect.   I only ever messed with that stuff briefly on the C64 before becoming pretty bored of it because I'm more interested in games than I am twirly effects.   But, I've seen similar things on C64 from Cosine.

 

Side note: That effect is out of place with the rest of that gameboy demo and is pretty pointless.  I think I'd like that demo better without the effect.


I personally think demos are kind of lame anymore and tend to just "watch" them for the music.   The effects are always kind of "the same but different", and it's kind of like "meh.  whatever."

They're glorified screensavers.

[ccovell]

He said megabyte instead of megabit...   which made me cringe...    janked...

To be fair, 1-4 megabytes is correct enough and apt for the audience that he was speaking to...  and "janked" always makes me cringe.  There will always be someone younger and seemingly more foolish than oneself to stoke the ire.  ;-D

[xelement5x]

Yeah, the only thing that really got me was him calling it the SNESSS, but maybe I'm just a crotchety old man.  He could have used a bit of work on his presentation skills, but it's still not too bad. 

I've personally found the Genesis architecture and the coding done for it more intriguing, but it could be because there is a very large Genesis homebrew scene so it seems a bit more straightforward.

[Sadler]

The video just sounds like some a$$hole that wanted to spend 45 minutes jerking his own ego off to a room full of people who probably don't realize he's sort of spewing nonsense. 

I couldn't even watch the whole thing.   the 15-20 minutes I did watch were a waste of time.  He didn't talk about much other than himself.

Yeah, the first part was pretty dull. I don't particularly care about his history of learning to program.

If he's talking about applying a bunch of prebaked crap to old consoles or computers, he can get f*cked.

The coolest shit is done in real time.

I think his first SNES demo was all basically video and yeah that's lame.

Anyway,
That block twirly effect is still just scan line stuff, and just requires careful use of art+scanlines to get it to have that depth effect.   I only ever messed with that stuff briefly on the C64 before becoming pretty bored of it because I'm more interested in games than I am twirly effects.   But, I've seen similar things on C64 from Cosine.

 

Side note: That effect is out of place with the rest of that gameboy demo and is pretty pointless.  I think I'd like that demo better without the effect.


I personally think demos are kind of lame anymore and tend to just "watch" them for the music.   The effects are always kind of "the same but different", and it's kind of like "meh.  whatever."

They're glorified screensavers.

Thanks for the links! It seems like most of the effects that impress me boil down to scan line effects + clever art. It also seems like I see a lot of the same effects in demos. The twisty letters/columns, the spinny block thing, plasma effects.

There's still some really neat stuff being done these days though.

[Arkhan]

He said megabyte instead of megabit...   which made me cringe...    janked...

To be fair, 1-4 megabytes is correct enough and apt for the audience that he was speaking to...  and "janked" always makes me cringe.  There will always be someone younger and seemingly more foolish than oneself to stoke the ire.  ;-D

Janked is at least an acceptable/recognized slang term, as opposed to just using the wrong terms, or saying SNESS, which we've all probably decided is dumb at this point.

My beef with megabyte vs megabit is, he's talking old hardware, where megabit is the unit that is used.  What's funny to me is, saying 1-4MB excludes Super Mario World, F-Zero, Mario Kart, among some other games.   Which is why I myself would've used the right terms and let the audience deal with it. 

You want to talk old stuff?  Do it right.

Besides, he's not really much younger than I am, based off his rambling autobiography monologue.   A few years behind me.   

That is what bothered me really the most about the video.

The entire video is practically just him talking about himself, so I think he wasted everyone's time.

The presentation idea sounds good on paper, but really falls short if you spend most of the presentation time talking about yourself/your history/generally just rambling.   Let people go google that shit.   Get to the damn point.

There's that old saying that you need to get your point across in 20 minutes or less, or people shutdown.

[ccovell]

Oh, yeah, of course I agree with almost all of your points: "SNESss", "Chrono Trigger is the best evahhhh" (when I was 4, I'm sure I thought Cookie Monster & Grover were the best evahhh too)...

I was just pointing out that disdain is all relative.

Yeah, as far as I know, SNES cart sizes range from 0.25 megabytes (2 megabits) to whatever.  Also, 'kibibit' is the "correct" term nowadays, so I'm sure someone is looking down their noses at all of us as I write this.

[Arkhan]

Oh, yeah, of course I agree with almost all of your points: "SNESss", "Chrono Trigger is the best evahhhh" (when I was 4, I'm sure I thought Cookie Monster & Grover were the best evahhh too)...

I was just pointing out that disdain is all relative.

Yeah, as far as I know, SNES cart sizes range from 0.25 megabytes (2 megabits) to whatever.  Also, 'kibibit' is the "correct" term nowadays, so I'm sure someone is looking down their noses at all of us as I write this.

Screw that kibbles and bits bullshit.   You can't just go back and retroactively correct like 40 years of computering.