scene on - history of the demoscene.

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 (c) Daniil Shepovalov

 Demo scene

A long time ago, a thousand years ago or more, people did not live in
on the Internet, and at home, in the mornings they went to work, kissed
entrances, gave birth to children, passed exams the first time, in short
eked out their miserable existence. But already in that dark time there were
progressive comrades who understood that it was no longer possible to live like this
it is impossible.  And they called themselves programmers. Now there are all sorts of
there are system administrators, designers and other intellectually disabled
labor.  Then everything was simple: if you were given a couple of
hours of computer time, which means you are a programmer.  Although, it is necessary
to say that programmers at that time were also different: some
programmed on ASM, others on Prince of Persia, and
some are even in the terrible language "Lexicon". And then in the evening,
when Lexicon programmers went to give birth to children and
kissing in hallways, the first two subspecies sat down
freed cars and continued to do their dark
business.  By one o'clock in the morning only
valiant workers of ASMA and debugger. And as you well know,
at anyfor a company passionate about the same thing, it’s always too early
or later the question arises: “Who, actually, has a longer penis?”
That’s why people started arguing about which of them is the coolest coder. 

By the way, about the meaning of the word coder. Now many people believe that
a coder is a person who is cool only in the architecture of the machine and
specific programming language for it, and in everything else
he is a complete schmuck and a premature imbecile. So, buddy, that's it.
complete crap!  Coder - wow! The coder is awesome!!! Almost
each of them has a sharp edge in algorithmization,
discrete mathematics, optimization methods and who the hell knows in
than.  It is true that the coder has no idea what they are called
disciplines that he knows perfectly, but that’s already a matter
tenth. 

So, people began to really need a way to verify
own incredible coolness.   It was possible, of course,
determine the winner by the number of holes in the punched cards, but
Fortunately, a slightly different path was chosen. You understand that
time PC took an honorable first place among the crap in terms of
computer graphics.  Well, the people decided that if people can
code some cool graphic effect on PC,
then he is the most incredible...in general, the most pepper and stuff.
Once every two months, the guys gathered at the computer center, where
watched the work over a beer andthe winner was chosen. These parties and
laid, in fact, the beginning of the piss scene. I must say that
demos for other platforms were coded long before Prince appeared
Persia.  The Commodore 64 and Amiga cars had much more
cool graphics and sound capabilities than PC, and therefore
Naturally, they were the main actors at the then
demo stage. Moreover, on these platforms demos have long since moved from
rank of the line for coding members into the rank of real
works of art. The emergence of BBS and FTN networks has greatly
a strong boost to the development of the demo scene. So, almost every BBS
had its own small demo, up to BKb (intra) in size,
and thematic ones began to appear in computer networks
conferences dedicated to dem programming. 

Meanwhile, personal computers began to acquire drop-dead
popularity, all sorts of sound blasters appeared and
ultra-sounds, the frequency of the processors was already measured in tens of megahertz,
and video cards supported real resolutions and color
depth.  Full music and graphics became available in demos, and
the number of effects in each work had already reached 10-12. to
to make a cool demo you had to be a genius in mathematics,
programming, optimization theory, be able to draw black
squares are no worse than Malevich and compose such tracker music,
so that afterher audition DJ Groove grew a long hair and
went to play the harmonica in the underground passage. Therefore
people quietly began to unite into teams with stylish
names like Psychic Link or Matrix. This is how the first ones appeared
demo groups. Here is the standard composition of such a group: 

- Coder: a programmer who writes the code for the demo.
Large demos were written in C with assembler inserts.  B
Basically, system functions were coded on ASMA (pixel insertion,
synchronization, etc.) and areas of the demo that are particularly demanding
computer resources. The intros were written entirely in Asma. 

- Artist (graphician): a person who deals with all static
2D graphics demo.  In addition to fonts, logos, textures, etc.
little things, the artist often had to draw full-fledged
cyberpunk images.  The fact is that until the year 96-97 in demos
it was fashionable to show screensavers between different
graphic effects.  This fashion was started by a famous group
Future Crew.  By the way, IMHO the screensavers were not shown for the purpose of
obtaining aesthetic pleasure, but in order to
calculate some complex effect at this time.  You,
for example, you admire a naked woman with a virtual helmet, and the computer
calculates the coordinates of a morphing object. 

- Musician: it’s clear that this is the devil who writes
music for demo.By the way, a lot depends on the joint
work of the encoder and music artist: all the action of the demo must be rigid
tied to music. In practice, the demos always won, even if
not with very cool graphics, but with a real soundtrack. The most
a striking example: the well-known Second Reality or Teddy Bear. 

It often happens that in a team several people are engaged in one thing and
the same thing. For example, there may be several coders in a group,
each of which writes a drop-dead cool effect. Sometimes it happens
and so that several groups join forces in order to
release a good demo for the upcoming cool party. 

Among the most famous world groups are: 

Matrix The Black Lotus (TBL) Complex 

From Russian groups: 

Deep, Deep Trouble Ent. Queue Members Group T-Rex 

Periodically, one of the groups organized the so-called
demo-party, where demo workers and just spectators poured into themselves the well-known
amount of beer, gave each other T-shirts with slogans like
“Every byte saved is our contribution to the cause of peace!”, and in
the remaining time was spent actually looking at the works
participants. After holding a party several times, she
became widely known in the world demo scene. Many
groups began to release demos not just like that, but for some reason
specific demo party. It has become a mandatory attribute of any job
greetings to all participantsand friendly groups in general. B
The most famous demo parties in Russia are ENLiGHT
(St. Petersburg www.enlight.ru) and BYTEFALL (Moscow
www.bfg.org).  Among the world's cult parties, ASSEMBLY can be called
(Finland www.assembly.org) and THE GATHERING (Norway). 

At any demo party, there is usually a viewing of works on the following
types of computer art: 

- Demo: well, you bet, you thought the demo party would be the first to
turn to look at alternative pictures of serial killers and
perverted sanitation workers?  This includes work that takes more than
bChKb and fit on the screw. Sometimes, however, the concept is distinguished
“mega-demo”, that is, a demo that can’t be screwed
fits. 

- bChKb intro: intra, the size of which should not exceed 64
kilobyte.  By the way, it is in this category that almost always
The most amazing things come across. It has become a matter for the people
honor to code things that you can only lift your jaw to look at
from the floor, wipe it carefully and squeeze out a phrase like
"This doesn't happen!"   Have you ever seen Unreal in 64
kilobytes, which does not slow down on the hundredth stump? And, in fact,
this is not such a terrible perversion - it can be cooler, I, for example,
I couldn’t come to my senses for a long time after watching a demo that used
pretty passable ray tracing (or pretending to be his
uses) andoutputting about 10 frames per second. Before that I
I saw similar images rendered at speed 1
a frame in about twenty minutes. In fact, this trait (code
things that are fundamentally impossible to do on this machine)
PC demos have been purchased since the days of ZX. I don't know at all
what should you call people who use only 8 colors and
Z80 processor (your calculator calculates faster) could write
programs that use 3D graphics with dynamic lighting. 

- CHKb intro: accordingly, the intro, the size of which should not
exceed 4 kilobytes.  Actually, I'm always lazy
look at works from this category, because 4 kilos are rare
manages to cram in something worthwhile. Usually it's one or two
standard effects, the group logo, and a bunch of greetings. Just
initially the 4 kilobyte intros were advertisements for the BBC - ok yes
cracker bands like Class, that's why this genre was on the menu
almost every demo party. 

- Java demo: demos created in Java, this feature appeared
relatively recently. 

- 3D-Accelerated demo: demos using 3D acceleration. Here
the main emphasis is already placed on the plot, music and new ideas,
because monstrous texturing is monstrous in Africa too
texturing. 

- raytraced art: this topic stands out from the general rendered section
art, since quite a lot is used herespecific method, with
called raytracing is a construction algorithm
highly realistic computer images. (more details in the article
about demo-making technologies). 

- rendered art: images rendered using
any package for working with 3D graphics such as 3D MAX or Maya. 

- pixeled graphics: 2D images created using
computer.  Although now this topic is relatively rare
- gave way to raytraced and rendered art. 

- CHchannel, multichannel, MPZ-music: music in various
formats. 

- animation: pure animation, cartoons that is. 

- demos, intros, music and graphics for the Amiga platform 

In our country, demo workers will probably never get out of shape
ranks of the cyberpunk underground. Demo parties are organized
exclusively at the expense of the participants and are held in assembly halls
halls of schools or institutes where they have the good fortune to study
organizers.  Well-fed bourgeois understand that such concentration
highly qualified specialists in computer graphics and electronic
music cannot be found anywhere else, and therefore it is worth making them
cool grandmas. What are they actually doing, vying with each other to sign up?
queue for sponsors.  So at many world demo parties
The prize fund includes more than one thousand green buckazoids. Well
Well, the only good thing is that Russia is the last strongholdcomputer underground. 

The PC has never been distinguished by high graphics or sound
possibilities, which is why the demo scene historically arose
on completely different platforms. However, thanks to Microsoft and
Intel, modern computing power of the iron friend
has achieved some pretty impressive results. Besides, our new god,
3Dfx Interactive Corporation has made its modest contribution to
the emergence of publicly accessible computer graphics. So now
the vast majority of demos for PC are vector-oriented
three-dimensional graphics.  This, by the way, makes the PC demo scene very different
from the same Amiga, where the main emphasis was on design, animation and
all kinds of 2D art.  On the other hand, such massive
the passion for three-dimensionality has made the scene quite popular (in
at least among the bourgeoisie). For example, in some Finnish
demo parties the number of participants reaches many thousands of people.
However, such a widespread dissemination of demo culture is quite
had a bad impact on the quality of demos. Judge for yourself: when it wasn’t
Internet, BBC-ok, FTN-networks and other remote means
telecommunications, people sat alone with a computer and coded
masterpieces. Now, in order to get detailed information
and the source texts of any graphic effects are sufficient only
type join #coders in the peer. After watching some demosDeja vu often occurs: like I saw exactly the same chips
a week ago.  It feels like people are just downloading sources
effects, combines them into one program, changes a couple of
parameters and within an hour it will release the demo.  Therefore create
anything worthy of prizes on today's stage is extremely
complicated matter.  We really need new ideas and tricks, not two
thousand one hundred and thirty-fifth demonstration of rotating cubes...