pouët.net

(Without reading any of the thread)
... and then I found a 25 Mb big prod, consisting of a 200 kb exe and a mysterious 25 Mb .dat file, that played suspiciously well in VLC ...

nitro1k01: if it's still looking cool, why not? the contents of most demos' data dirs play suspiciously well in IrfanView and Winamp...

if a 4k needs a ps3.0 card to run, a 64mb demo will clearly use 200gb of memory and need a geforce27 running ps9.0 to work properly, and im not due to upgrade my machine to that until november

you just can't stop reinventing yourself, eh? :)

When demo executables get larger than their video conversions, there's a real flaw in logic going on.

Personally, I don't mind how large they get as long as it reflects in the quality and detail.

ShaneTheWolfTigerTurtleFaggotSugar: that's why I don't like the concept of 16s demos (that and the fact that they take need more precalc time than their actual length)

on a very selfish side i don't care, because my demo collection can't be backup on a DVDR anymore :D

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN

won't all the children use fiber connection and 3d storage ?

I think it was kb who once mentioned that since it is realtime, the demo is available for viewing in different resolutions. This is one important aspect of the discussion. Also, I don't beleive a video conversion would give you the same quality if it drops below the size of the exe (in most cases).

I think it's off the point to worry about exe-size if the prod downloads in reasonable amount of time. The days of floppies are gone: To me, the size restriction (which turned to some kind of demoscene fetish) was nothing more than a practical obstacle. I can agree that to some extent it's an "art", and I do enjoy the occasional 4k, 40k or 64k. But I do not see the rationale behind demanding obscure sizelimits on full blown demos. In case it should be regulated, the rules should be govern be practical concerns like bandwidth at the party sever and such.

I mean, optimizing the code is not going to help saving megabytes if you want high quality music and a couple of hand painted pieces of gfx.

I'm not saying one should bloat away, but the reason why we slaughtered our samples or cut the amount of bitplanes in logos back in the '90s was mainly so spare the rest of the scene from having to distribute two disks for one demo instead of one disk. And that reason is no longer valid today.

Keops is mentioning something I find very strange about the current trend in demos: Precalc time is allowed! Why the hell is this accepted today, while the size of a prod is a highly combustible subject? If any demo featured a 20 sec. precalc time on amiga, I think it would have been blacklisted immidiately. I should mention that I don't care much as long as the precalc time is reasonable, but it seems to be a non-subject (except from certain cases).

btw, I get the strange feeling this has been discussed before somewhere.. hmm.

Hyde: so true. And yeah, realtime and smart precalc was the shit back then. Now people just throw a boring white loading bar at you during 30 or 45 seconds (ok for 4k/64k intros since it's all about content generation but not ok in demos imo).

I usually press ESC or kill the process after 20 secs when it's a demo :)

some loading bars are part of TEH ART :P

I think up to 5 secs precalculating per minute of demo is quite acceptable.

I may be remembering this totally wrongly... but I seem to remember the worst demo for having a loooong loading bar lately was track one. And wasn't that something to do with having to compress textures to fit the demo into the compo size limit?

Anyway, what happened to the final? (Ahh... revenge for smash's constant bashing of my pride-and-joy gf5 series video card! =)

psonice: oh, it went the way of most of the final versions we thought of doing - we just couldnt be bothered to do it.
it takes a long time to load and uses a lot of memory because we made most of the demo in 3 days without sleep, and we didnt have any time to fix it. although all the textures being jpegs and not dxts certainly doesnt help it's loading time or vram usage.

the cheques to cover the support work and patch/fix development never showed up, so we just got on with something less boring instead. ;)

Hold on, what about that crate of vodka I sent in return for the final?! Don't tell me you drank it all and woke up with no memory of it?

Anyway, long live CBA! And where's limp ninja when you need a cracked and fixed version?

fix smash's code? are you insane? nobody in their right mind would do that.

25 MB HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHA (kuf kuf) HAHAHA !!!

\o/ A new Bahnhof demo at Evoke. \o/
Matzeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

amigaaaaa

Hey... its the "big-demos-are-lame" thread again. How refreshing...

So what`s the size of the biggest demo ever released?

Dunno, but Suicide Barbie is over 100megs and it's for a handheld ;-)

I think we can agree on the following rule: You can't make a prod where the size, counted in Kbs, times the area of a slice of a regular Granny-Smith apple is greater than the motherboard on the machine the prod is supposed to run on.