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18 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
18 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
2 years ago
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# Demoscene
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Demoscene is a [hacker](hacking.md) [art](art.md) subculture revolving around making so called [demos](demo.md), programs that produce rich and interesting audiovisual effects and which are sometimes limited by strict size constraints (so called [intros](intro.md)). The scene originated in northern [Europe](europe.md) sometime in 1980s (even though things like screen hacks existed long before) among groups of [crackers](cracker.md) who were adding small signature effect screens into their cracked software (like "digital graffiti"); programming of these cool effects later became an art of its own and started to have their own competitions, so called *[compos](compo.md)*, at dedicated real life events called *[demoparties](demoparty.md)* (which themselves evolved from *[copyparties](copyparty.md)*, real life events focused on [piracy](piracy.md)). The community is still centered mostly in the Europe (primarily Finland), it is underground, out of the mainstream; [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md) says that by 2010 its size was estimated to 10000 people (such people are called *demosceners*).
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Demoscene is a bittersweet topic: on one side it's awesome, full of beautiful hacking, great ideas and minimalism, on the other side there are secretive people who don't share their source code (most demos are [proprietary](proprietary.md)) and ugly unportable programs that exploit quirks of specific platforms (many times proprietary ones like [Windows](windows.md)). These guys simply try to make the coolest visuals and smallest programs, with all good and bad that comes with it. Try to take only the good of it.
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The scene is perhaps a bit similar to the culture of street rap, except that there's less improvisation (obviously, making a program takes long) and competition happens between groups rather than individuals. Nevertheless the focus is on competition, originality, style etc. Individuals within a demogroup have roles such as a [programmer](programmer.md), visual artist, music artist, director, even [PR](pr.md) etc.
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A demo isn't a video, it is a non-[interactive](interactive.md) [real time](real_time.md) executable (even though categories outside of this may also appear). Demos themselves aren't really limited by constraints (well, sometimes a limit such as 4 MB is imposed), it's where the programmers can show off all they have. However compos are often organized for **intros**, demos whose executable size is limited (i.e. NOT the size of the source code, like in [code golfing](golf.md), but the size of the compiled binary). The main categories are 4K intros and 64K intros, rarely also 256K intros (all sizes are in [kibibytes](memory_units.md)). Apparently even such categories as 256 byte intro appear. Sometimes also platform may be specified (e.g. [Commodore 64](c64.md), [PC](pc.md) etc.). The winner of a compo is decided by voting.
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Some of the biggest demoparties are or were Assembly (Finland), The Party (Denmark), The Gathering (Norway), Kindergarden (Norway) and Revision (Germany). A guy on https://mlab.taik.fi/~eye/demos/ says that he has never seen a demo [female](female.md) programmer and that females often have free entry to demoparties while men have to pay because there are almost no women anyway xD Some famous demogroups include Future Crew (Finland), Pulse (international), Haujobb (international), Conspiracy (Hungary) and [Razor 1911](razor_1911.md) (Norway).
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**On technological side of demos**: great amount of hacking, exploitation of bugs and errors and usage of techniques going against "good programming practices" are made use of in making of demos. They're usually made in [C](c.md), [C++](cpp.md) or [assembly](assembly.md) (though some retards even make demos in [Java](java.md) [lmao](lmao.md)). In intros it is extremely important to save space wherever possible, so things such as [procedural generation](procgen.md) and [compression](compression.md) are heavily used. Manual [assembly](assembly.md) optimization is common. [Tracker music](tracker_music.md), [chiptune](chiptune.md), [fractals](fractal.md) and [ASCII art](ascii_art.md) are very popular. New techniques are still being discovered, e.g. [bytebeat](bytebeat.md). The final executable is also compressed with [specialized executable compression](executable_compression.md).
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## See Also
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- [code golf](golf.md)
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- [LAN party](lan_party.md)
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