Presented at FMX 2015 by Tomasz Bednarz and Rafal Koffer. ps. formatting of the slides is a bit broken by Slideshare upload.

1. DEMOSCENE STORIES, AND OLD SCHOOL CODE
TRICKS
Rafal Koffer Ice-k (Incuvo) & Tomasz Bednarz Warlock (QUT, ACM
SIGGRAPH IRC )

2. DEMOSCENE
demoscene was born in the computer
underground, and demos are the product of
extreme programming and self-expression

3. DEMOSCENE VS VFX
• Demoscene is all about all computations done in real-time
• Demoscene productions run as standalone executables (not pre-rendered
animations)
• Demoscene executable has total size not over 4kb, 64kb, etc…
• Demoscene needs to use many procedural generators to overcome size
limitations (generate music, textures, meshes in fly) - rather than load and
operate on “big” source files

4. OUR STORY

5. EVERYTHING STARTED
WITH A

6. HOW WE HAVE STARTED
Early computer exchange/market

7. COMPUTER MARKET AND VIRUS
STORY

8. BEGINNINGS WERE
CHALLENGING
MATH KNOWLEDGE ON LEVEL OF
ALU

9. NO FPU BUILD
IN
BEGINNINGS WERE
CHALLENGING

10. NO GPU
BEGINNINGS WERE
CHALLENGING

11. NO INTERNET !!!
BEGINNINGS WERE
CHALLENGING
SWAPPING ONLY!

12. & NO REFERENCES AVAILABLE, JUST
EXPERIMENTS
BEGINNINGS WERE
CHALLENGING

13. BUT...

14. IN EUROPE EVERYBODY C++

15. AND ASSEMBLY AND...

16. WE HAD A DREAM TO CREATE
IMPOSSIBLE

17. WE TRAVEL TO THE PARTY
PLACE

18. DEMOSCENE PARTIES
AND HOW WE WENT TO THE GENERAL PROBE II PARTY
• Demoscene = Cult of DArt.

19. WORKFLOW (CREATING
DEMOS)

20. DEMO
• real-time procedural visualisations (not pre-
rendered animations!)
• executable
• limited in size
• 256b, 512b, 1k, 4k, 64k, floppy+
• platforms
• atari, c64, amiga, pc, web
• design process
• group gathering
• music before demo
• demo before music
• code tricks to achieve impossible
Revolt by Amnesty, 1996

21. PARTY PLACE
COMPETITION

22. AMIGA AMIGA AMIGA
• released in 1993
• motorola 68EC020 CPU 14.3Mhz
• ROM 512 kB, RAM 2MB
• AmigaDOS 3.1

24. TRAVEL BACK HOME
AND START WITH ANOTHER…

25. DREAM

26. WHY?
emotions
push hardware to the limits
competition

27. TRICKS
• pmode
• rotations to avoid multiplications
• nop assembly instruction
• env mapping
• self-modified code (loading to registers)

28. DO YOU REMEMBER HERCULES?

29. SOME OLD-SCHOOL TOOLS (PC)
• Fasttracker2
• Autodesk Animator
• Autodesk 3D Studio
• Lightwave
• Turbo Assembler
• Watcom C/C++
• Volcov Commander
• Pov-Ray
• Turbo/Borland Pascal
• Photoshop

30. ENVIRONMENTAL MAPPING

31. 3D OBJECTS

32. VOODKA BY ABSENCE 1996
• team work: 2 coders, musician, 2 pixel
artists
• music done in Fastracker2
• graphics done in Autodesk Animator in
mode 13h (320x200x256)
• 3D models in Autodesk 3D Studio, and
Volkov Commander
• code done in pure assembler, protected
mode EOS v3.02
• energy drink used: carrot juice
• linking and design took ~1 week
• total executable size ~800kb
https://github.com/tomaszbednarz/demoscene-absence-voodka

33. DEMOSCENE AND SCIENCE

34. DEMOSCENE AND SCIENCE

35. IMMERSIVE EBOOK

36. MICE BONE CANCER VISUALISATION

38. DEMOSCENE = FOUR HATS
art science
design engineering

39. interactive breathing
with June Kim - Colab, AUT University, NZ

40. FLASHBACK 2015, SYDNEY

41. join us at #Demoscene BIRDS OF A FEATHER

42. THANK YOU