xstatic / Solar
by Richard Thomson
The demo scene revolves around the creation and appreciation of "demos"--digital multimedia art generated in real-time from a program executing on a computer. A "demo" is a demonstration of skill in expressive digital art: coding skill, musical skill, graphic art skill or design skill. A demo can simply showcase one's abilities, it can tell a story, or it can exist as an executable music video.
The Demo Scene originates out of the hacker culture. In the early 1980s, computer games were expensive and most had some form of copy protection preventing the diskettes from being duplicated. Hackers worked on cracking the copy protection to get the games from their friends. At first they just hacked the copy protection, but later started adding a little bit of code to take credit for the hack. This displayed a "credits" screen at the beginning of the game.
The credits screens soon included animation and sound effects, further demonstrating the programming skill of the hacker. As the animated sequence in the credits screens became longer and longer, they became group efforts called "cracktros" or "intros" since they introduced the team that had cracked the software. As these intros become longer and more sophisticated, the intros became an object of interest in their own right. At some point, people decided to make intros as standalone pieces of software, no longer attached to the pirated software. At this point the intros became "demos", a demonstration of the skills of the people that had created it, and a new art form was born. At this point the demo scene separated itself from hacking and software piracy.
At first, this new art form was only of interest to other programmers and afficionados of the technical details of early personal computing. Demos began as a demonstration of programming prowess, usually as a string of unrelated "effects", tricks and techniques. The more sophisticated demos included graphics effects synchronized with the music tracks.
During the 1980s and 1990s the power of personal computers grew tremendously and demos grew right along with it. Demos have now evolved beyond a parade of programming tricks into an expressive medium as rich as television and film. The parade of effects style demo is still popular, but demos that tell a story or have an overall cohesive design are becoming more commonplace.
Demos create all of their imagery in real-time as you watch it. "Real-time" means that the images are drawn and created fast enough to simulate the illusion of smooth motion. Many demos create image frames at the refresh rate of the computer's monitor, usually 60 or 70 frames per second. Movies such as Toy Story use large amounts of computing power to render each frame of film and do not produce images in real-time.
Early demos relied on software rendering or direct access to the hardware in order to perform their tricks. Demos were often coded on early personal computers such as the Commodore 64, Atari ST, or the Amiga. The PC was rarely used because it didn't have as much graphics and sound capabilities as the other computers of the era.
Today, most demos are written for the PC running either linux or Windows and assume the presence of a hardware 3D accelerator. There are still new demos being produced for the "classic" personal computer platforms: Commodore 64, Amiga, VIC-20, etc. There are Macintosh demos, demos for handheld devices such as the GameBoy Advanced, demos for cellular phones, demos for game consoles such as the XBox and PlayStation 2 and homebrew hardware demos using one-of-a-kind hardware.
Demos are evolving into a new storytelling medium -- audio or text narration with a soundtrack and real-time graphics.
However, there is still a drive to create interesting demos within a technical limitation. The most common limitation is a restriction on the size of the executable. For 256 byte, 4096 byte and 16384 byte size restrictions, assembly is the language of choice. Other restrictions requiring programmer ingenuity are found in demos that work on small mobile devices. While a 3D accelerator means that people rarely write their own software renderers anymore, it doesn't mean that there is no creativity in demos -- there are still plenty of new ways to use the hardware!
Todays demos are complex and generally are the results of team efforts, although a few lone geniuses still roam the land. The effort of creating a top-notch demo today is usually divided into the programming, the music and the graphic design. The programming, or coding, may be performed by a single person or a group of people. The coding generally controls the movement of the virtual camera and the movement of items within the demo. Algorithms can also be used to generate the models within the demo or the soundtrack as well.
The musician creates the soundtrack, and often consists of a synthesizer sequence combining multiple sampled instruments arranged in tracks. This "tracked" music is compact in size yet still provides for a dynamic performance. The traditional tracker style of music synthesis is being joined by MP3 and OGG encoded music soundtracks as these formats permeate the marketplace and influence music creation tools.
A graphic artist contributes such elements as still images and 3D models. Graphic artists are often involved in the design of a demo, contributing storyboard details and a sense of pacing as the demo progresses.
Demo parties are gatherings of people interested in the demo scene. They can be anything from a few of your friends gathering to watch demos, or they can be large organized parties with seminars and competitions, or "compos". New demos are often released in a compo at a demoparty. Demoparties are quite frequent in the European Union; in North America it has been more of an underground scene.
Most demo parties have competitions for demos, music and graphics. The demo competitions may have one or more categories based on the size of the party and the number of entries. The music competitions generally revolve around "tracked" music, where samples are structured into a musical score arranged in one or more tracks. MP3 and OGG encoded music competitions are becoming more popular, however. The graphics competitions include hand-drawn images and ray-traced images, organized into one or more categories depending on the size of the party. The larger parties award significant prize money for the best music, graphics and demos. (A prize of 4,000 euros was given at Assembly, for instance.)
A relatively new category of compo is the so-called "wild demo". These can be almost anything you can imagine, such as a kinetic robotic sculpture, or a clever animated display on a mobile device, but most wild demos consist of traditional animation and off-line rendering to create a short film. A good example is the "South Party" parody of South Park created by the group Hybris / Nemesis.
There are literally terabytes of demos out there! Exploring the archives is a great way to see what's going on in the demo scene and get ideas for your next demo. Some of the most popular web portals for the demoscene are listed here.
