What is:
Demo Scene

What does it
Provide

What is:
Siggraph
GDC

 
Contents:


What is the Demo Scene?

This will take a moment to tell you. First, some short lines:

Programming + Art = Demo

or

Real-Time Graphics and Music form a Demo, pure computer art.

or

What's a demoparty? 

A demoparty is a reunion of creators and fans of demos. (cf. "What's a demo") You go there with or without your computer in order to participate (or not) in the different competitions (demos, gfx, music and animation). You can also go there for the simple pleasure of meeting interesting people and watching the productions.
What's a demo? 
A demo is a standalone program whose sole purpose is to impress and entertain its user. It usually contains visual effects, music and graphics. 
What's the "Demoscene" 
We call "Demoscene" the community of creators and fans of demos. In order to have an idea of its activities, we suggest you visit the following sites and come to Coma3.
- from Coma
or

Gamasutra's article Introduction to Demos & the Demo Scene

or 

"A demo is a way to show others what some demomakers can do in programming (that's the coding part), music (zik) drawing (gfx) and/or modeling (3D). It is a kind of non-interactive multimedia presentation, the difference with a classical animation being that the display of a demo is computed in real time (like people playing a play contrary to showing a movie) making a biggest challenge (because of some computing power considerations). For now a demo is mostly composed of 3D animations mixed with 2D effects." 

- from orange juice
or
 
What the Demo Scene has to offer

For:

Academics/Educators
We believe there is a huge untapped resource of highly intelligent and curious undergraduate students in today's Universities. All who don't know the DemoScene exists and likely to be very interested in computer graphics - how popular are the Computer Graphics CS courses? What if there was a way student's could develop their computer graphics knowledge in an environment that fosters and challenges them beyond their undergraduate course.

The DemoScene is perfect for undergrad students who have some spare time and wish to push the envelope of real-time 3D graphics, real-time audio, real-time physics, system programming and compression to name a few. For example, a 64KB intro has to include all code, models, textures, sound and all other data in a total of 64KB! Which combines skills of, real-time performance, compression programming and content generation. A challenge on huge variety of topics in the programming, art, design, and music fields.

This is an ideal environment to suppliment an bacholer or higher degree and prepare students for a professional academic or commercial career in computer graphics, art or music.

Commercial/Development 
How can the DemoScene benefit the commercial world? While direct commercial involvement is likely to be small, i.e. providing hardware prizes at various competitions we believe the DemoScene is an excellent place for recruitment. Its one thing to have a Bachelor Degree, it's another to be a diehard computer freak, who eats breaths sleeps technology.

If commercial organizations could help foster this community, it would provide an excellent place for recruitment and give people that much needed experience in a close to 'real-world' environment. Many DemoScene people now work in the computer game industry but there are many other places for these talented people.

Realtime Electronic Theater 
Demos are a form of electronic expression, which is perfect for the annual SIGGRAPH conference, where about's we're not too sure. It combines both technical, artistic and real-time computer graphics and audio technology into a form that can be watched and enjoyed by many people. Its also just the beginning of what can evolve into a Real-time Electronic Theater not only for Demos but for the increasingly large real-time computer graphics community. This could include real-time things such as, Demos, Computer Games, Web3D, VR, Visualization and many more real-time computer graphics applications which will emerge in the near future.
 


What is SIGGRAPH?

This page contains information aimed specifically towards DemoScene people. As we've had discussions with many sceners about our efforts its clear most sceners have quite different ideas on: 

  • What is SIGGRAPH
  • Why we are doing this
  • How does this benefit the scene
Thus we've compiled a short list of information to hopefully clear up any misconceptions about The Demoscene@SIGGRAPH 2001. 

What is SIGGRAPH 

There are two distinct things here, the organization ACM SIGGRAPH and the annual SIGGRAPH conference. The organization, ACM SIGGRAPH is a Special Interest Group (SIG) under the parent organization, the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) in the field of computer GRAPHics. The ACM SIGGRAPH organization plans and runs the annual SIGGRAPH conferences and other computer graphics related forums. So what is ACM SIGGRAPH and the annual SIGGRAPH conference about? Firstly ACM SIGGRAPH is a non-profit organization run by volunteers, which allows it to be free from commercial bias and provide an open forum for discussion. Secondly the annual SIGGRAPH conference is the highlight of most professional and academic computer graphics people. It contains the best of the best in all fields of computer graphics, from academic research to film production to absolutely bizarre experimental ideas and research. 

Why are we doing this 

The DemoScene has no representation at the annual SIGGRAPH conference and would be an excellent addition to the event. We believe the DemoScene and the SIGGRAPH community can both benefit from in the following forms: 

  • Educate sceners about the SIGGRAPH community 
  • Educate the SIGGRAPH community about the DemoScene 
  • Show demos as an artistic form of expression 
  • Enable information flow between SIGGRAPH and the DemoScene 
  • Foster the development of the Demoscene 
Why this wont 'destroy' the scene 

Our project intends to bring new sceners and information into the DemoScene. This is done by publicity of the scene but to a specific highly talented like minded peopled. Many people believe publicity is bad for the scene and will increase the number silly questions like and in general annoy most sceners. 

We believe this is incorrect, as we're not directing this to the general public but to specific group of like minded people. If we say this is 'real-time' these people know what that means and most importantly can appreciate the technical and artistic merits of a demo. 

Finally the another concern scenes are worried about is that publicity and commercial interests will damage the DemoScene. Causing people to only compete in competitions for prize money and not to 'pushing the envelope' and 'beating' other groups/productions. This is not our intention or desire. Sure commercial companies may become more interested, might sponsor some events but how bad is winning the latest and greatest piece of computer hardware or having a more direct route to research or development tools and information. If anything we believe exposing the scene to the commercial vendors will help improve it, by bring more talented people into the scene, provide the latest research, information, and enable a platform where sceners can make the transition from computer graphics as a hobby, to computer graphics as a professional career. Something many scenes undertake. 


What is GDC (Game Developers Conference)?

The Game Developer's Conference is an annual conference for game developers, held in San Jose California. 

We host an annual "Best of the Demo Scene" reel there, simply keeping them up to date on some of the latest and greatest, and showing demos to people who haven't seen them before.